Valedictory Statements

In accordance with Standing Order 360(3) I call on the Hon Phil Goff to make his valedictory statement. I understand it is the wish of the House that should we adjourn earlier than 6 o’clock, or slightly later than 6 o’clock, we will then, at that stage, rise for the dinner break.

It was some 35 years ago that I first stood in this House. I was actually elected 6 months before I gave my maiden speech, because it was the tradition in the Muldoon years that Parliament was not called for 6 months after an election. I would not encourage the current Government to consider adopting that practice.

I looked back at my maiden speech and I thought that with experience and with changed circumstances many of the policies that I have pursued over my time in this House have changed. But what I do not think has changed are the values that I pronounced in that very first time that I stood up in this Parliament. What I believe in very strongly is a socially just society that respects all of its people equally and that works to ensure that people have access to their basic needs like housing, health, and education to live their lives decently, and a society that is committed to every child born or brought up in this country having the opportunity to achieve to their full potential.

I am part of a lucky generation. They call us baby boomers. We grew up in the aftermath of the Second World War, and we stood on the shoulders of a generation who had gone before us, many of whom had gone overseas to sacrifice their lives for the freedom that we enjoy in this country. It was a generation who lived and suffered through the Depression. I want to pay tribute to that generation and, in particular, I want to pay tribute to the first Labour Government, which strove to achieve a country where people got the best education they could, regardless of their income; the best health treatment they could, regardless of what their position in society was; and housing that gave a stable life for them to raise their families in.

I was a beneficiary of those policies. I achieved an education that was beyond the reach of my parents. Both my mother’s and father’s families went through hard times. In particular, the influence on my life was my paternal grandmother, a woman called Jessie. Her brother died in the First World War. Her husband, my grandfather, fought on the Western Front, was gassed, and spent the end of the war in a prisoner of war camp. He paid with his health for that experience and he died in 1934, about 12 years after the family migrated to New Zealand. He left behind him a widow and three children, the oldest of whom was 14. They had paid two-thirds of their mortgage but they were unable to keep up their payments, and they found themselves out on the road.

A year later a man called Michael Joseph Savage was elected as the first Labour Prime Minister of this country, and I grew up on my grandmother’s knee believing that Michael Joseph Savage was a saint. He did some very practical things. He lifted the widow’s mite by a shilling a week—it does not sound very much to us today—but, most importantly, he gave families like my grandmother’s family hope for the future.

My grandmother continued to suffer after that. She lost her youngest son, John, my uncle, aged 19, in the war in the Pacific serving with the Royal New Zealand Air Force. Maybe as a consequence of those experiences that she went through, her family believed that working people, who had given so much for their country, deserved a fair go in return.

I grew up under the principle that Michael Joseph Savage followed—that social justice should be our guiding principle. That, I guess, was reinforced by my Catholic upbringing. It was reinforced by excellent teachers that I had at school. I pay tribute to my old school, Papatoetoe High School, where working-class kids went and got the best education they could ever have hoped to get.

I was also inspired by a young guy who was flatting with my brother, Warren. At age 16, halfway through my last year in what was then called the seventh form, I was not so politely asked to leave home by my father. We still argue about this, and we are probably going to meet halfway, but it was partly his responsibility and partly mine. But that young man was a guy called Mike Moore, who went on to become Prime Minister of this country and Director-General of the World Trade Organization (WTO). So I had good role models. Another role model was my predecessor as the MP for Mt Roskill. His name was Arthur Faulkner. He was a Spitfire pilot during the Second World War. He was an excellent local MP, serving Mt Roskill for 24 years. He was a decent and capable man, and he taught me much about politics.

Two and a half years after I succeeded him as MP for Mt Roskill, the then Prime Minister, Sir Robert Muldoon, called what became termed the “schnapps election”. We have all seen the photographs, we remember the clips on television, and Don McKinnon still wonders why he was standing behind the then Prime Minister while those famous shots were taken. But I remember gathering that night upstairs in the Leader of the Opposition’s room—David Lange’s room—and the palpable excitement that we felt that there was going to be change in New Zealand and we were going to be part of that.

I was privileged to be elected by my caucus to Cabinet in 1984 at the tender age of 31 years, which I think still makes me the youngest Cabinet Minister in New Zealand’s political history. I was young, and perhaps that was an advantage. I did not know the constraints on Ministers. The first thing I did as the Minister of Housing was to unilaterally stop the sale of State houses. A triumvirate of finance Ministers—Caygill, Prebble, and Douglas—came to see me and said: “Do you know what the fiscal implications of your announcement are?”. I did not, and I was not concerned about that, but I was pleased at what I did.

