John Armstrong: Marina attack has little bite

Chris Carter spent last weekend looking for sharks. Yesterday they came looking for him.

Forced to wait for seven days before they could question the Conservation Minister over his veto of the Whangamata marina, National MPs were in a feeding frenzy when Parliament resumed yesterday following last week's recess.

However, during the initial question-time onslaught, Mr Carter seemed to enjoy protection equivalent to the steel cage in which he had gone diving off the Chatham Islands in search of a great white in a publicity exercise drawing attention to the threatened species.

The real thing failed to show. And it seemed there would be a similar anti-climax yesterday as Nick Smith, National's spokesman on the Resource Management Act, and Sandra Goudie, the party's Coromandel MP, took turns with Mr Carter during question-time.

The best they could come up with was an email suggesting former Labour Party president Bob Harvey had urged fellow surfies to lobby Mr Carter to use his position to overturn the Environment Court ruling favouring the marina development.

Dr Smith claimed the email, which had been circulated prior to the minister's announcement, also indicated Mr Harvey had been tipped off in advance that there would be a veto. According to Dr Smith, the subsequent email lobbying campaign was initiated to enable Mr Carter to say he had majority public backing for his decision.

Mr Carter responded in kind, aiming his spear-gun where Dr Smith was most vulnerable - the National MP's tenure as conservation minister in the late 1990s. The current minister accused the former one of pressuring Department of Conservation officials into supporting the marina when they had actually been opposed to it.

The subject of past lives catching up with MPs was already in members' minds following Michael Cullen's warning Labour had something on Judith Collins and might retaliate if she continued to make life a misery for Social Development Minister David Benson-Pope.

But Mrs Collins yesterday had her eyes fixed on Ruth Dyson - Mr Benson-Pope's associate minister.

Mrs Collins had remembered Ruth Dyson's gushing description last year of Child, Youth and Family - the about-to-be-disbanded department in her charge - as moving into a phase of "performance excellence".

Mrs Collins wanted to know if the minister still stood by that statement given last week's damning State Services Commission report which found the department's performance to be something well short of excellent.

Rather than admit defeat, Ruth Dyson tried to bluster her way out of her predicament by accusing National of undermining her department.

But Mrs Collins had another pearler. Which statement did the minister think was correct: Child, Youth and Family's assertion it had a "culture of excellence" or the commission's view that the department suffered from a "culture of resistance"?

It was no win for the minister either way. "From the perspective of the authors, both," Ruth Dyson replied tamely before resuming the bluster.

It was left to Nanaia Mahuta to restore a vestige of honour for Labour. Answering National's call for farm dogs to be exempt from the new law stipulating dogs have microchip implants, the Associate Minister of Local Government turned things back on National by arguing for "one law for all dogs" - a reference to Don Brash's Orewa call of "one law for all".