John Banks shaky in raucous House

Banks that are too big to fail have been in the news a lot in recent years - now the latest of these is the Honourable Member for Epsom.

John Banks might be lower than a snake's belly in the political polls but for now, anyway, Prime Minister John Key sees the Act Party's 0.0% in the latest Herald Digipoll as still being too big to fail.

For now, anyway.

The prime minister seemed a bit more terse on the issue of the Act leader today.

Mr Banks was in the House today, somewhat shakily defending his position. 

Notably, no National MPs were on their feet helping defend him against attacks from Labour hatchet man Trevor Mallard.

Mr Mallard had laid down a question on the order paper asking Mr Banks, in his role as Associate Minister of Education, about progress with development of charter schools, a key Act Party plank.

A shaky Mr Banks began with, "We've made, we’ve … we've made… " and was greeted with jeers from the opposition and a cry of, "can you remember?" from one Labour MP – a reference to Mr Banks' extraordinary amnesia over Mr Dotcom's $50,000 donation to his mayoral campaign.

Mr Banks managed to stutter out that the government had made "very good progress" on charter schools and added that "this initiative is well over due, well over due, for the 20% of people at school without any hope".

The only question in everyone's mind was nothing to do with charter schools, however: what everyone was wondering was how Mr Mallard would tie charter schools into the Kim Dotcom row.

Sure enough, Mr Mallard's supplementary questions zeroed in on that area, asking whether any donations to charter schools would go to the schools themselves or to Mr Banks' campaign fund.

Acting Speaker Eric Roy allowed Mr Mallard to get away with this.

Mr Banks went into his usual lines about charter schools - they would learn from the mistakes and the successes of similar schools overseas, he told the House.

"There will be a working group, which will establish an arms' length body, an arms' length body, to approve schools," he told the House.

His voice rising, he went on to say: "Approving new charter schools, approving new charter schools, will not by my responsibility and certainly will not be the responsibility of the Labour Party or the unions who do not believe in looking after the kids who are falling through the cracks."

By this point the House was in an uproar – which meant that Mr Mallard was only just getting warmed up.

The next question asked whether the working group would be made up of people from Mr Banks' campaign committee and used to launder funds for his campaign.

But this was too much even for the tolerant Mr Roy, who ruled it out of order.

"I'll have another go," Mr Mallard cheerfully told the Speaker, and asked why Mr Banks had refused to talk to Kim Dotcom earlier this year, why he had said he did not know Mr Dotcom, and had Mr Dotcom wanted to talk about charter schools?

Mr Banks said lots of people wanted to talk to him about charter schools, and went into his routine about how charter schools are aimed at the "far too many young people who are out of school, out of luck … they need this government and this coalition to put in place an opportunity for them".

Then came Mr Mallard's king hit: was Mr Banks considering a charter school to be based in Sky City Convention Centre, "so his cronies stop getting bad publicity about kids getting left in cars?"

By that point Mr Banks was on the counter-attack: "I want to pick up on his point about laundering, and cronies", he indignantly told the House, and went on to talk about "his crony, the Labour Party Mayor of Auckland, laundered around $490,00 through a secret trust into his campaign".

By this point the noise had reached deafening levels, and although New Zealand First leader Winston Peters challenged the question, Mr Roy appeared to indicate he had not heard it anyway.

It was not parliamentary democracy's finest hour, but there were two over-riding impressions left of the exchange.

One is that Mr Banks was looking very rattled, his voice often shaky.

The second was the Labour is as happy as a pig in muck over this whole affair, and is at last back in its comfort zone, attacking the government not on policy but on issues of dealmaking and cronyism.