I said we were excited, but our first Cabinet meeting was before we were sworn in. We were briefed by Rod Deane from the Reserve Bank and Bernie Galvin from Treasury. I remember that excitement subsiding as they told us what the state of the country’s books was. We were broke, and there were really tough measures that were going to be needed to rescue our country from bankruptcy. I remember grimly thinking: “This is going to be a one-term Government.” In the event, it was not. We took the hard decisions—most of them, I believe, right; some of them wrong—and we were rewarded for our courage with a second landslide victory in 1987.

The excitement of that election did not last long. I remember running into Roger Douglas in January 1988—I was still in the habit of coming back early from holidays, thinking “This is a really important job. I need to be behind my desk.”—and Douglas saying to me “I got a letter from the Prime Minister.”, and I wondered “Why would the Prime Minister be writing to the Minister of Finance?”. That Government, which started with so much promise, ended after the collapse of the share market and with the disunity that marred the second term of that Government, and that is a lesson for any Government in this country.

Just reflecting on the portfolios, my first portfolio—I think your first portfolio is like your first love, with respect to my wife, who is sitting in the gallery. “Not quite as good as your first love” is what I should have said.

💬 Jacinda Ardern: You’ve had heaps of portfolios.

I have had many portfolios, but I have only had one wife, and she will be pleased to know that.

💬 Mr SPEAKER: Get your way out of that, Mr Goff.

I diverge, Mr Speaker. What I loved about the housing portfolio was that I believed that you could make a tangible difference in people’s lives, and I hoped that I was able to do that for the many families that we were able to help.

There were other portfolios where I also felt that, working together with a group of other people, we were able to make a difference. Making a difference is what is really important when you come into this House. That is what all of us want to do.

You do not always go along with public opinion. I remember when I became the Minister for the Environment and very soon after that an organisation called the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research put a report on my table. That report said that within a matter of months the Pōhutu Geyser at Whakarewarewa would collapse, and it would collapse because the residents and the commercial establishments had all decided that having cheap energy was really great and they would sink bores quite close to it. I was appalled at that thought, and worked, remarkably, with Peter Tapsell and Bob Tizard, and we made the decision to close those bores within a 1.5 kilometre radius. I think if I had gone to Rotorua at that time I would have been lynched by the locals. But today that geyser is still there. That geyser was there for me to take my kids to, and will be there for me to take my grandkids to. It is a small thing, but it gives you a sense of the satisfaction of how we can make a difference in what we do, and when we make decisions that might not always be popular but are the right things to do, we should be ready to be judged by history rather than by what the contemporary people might say about us.

Education was a challenging portfolio for all of those Ministers who have carried it out. I inherited the portfolio from David Lange. I remember this cartoon. It had David Lange floating down serenely on a parachute and had me plunging to the ground with this lead weight around my leg called “education”, and David is calling “How’s the portfolio going, Phil?”. And it certainly felt like that. But we made some remarkable changes, with Learning for Life, Before Five, and Tomorrow’s Schools. One of the small changes that I made—looking back at my colleague who was also a Minister of Education—was the Education Amendment Bill in 1989, where we enabled public institutions to take on international fee-paying students. It was not, Trevor, always a popular decision with all of my colleagues and with the education establishment. It was going to ruin education, I was told. International education today is a $3 billion enterprise that employs highly skilled people at high rates of pay, and again I was proud to be part of making that change.

In 1990, I and some of my colleagues, Annette King and Trevor Mallard, lost our seats in the landslide victory of the incoming Bolger Government. We all came back 3 years later, in 1993. We were termed “retreads”—I think that was the phrase. But all of us remembered the lesson that that had taught us: that serving and being accountable to our local community and to our electorate is what gives us the right to be in and stay in this place.

In 1999 Helen Clark appointed me to two portfolios—one was foreign affairs and trade and the other was justice. They were a curious pairing of portfolios, but, Prime Minister, if you want to keep a Minister busy and keep them out from under your feet that is probably a very good thing to do.

💬 Rt Hon John Key: I don’t know where he is at the moment.

Ha, ha! But I relished both of those portfolios. I look back at some of the legislation we passed over that time. There was the Bail Act, the Sentencing Act, the Parole Act, the Victims’ Rights Act, and the Criminal Records (Clean Slate) Act. Some of those were laws that were tough laws, but I believe that combined with addressing the causes of crime, they contributed towards making our community a safer place.

