KEY POINTS:
New Zealand First leader Winston Peters hit out bitterly at a formal censure vote against him passed by Parliament last night.
His main targets were National and the Maori Party.
The censure was passed by 62 votes to 56, with one abstention from Jim Anderton.
It follows the privileges committee finding that Mr Peters knew about and should have declared a $100,000 donation from billionaire Owen Glenn in 2005 in the register of pecuniary interests in 2006.
Mr Peters said he asked for fairness and got a farce.
"There is no morality or ethics in this motion today," he said.
"The court that I will stand before is on Saturday 8th of November [the election], and I'll place my faith in the people of New Zealand to decide the outcome of this case."
Mr Peters attacked the Maori Party, which supported the censure motion on the advice of its MP on the privileges committee, Te Ururoa Flavell.
"Why would they tell Maoridom on the marae and over the airwaves they supported me when at the committee they did the reverse?" he said.
"They tried to ride the waves of sentiment then lined up with [National leader] John Key and [Act leader] Rodney Hide to sell me out and soon, before their people, they will find the consequences of that."
Labour and NZ First were the only parties to side with Mr Peters.
United Future, the Greens and the Maori Party all supported the findings of the privileges committee. So did the two independent MPs, Taito Phillip Field and Gordon Copeland.
Mr Peters scoffed at suggestions the Green Party had no axe to grind against him.
"Who consigned the Greens to a position outside of Government for the past three years? How naive can you be?"
He continues to insist he did not know about the donation.
The money was used to cover legal costs for Mr Peters' electoral petition against National candidate Bob Clarkson's win over him in Tauranga in 2005.
The most damning evidence against Mr Peters was an email from his lawyer to Mr Glenn, sent minutes after Mr Peters had been talking to Mr Glenn on the phone.
That email said "further to your conversation with my client ... " and providing bank details.
Deputy Prime Minister Michael Cullen yesterday said that there should have been no finding against Mr Peters because if he had sought legal advice on whether to declare the donation in 2006 his lawyer would have told him he did not need to.
Prime Minister Helen Clark did not take part in the debate, but continued to say the process had been politicised and there was still "conflicting evidence".
She said she had not looked closely at the evidence given by the Serious Fraud Office, which showed that statements given to the committee about the $40,000 costs in the electoral petition were untrue.
Helen Clark did not believe there were any parallels in the sacking of Labour minister David Benson-Pope from the Cabinet.
"That was a very clear-cut case of a lie provably being told to the media and to me and colleagues," she said.
"In this case you had a conflict of evidence not satisfactorily resolved one way or the other."
Act leader Rodney Hide said he was disappointed that the committee did not delve into that matter, and he believed the new Parliament should.
United Future leader Peter Dunne criticised the SFO intervention.
"It's a sad occasion when a select committee has to speak to one of its own in the way this one has, and I don't think the other matters, the intervention of the Serious Fraud Office and other events, were in the event very helpful," he said.
"I think they clouded the event in a way that was not particularly positive or beneficial to them or to the conduct of this inquiry."
