Maiden Statement

So here I am, inside the people’s House. Tēnā koutou. We are inside the people’s House, where so many words have been spoken, where words have been transformed into deeds that have changed this country, sometimes even for the better. I look around and I see men and women with the power to do good and to change things for the better. I hope that we choose to do so.

I want to greet those who have come before me. I want to remember my predecessor Rod Donald. Rod achieved a great many things in politics, but perhaps one of his greatest achievements was to make this Parliament much more democratic. Without Rod’s leadership in making the case for MMP we would not have parties like the Greens in Parliament today. The elected dictatorship would still hold sway. Rod, go forth from here, go to the other side.

I want to remember my late father, Colin Norman. Col was someone who had a deep, enduring passion for science and engineering. My dad also really understood the opportunities that he got because of the social democratic movement that came out of the Depression and the war. I share his passion for fairness and for science. Go forth from here, go to the other side.

To family members of us all who have left us, and to House members no longer with us, I say to you in a traditional way: E ngā mate, o konei, o tātau kātoa. Haere. Haere, ki tua, o te kahurangi. Go forth from here, go to the other side.

Of those around me now, I want to mention Nicola and Holly, Rod’s partner and daughter. I am deeply touched and honoured that they are here today. I want to mention Olive Norman, who, on a tight budget, brought up six lucky kids. Not only that, she was part of the glue of the whole street that we grew up in. Even today, at the tender age of 70-ish, she drives Meals on Wheels to those who need help. Thanks, mum, for coming all the way here from Brisbane. I give special thanks to my beautiful Katya—my best friend, my chief adviser, and my beloved. May this election year have a better outcome than the last, in more ways than one.

To one of the country’s finest citizens, Jeanette Fitzsimons, and to all the other Green Party MPs, staff, members, and supporters, I say that I am in this place and able to put forward these views only because of your efforts; I will never lose sight of that. I pay tribute to Nandor Tanczos, Mike Ward, and Catherine Delahunty. I greet those in the gallery, and those watching and listening across the land.

My wise Green colleagues suggested I should talk a little more about history, especially my own. But first I want to talk about what our country is like now. I want to talk about those Kiwis less fortunate than us here, those tens of thousands of New Zealanders whom successive Governments have marginalised, and those people who have become outsiders, outlaws, and outcasts. And I say “have become”, because outsiders are not born; they are made.

On the same day that I was sent to Parliament—last Friday—a man named Sean was sent to prison for 12 years. Sean was abandoned to a boys’ home in Australia as a young child. Since then, like so many, he has been institutionalised, mostly in prisons—universities of crime that we throw our scarce tax dollars at. Two decades of jail, under centre-right, lock-’em-up - type Governments, have not helped this man, and they have not helped his victims either. Last year he took part in an angry 3-month - long crime spree in the South Island. He robbed two banks, stabbed people, and crashed into cars. Around 20 people suffered from this rampage.

I condemn his actions—make no mistake. My gut response to people like Sean is to make them pay, and to make them suffer. But I know that the evidence shows that locking up more people will not make any of us safer. Revenge might feel good, but it does not build safer communities. The difficult truth is that if we show people how to be human, and if we respect them as human, then they are more likely to act humanely. In the past 20 years we have doubled our prison population, yet we are no safer in our homes and on our streets.

Here I am in Parliament, and I wonder, if someone had not given my parents and my grandparents a hand up, whether I would be standing here today. My parents were from poor, Depression-era families. My grandparents were born at around the turn of the century, and by the time my parents were born, in 1930, things were not going so well. Both of my grandfathers were out-of-work builders. They were alcoholics and were treated with indifference by their society, and they responded in kind. But something incredible happened. In the 1930s and the 1940s, in our part of the world, those who could do good, did do good. Governments could have turned their backs on the poor, but they chose not to. They chose instead to change the destiny of millions of lives, including my parents’ lives, for the better. My parents were able to access affordable Government housing and family benefits. They were able to access the opportunity of education. Although my parents were poor for a long time, my dad was able to get a trade—as a fitter and turner—then get his steam ticket and work in the sugar refineries of North Queensland. He then got to university and became an engineer. My mum received family support from the State to bring up a family and get them through school. My parents, and the generation before them, built a nation, and they built it on justice and a fair go.

It has been said that the soul of a nation is found in the homes of its people. Back in Brisbane we lived in a housing commission house in a housing commission suburb. My mother still lives there. It has weatherboards and fibro-walls. We were lucky. It was cheap. The mortgage was for 45 years, and we had a place we could call home. No, this does not mean that a State house kid can do anything; it means that State commitment of resources towards housing and education can really make a difference. Those Governments proved that compassion could triumph over competition, and that we are all part of the human family and deserve to be loved and looked after, especially when we are down on our luck.

