United Future
Hon Peter Dunne

Peter Dunne replies to a critic

You claim that the passage of the Prostitution legislation and changes to the Care of Children legislation show United Future to be ineffective. Oh really? All United Future MPs voted against the Prostitution legislation at every stage, and played a leading role in the campaign to defeat the Bill. Had one Labour MP who said he was against it, voted against it instead of abstaining, the Bill would have been defeated.

In the light of this, and given that the measure was a conscience vote I would be intrigued to learn what more we could have done to defeat it. Obviously consistent 100% opposition is not enough!

As for the Care of Children issue, that matter will not be resolved for some months yet and I would expect that when the Bill returns to Parliament, either later this year or early next year, the offending provision re lesbian fathers will have been withdrawn. Again, United Future has done all it can to date.  Not only did we draw attention to the matter, but we voted against the entire Bill because of it, and have made clear that we will not support the measure, including those pieces of it which are unobjectionable, while this set of provisions remain.  This Bill  has only got as far as it has, because of the Greens' support.

You call for United Future's support for joint custody. We are in favour of that, and have said so for some time. A cheap stunt for the television cameras will not alter that. We are actually more interested in doing things that work, and working with people to achieve those goals, rather than acting like a set of political empty cans the way too many other  parties are.

United Future MPs have worked extremely hard over the last 12 months to be the sensible, reliable middle party New Zealand needs to make MMP work effectively, the way voters wanted. We are certainly not going to sacrifice that now.

Hon Peter Dunne

MP for Ohariu Belmont

Leader, United Future