All these matters have been substantially reformed to provide a more rational system. Time-limited debates, party voting, meal and sleep breaks in urgency, and regular short recesses have all proved successful.

Question Time is much more immediate, timely, and flexible as well as dealing with all questions put down. Despite criticisms from some, it is, in my view, by far the most effective test of the mettle of ministers, and their opponents, of any Westminster-style parliament. Imagine, for example, how well George W. Bush would have survived Question Time if he had been our Prime Minister!

Such testing is the real purpose of Question Time - not to elicit a recitation of simple facts but to hold Ministers to account and to test their mettle. That is why it is easily the most popular part of the televised proceedings.

Indeed, I would go further. Much of Parliament is a form of theatre, a stage on which ideas and personalities contest for dominance. It is neither a simple legislative sausage machine, nor a company board, nor some kind of policy group-grope or, as we now call them, summits.

The vast majority of MPs come here to try to improve the lives of New Zealanders however much we may differ as to the means of so doing. Hence the most depressing comment about MPs that I can recall was when one senior Press Gallery member claimed the default position of politicians was to lie. One might easily respond that the default position of journalists is to misrepresent and to manipulate. Neither statement is a fair reflection of the truth.

What I would assert is that for all its faults, and the occasional silliness, the system works far better than any known alternative.

Mr. Speaker, I arrived in this place at a time when my party was divided, a division which in one form or another lasted through to 1996.

I came knowing I was the MP for St Kilda for one reason alone: I wore a Labour jersey. Since that time it has been my desire to help create a strong, modern, unified social democratic party wearing the proud old name of Labour.

That was not easy. In the 1980s the urgent and necessary process of modernisation and reform lurched off into ideological excesses underpinned by the belief that there was no gain without pain. That came to mean that pain must inevitably lead to gain and then to a kind of political sado-masochism in which pain almost seemed to become an end in itself.

It certainly caused me some small financial pain. The biggest speeding fine I ever got was driving back from Whakatane to Wellington in January 1990 when I heard on the news that Geoffrey Palmer was supposedly moving to reinstate Roger Douglas as Minister of Finance. I hit 134kmph before a firm but polite traffic cop restored me to my senses.

The persistent divisions, the consequent weakening of the Labour Party, and the introduction of MMP meant that in the early to mid-1990s it appeared far from impossible that we would cease to be the dominant voice of the centre-left in New Zealand.

The need to build a policy platform of a socially progressive, economically literate, fiscally conservative party was obvious. It could and should have been done in the 1980s. It was done under Helen Clark's leadership and I am proud to have had some small role to play in that regard. That laid the basis for a long period in government.