Cullen brings Locke close to tears in parliament

Finance minister Michael Cullen almost reduced Green MP Keith Locke to tears in parliament today when he taunted him about his personal beliefs.

The exchange came when Locke was quizzing Cullen over human rights in China and the proposed free trade deal between New Zealand and that country.

Cullen answering questions on behalf of foreign minister Winston Peters said the New Zealand Government always raised human rights issue with Beijing over the years.

"However, it is fair to say that the Chinese Government's record in these matters is somewhat better than in the depths of the days of the Cultural Revolution, when that member supported the Chinese Government's approach," Cullen said.

A clearly furious and upset Locke vehemently denied this.

"I assure the House that I have never supported the Chinese regime - the one-party state in its activities during the Cultural Revolution or at any other time," Locke said.

Cullen was unmoved by Locke's plea of innocence and threw another accusation at him.

"Clearly my memory as a fellow student of the member at Canterbury University is now somewhat faulty on these matters. I must remember him referring to the Pol Pot regime."

Locke has often been taunted for being a supporter of the Pol Pot regime which committed genocide in Cambodia and he has numerous times explained to the House this was not true.

"I think it is a disgrace for a Labour Deputy Prime Minister to sink to that level," Locke said.

This time Cullen withdrew and apologised, but later in the session tabled an article he said showed Locke did support the murderous regime.

Locke returned to the House and once again explained that he had never backed Pol Pot, but had once written an article in April 1975 when the "quite corrupt regimes in Saigon and Phnom Penh fell", hoping it would be good for the country when the new governments came into power. This was before Pol Pot and the genocide.

Locke hoped the House would stop baiting him on the issue.

Cullen was a friend of his family so should well know that what had driven Locke to be a campaigner for human rights. Locke said a formative time for him was learning his mother quit the Communist Party after hearing Russian tanks had entered Hungary in 1956 and shot people in the street.

National MPs said later in the debate that Cullen had almost reduced to tears a member of a party that Labour hoped it could do business with in the future.