Foreign affairs and trade was a quite different portfolio. It was stimulating; it was fascinating. We had the challenges, quite early on in our time, of 9/11. I remember 9/11 well. I habitually went home at about midnight. I got taken home by our VIP Transport Service. I had been in bed for about 20 minutes when I got a call from my driver. He said: “Minister, I think you should go downstairs and watch the television.” I thought that was a very strange thing to suggest at 20 to 1 in the morning. But that was a scarring experience for the whole world, and I remember the dramatic nature of what happened and the decision that we made shortly thereafter that we would need to commit our soldiers, putting them in the line of duty, at risk because of the threat that al-Qaeda posed to the world.

I remember the Boxing Day 2004 tsunami. Mary and I had decided we would stay at home on the farm rather than go away those Christmas holidays. I remember building a structure out in the front of the farm, and getting the telephone call. I remember the dramatically awful experience of going to a place called Khao Lak, north of Phuket, and going to a temple that was a morgue for several thousand people who had been dead and exposed to the sea and the sunshine for about 8 days. I remember the huge admiration I had for the disaster victim identification team—our New Zealand police officers—who did a job that I am just amazed they could have stomached, for 2 or 3 weeks at a time. The smell, the sight, and the taste of death is something that will always remain with me, but, equally, so too will my respect for those people, who served our country so well.

I said before that I was proud that we made the commitment to Afghanistan. I was equally proud when we made the decision not to commit to the invasion of Iraq. We believed that the invasion was a poor decision, that it was ill-founded, and that it was the wrong thing to do, and I believe that that decision by the allies has led to the appalling situation that we face in the Middle East still today. I was proud that this country stood up and was independent in its assessment and its delivery of its foreign policy—and we were right. As foreign Minister I had the opportunity to get out and meet with people in our Defence Force who were on deployment. I went to Bosnia, to Timor, to Afghanistan, and to the Solomon Islands. In every one of those deployments I saw the respect that was accorded the men and women of the New Zealand Defence Force. They were professional, they acted with courage, and they treated the local people decently.

I remember a particular example. I have been part of the movement for an independent East Timor since 1975, and I think Nick Smith and I went to East Timor in 1994, when it was under Indonesian occupation. But going back there—and some of us in the House were independent observers at the referendum in 1999 on the independence of East Timor in 1999. But I remember going there shortly after we had committed our troops in 2000. We were driving out of Suai in an army truck marked with a big kiwi emblem on the side. We drove by one of the many schools that had been burnt to the ground by the militias, and the kids were, therefore, taking their lessons under the tree. These were kids for whom a lifetime of experience said that a man in uniform was an oppressor and a threat to them. We drove by, and I asked my driver to stop. It was just a fantastic photograph—the burnt-out school, the tree, and the kids doing their lessons. As I got out of the truck, the kids looked up. I have got this wonderful picture of all of them running towards our truck with their thumbs up, saying: “Kia ora, Kiwis.” What they had learnt in a matter of a few months was that our people were decent people, who were there, on their behalf, to help them. I was incredibly proud of that experience.

I have particular regard for the SAS. Their toughness and their skill are matched by their integrity and their courage. It was also a proud moment to be there to tell Willie Apiata that he had won the Victoria Cross.

I was later privileged to become Minister of Defence. In that role, I was aware that one day I might have to explain to parents that their son or daughter had died in their country’s service. Sadly, the first New Zealander to die in Afghanistan was my nephew Matthew, who was serving with the 173rd airborne division of the American army. Our family still keenly feels that loss 9 years on. We understand only too well the emotions that other families who lose their children, their brothers, or their sisters in those circumstances go through.

In 2005 I took on the trade portfolio and worked immediately to try to negotiate a free-trade agreement with China and then with the countries of ASEAN. I want to pay tribute in this House to the skill and the absolute commitment of our trade negotiating teams. My first experience in a trade negotiation was in Hong Kong, with the WTO. Our people worked through the night. They went to bed at 3 o’clock in the morning, and they got up at 6 o’clock in the morning to continue that work. And I pay tribute to those people in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade who show that commitment to their country, and, in particular, I pay tribute to David Walker, who was my chief negotiator on the China free-trade talks. That was an amazing deal, to get the first free-trade agreement that any developed country had with China, and, Prime Minister, I think that that helped us immensely with the trebling of our exports, and that helped us not to sink into the severe recession that we might otherwise have suffered from with the global financial crisis.