We remember those who showed their love. At Bastion Point in Auckland there is a memorial to Michael Joseph Savage. It is a simple concrete obelisk above his grave, looking over the beautiful Waitematā Harbour, and it says at the base: “he loved his fellow men”. Savage, a fellow immigrant from Australia, knew that having a right means having a chance. It means having a roof to shelter under, and a meal on the table, and a school and a doctor. It means that a nation that truly values the rights of her citizens promises a fair go to each and every one. Savage helped to create a society where there was hope of a better life, and there was fulfilment of that hope.

The first agenda item of Savage’s first Cabinet meeting in December 1935 was a Christmas bonus for the unemployed. This was not popular amongst the bankers in London. It was, however, an act of compassion. When was the last time we did that for beneficiaries? We punish the children of the poorest by refusing them the in-work payment of $60 a week. The truth is that we have yet to restore Jenny Shipley’s benefit cuts of 1991.

There is another memorial in Auckland—one dedicated to those who turned their backs on ordinary New Zealanders. In the Auckland central business district there is a memorial to Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson. It is a casino in the shape of a syringe. They created a society in which desperate people’s only hopes are the pokies and drugs. “You’re gonna reap just what ya sow.”, and we are reaping in South Auckland and Bridge Pa.

Last month the Child Poverty Action Group said New Zealand had the fastest growth in income and wealth inequality in the OECD. I will repeat that, because I did not say we had the fastest GDP growth; I said New Zealand had the fastest growth in income and wealth inequality. We are becoming more divided. The latest figures show that about 150,000 children are in benefit families in significant or severe hardship. These 150,000 are the children of the poor, and they have been forgotten. These are the children of the poor whom Michael Cullen should have been focusing on in his last nine Budgets. These are the children of the poor whom John Key should start telling us how he will offer hope to, assuming he wants to be more than just a breathing replacement of a struggling Government. These may well become the teenagers and young adults who feature on our television screens a 6 o’clock, in a decade’s time. “We’re gonna reap just what we sow.”

I fear that the people in this room have forgotten their history. Is this the future that Mickey Savage dreamt of? Is this what he had in mind with his “applied Christianity”? The takeover of Labour, then National, by the extreme right in the 1980s and 1990s meant that those who genuinely cared for a better society had nowhere to go. My parents left the Labour Party after Hawke and Keating performed their smash-and-grab job over there. It was bad for them there, but it was even worse here, because there was no restraint.

I started a different journey, one that led me into left-wing politics. I am not ashamed to have a history in the socialist movement. I am not ashamed to think that everyone deserves a fair go and a fair share of what this life has to offer; to believe that this world is too divided. But nor do I shy away from my reasons for embracing Green politics, for moving on. The two great failings of socialism, as I knew it, were a lack of democracy and a failure to grasp the reality that the life-support system of the planet itself is endangered.

When I first got involved in Green politics, we were trying to stop the logging of old-growth forests in Gippsland, Victoria. We set up the South Australian Green Party in the mid-1990s, affiliated to Bob Brown’s Australian Greens, before I came to live in Aotearoa in the 1990s and join the Green movement here.

There is perhaps a single new idea at the heart of the Green movement, and that is that the planet is finite. The planet has limited ability to absorb our pollution, and supply us with resources. It has limited minerals, forests, soils, rivers, and lakes. The realisation that the planet is finite is a simple, yet profound, insight into the true nature of human existence. It is an insight that we, the human race, are struggling to come to terms with. In trying to live sustainably on planet Earth we are facing the greatest challenge to our society and economy since that faced by Savage in confronting the Great Depression and the war. To make our economy and society sustainable will require an enormous change in the way we live. And just as Savage had to confront powerful vested interests, so will we—those who believe that their short-term economic interests are more important than the survival of the human species, those who are so blind that they cannot see that their grandchildren need them to change their ways.

Savage had powerful enemies, but he was able to forge a nation in a furnace of Depression and war. He told people the truth. He shared the burden. He put forward a vision in which everyone had a fair go. Those who came after him in the 1980s and the 1990s did not build a nation, they dismembered it. Our challenge is to bring the nation together again to face up to the basic scientific and physical reality of our environment—the planet is finite.

We must tell people the truth. Oil will never be cheap again. Anyone who says otherwise asks people to believe in fairies at the bottom of the garden. We must cut our greenhouse emissions rapidly—read the science. We must act fairly. We need to offer people affordable, decent housing that is warm and enables them to live well while using less power. We must offer people a vision of a better future. We desperately need a public transport system that allows everyone to get around. We need safer cycling and walking. A Government that is engaged in the biggest road-building project in the nation’s history is a Government in denial. The Greens have the courage to tell New Zealanders the truth about the state of the world because we believe that ordinary people can handle the truth.

Mickey Savage once said, in this House: “We might make mistakes, but we would make other things too.” As someone who has come here to get things done I am pretty sure I will make mistakes and bugger the odd thing up. But my greatest hope is that we will, as Savage said, make other things too—make good things that we can feel proud of: a nation and a people steeped in fairness, democracy, peace, and hope, living graciously on and caring for these beautiful islands on this planet we love. Thank you.