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Thank you for the welcome you have given here today, to Richard Prebble, Trevor de Cleene, and to me. Thank you to the Backbone Club, for organising the occasion. Trevor, it gives me special pleasure to have you here, presiding over this meeting.

Most of the spotlight has been focused on Richard and me. But to my mind, the man who showed the real courage through this whole situation was not Richard or me, it was Trevor de Cleene, who resigned both his portfolios, and all he said about it was: "I did it for me mate."

No!

Richard and I both know Trevor did it for New Zealand. For your children and mine, his belief in the policies of the last four years, and his conviction that they matter to the future of this country.

To make that point to you; Trevor, with a shrug, and a throwaway line about mates, has given up $50,000 a year, two cars, the use of a chauffeur-driven limousine: and all the other perks of ministerial office: He personally was not prepared to go along with a decision that he thought wrong. Nobody sacked him. His perks were safe. He made his own choice. Trevor de Cleene, I salute you.

There is another thing I want to say, too, right now, before I go any further. To everyone here at Chase Plaza, and to every New Zealander, young or old :

Just two words, but two words from the heart, on behalf of all three of us: Merry Christmas! It is a wish that matters, this week, to each one of us: to our families. But next week, another wish will matter more, and matter longer : The New Year! Happy 1989: A prosperous decade in the 1990s: and after that - happy New Century.

That's why you're here today. It's why we're here: Happy 1990s - and do we get it?

Leadership is certainly one key part of the answer. Leadership is not about the past. Leadership is always about the future: Where do we want to go? How do we get there?

Your future, the future of this country is not somewhere back in the 1930s or the 1950s: our future lies out there ahead, in the international world of the 1990s and the 21st century. That's where your children and mine have got to earn their living, in the years to come. We have to face up to that world, as it is, and as it will be, not bury ourselves in the past.

As Minister of Finance for 4 years, I had just one objective, to get New Zealand - our economy, but even more important, our knowledge, training, skills, and attitudes, in fit shape to take on that challenge with the certainty that we are going to win.

Why not?

New Zealanders have always gone out and done well on the field of sport: you name it, rugby, netball, canoeing, cricket, yachting, squash.  Why just sport? Why not across the board? How do you win? You don't win by paying low wages to people who couldn't care less about productivity.

You do not win by taxing people so hard, that effort and initiative are punished instead of rewarded. You win by excellence, by knowledge, skill, and training, by arranging it so that our people want to do well:

Want to innovate, to get rid of unnecessary obstructions, to find cheaper, smarter more effective ways of doing a better job faster, to develop new products, new processes, new methods of marketing, new ways of organising their work.

Look, every person in a job in this country knows, in their own patch, of ways to do things better. Why aren't we doing it already? Because the incentives have not been there to matter to people or to make it worth their while bothering. That's why I wanted and still want to see personal income tax at 23 cents so that you can keep 77 cents of every extra dollar you earn in the future, for the rest of your lives.

That's why I wanted, and still want, to see everyone with a family who takes the trouble to work, at least $70 a week better off than those who are unemployed. That's why I wanted, and still want, to get rid of the poverty traps that make a lot of low income people pay the Government 88 cents out of every extra dollar they earn when I know how to fix it so that they only have to pay 23 cents.

What's wrong with that?

I did not believe last January, and I do not believe today that one man had the right to cancel those schemes, to terminate them, single-handedly, without consultation when they had been approved and authorised by the whole Cabinet of the Government of New Zealand.

What's wrong with keeping 77 cents out of every extra dollar you earn, this year, and for the rest of your life? What's wrong with an arrangement where any working person with a family gets at least $70 a week more than people who do no work at all?

I will tell you something else too, the mothers, the caregivers of this country lost out especially, when that package went down the drain last January. They were the people who would have got that extra payment, it was going straight to them. What's wrong with having incentives for low-income people, instead of incentives just for high-income people?

David Lange should be answering some of these questions!

He had given me his private assurance that he would not cancel, because new and better information was in the pipeline, coming forward to him. I had promised to present it as soon as I returned from overseas.

Why did he break that assurance? Why did he act while I was still overseas? Why did he act without consulting Cabinet, without even consulting the Deputy Prime Minister? He could have phoned me and told me what he was doing.

Why did he leave it for journalists to tell me, by waking me at 2 in the morning after he had taken action?

They are fair questions.

He gave me and other senior Ministers his assurance before we announced the package, that he did not want to stop it, that he intended in January to come back from his holiday early to help promote it to the public! On that assurance, we went ahead.

Did he keep it in January? Why not? Other Ministers and I had taken those assurances seriously. We relied on them. We acted in line with them. That was in good faith. Why was the rug pulled out from under us?

Why did the Prime Minister in June, make a speech declaring to the nation that the deficit was $3.2 billion? When in fact it was $1.4 billion? Who gains by that?

Why did his office telephone a foreign capital to warn people in June that a TV programme was going to claim a damaging deficit blow-out, and impact adversely on New Zealand in the financial markets of the world? They knew there was no blow-out. They knew about the programme. They could have stopped it simply by providing accurate information. Why not stop it?

Why did they not even bother to inform my office that the programme was going to run, when they were telling people on the other side of the world that it would be damaging? Who gained by that?  I know who lost. The whole of New Zealand lost.

Why sack Richard Prebble, when he and I and the Treasury and the Prime Minister's own staff, were busy preparing an agreed paper which Cabinet itself had requested?

Why did David Lange decide that as Minister of Finance, I did not have the right to choose my own staff?

I cannot answer those questions for you. I do not know of any answer that makes sense.