I want to mention just one other portfolio, and it is disarmament. People thought, when I went overseas, it was curious that I was simultaneously Minister of Defence and Minister of disarmament. I have always been proud of our small country striving for a better and a more peaceful world. As a country, we have been ready to stand up and fight when it was necessary to combat evil. In the two World Wars our casualties per capita were higher than any other Commonwealth country, and in the First World War, they were higher than any country other than Russia. But we have always striven for a world in which alternative ways can be sought to resolve conflict.

I am proud, and Labour is proud, of Peter Fraser’s role in setting up, as a charter member, the United Nations. We are proud of our Prime Ministers Kirk, Lange, and Clark for their pursuit of a world free of nuclear weapons. Einstein once warned the world that splitting the atom changed everything except the way we think, and therefore we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe. That warning remains relevant, and we need, as a country, to continue to lead the struggle for a world free of weapons of mass destruction. One of the things that we achieved during my time as Minister of disarmament was to be one of seven small countries that managed to get through a convention against cluster munitions. And our country should be proud of the role that we played.

It is a moving occasion for me to be making my last contribution as a parliamentarian. I want to thank my Mt Roskill electorate, which has supported me so strongly for so long. It is a wonderful and diverse community, and every day that I have served the holy city of Mount Roskill has been an absolute privilege for me. I want to thank my electorate secretaries: the late John de Jager, Paul Grant, Christine McKain, Elaine Niven, and Terry Law. Each has worked for me for years, and they have done an amazing job. Likewise, my private secretary, Murray Wansbrough, sitting in the gallery, is still with me after many years. And all of those people—the seconded people who came from ministries, the personal staff we have, and our parliamentary staff—this Parliament can be truly proud of the calibre of people who work on our behalf.

To the New Zealand Labour Party. Andrew, I want to thank the Labour Party for making my parliamentary career possible. Our party is 100 years old. It has shaped the country that we are today. I want to acknowledge in particular my long-term bench mate and friend Annette King. We have been through a lot together, Annette, and you have done a fantastic job for this Parliament and our country.

Can I acknowledge that there are a number of parliamentarians in this House still today who started off working in my office: David Shearer, behind me; Jacinda Ardern; Moana Mackey; and Kris Faafoi. You could not have learnt from a better person. But there is somebody who went to the dark side, and I also have to acknowledge Paul Goldsmith, who is sinking lower into his chair as I mention his name. He did have the redeeming factor of being a boy from Mount Roskill.

To all of the people in my party organisation—those still with us today and those who have passed on—they have been my inspiration as well as my support. I would like, in particular, to acknowledge, somewhere in the gallery, Michael Wood, who has been the longstanding chair of my electorate. Michael is a young man of amazing integrity and of competence, he is sensible, and he is hard-working. He has served the community well on the Puketāpapa Local Board, and his candidature as the new Labour candidate for Mt Roskill makes it much easier for me today to relinquish this job.

To my family—Mary, in the gallery, who was my teenage sweetheart and remains the love of my life, and my children, Kris, Sara, and Kieran—your love, tolerance, and support have made it possible for me to do my job. You have made sacrifices for the job that I chose to do, and I pay tribute to the partners, the spouses, and the families of all of us in this House, who take the flak and sacrifice the family time on our behalf.

Finally, although I am leaving here, you have not, I promise, seen the last of me. It was a deep honour and privilege last weekend to have been elected with a strong mandate to serve my city of Auckland as its mayor. It is a city I love. It has a stunning environment. It has a richness of cultural diversity. It offers the people who live in our city choice and opportunity. It makes up 35 percent of our population and 37 percent of our production, but more than half of this country’s growth. Auckland is our country’s international city. By attracting and retaining the talent and enterprise that New Zealand needs to progress, it serves New Zealand as a whole. For New Zealand to succeed—Cabinet members, this will not be the last time you hear this—Auckland has to succeed. I look forward to working with the Government and with all members of the House to start to resolve the problems we all know about—the worsening traffic congestion and the housing unaffordability—which stand in the way of Auckland achieving for New Zealand and itself what we as a country need it to do.

This is an adversarial chamber. However, I believe that members elected to this Parliament all want to make this country a better place. I thank you all for your friendship. I thank you for indulging me today as I have reflected on my time in this Parliament. I wish every one of you well for the future, and farewell. Thank you very much.

Waiata

Sitting suspended from 6.09 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.