Maiden Statements

Members, following the maiden statement, the House will suspend for the dinner break. To make his maiden statement to the House, I now call on Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan.

[Singing]

没有花香 没有树高

我是一棵无人知道的小草

从不寂寞 从不烦恼

你看我的伙伴遍及天涯海角

春风啊春风你把我吹绿

阳光啊阳光你把我照耀

河流啊山川你哺育了我

大地啊母亲把我紧紧拥抱

Tākiri ake ngā haeata o te rā

Ka pā ki te whenua

Ki te rāwhiti

Ka ao, ka ao, ka awatea

Ka haukū a Papatūānuku

Ka ngāueue te whenua

Ko Ranginui e tū iho nei

Ko Papatūānuku e takoto ake nei

Tūturu whakamaua kia tīna, tīna

Haumi e hui e, tāike e

[The rays of the sun break the dawn

They touch the earth

To the east

The dawn brightens into day

The earth is humid

The land trembles

Ranginui is above

Papatūānuku lies below

Bind these words and make them real

It coalesces, it assembles, it is bound]

It is an honour for me to open my speech in my native language, Mandarin Chinese, and the first language of Aotearoa, te reo Māori. I was born in Tianjin, China, a city of only 14 million people. My home city is well known for breakfast food, or just food in general. We are a people that love to eat, and our dialect is often used for comedy. Hearing anyone using Tianjin dialect brings me fond memories of growing up. I think there is nothing that says you’re in Tianjin, when you hear someone in the marketplace who says, 姐姐，做吗呢?

I arrived in Aotearoa in 1997, bringing with me my maternal grandparents. My mum was already here. She was a solo mum. My parents divorced when I was young, so life wasn’t the easiest. Like many Asian migrants, our skills and qualifications were not recognised upon arrival. You either have to jump through hoops to obtain certification at great cost and time, or change your job, often to what has been dubbed “low-skilled” work. But do you know what? Those “low-skilled” migrants got us through the pandemic.

I remember clearly one time that I wanted to eat watermelons, and Mum got some. She didn’t eat any herself, telling me that she didn’t like watermelon. It wasn’t until years later that I found out that Mum loves watermelon—there just wasn’t enough for two.

I grew up in East Auckland and after high school I attended the University of Auckland. Now, I’m going to admit something that not many people, other than my closest friends up in the gallery, know about, which is that I disliked politics immensely while I was at uni. In fact, I didn’t vote in three elections that I was eligible to vote in. I thought that academia was beyond the reach of politics, but that illusion was crushed by the drastic decrease in university funding, particularly in the arts and humanities in the early 2010s.

So to all of the politically engaged rangatahi who might be watching, do not let politicians patronise you by saying that you’re just a little excited. No, you know the value of standing up for your rights, of making yourselves heard, and I am in awe of each and every one of you, particularly the Young Greens.

I would also like to thank the late Professor Matthew Trundle for the many discussions after our departmental seminars and after a few libations to Dionysus. He taught me the Athenian history behind democracy and freedom of speech. Democracy combines the Greek root demos, “people”, and kratos, “power”. “People power”—that’s what democracy is all about. We don’t get to say that we are democratic by asking the nation to tick a couple of boxes every three years; it is something that we, as parliamentarians, have to prove every day, something our people demand of us every day, and something we should empower the people to do every single day.

As an educator, I was responsible for compliance and quality assurance. In the Three Kingdoms period of the 3rd century CE China, the leader of Shu, Liu Bei Liu Xuande, once said, “夫济大事，必以人为本”—for one to accomplish great things, people must be the foundation. This was the principle that I held with my work. The goal of regulations and policies was to ensure that the people—in this case, my students—were looked after and that they are provided with the best opportunities and support to flourish.

My doctoral thesis looked at how ancient Egyptians told epic stories. In an age where we are so focused on having everything down on paper, pen on paper provides safety, but it also confines our words to a moment in time. Oral stories play an important part in our lives. Stories passed down from generation to generation, they live on through us. They shape our whakapapa and hononga. The significance of arts and humanities cannot be underestimated in our society. We speak of balance, like yin and yang, but we have now reduced humanity to numbers and statistics, rather than remembering that they are individuals with their own struggles, their own hopes and aspirations.

There are many stories that I would like to share, stories of the long and enduring friendships between Chinese people and tangata whenua. He waka eke noa—同舟共济. As the Te Tiriti party, which is what the Green Party’s known for, and tangata Tiriti, we uphold He Whakaputanga me Te Tiriti o Waitangi. We will continue to tell the stories such as Chew Chong and the Taranaki black gold—hakekakeka, or wood-ear fungus—the market gardens of Manukau Harbour, and the cooperation between hard-working Chinese farmers like Joe and Fay Gock and Pūkaki marae, and the early miners of Otago and their sharing of traditional Chinese medicine and rongoā in spite of racism. So, as a migrant, if a country cannot even respect or honour their own indigenous people and taonga, what chances do we have to have our culture and heritage accurately recognised?

Another realisation, when you have undertaken something like a doctorate, is that you have to wrestle with the idea that you know very little about anything, because wisdom and knowledge are infinite. The Maxims of Ptahhotep, dated to the 5th dynasty from Egypt, which is roughly around 2300 BCE, contain some cautionary tales around this. One of my favourite lines is this:

which roughly translates to: “As for the fool who does not listen, nothing can be accomplished by him. He sees knowledge as ignorance, the beneficial as the harmful. He makes every mistake, so he’s accused by the people each day.” See, people from 4,000 years ago were already championing evidence-based thinking. Meanwhile, some in this very room may say that they’re here for the people, but when the decisions that this Government makes, deliberately through malice or inadvertently through ignorance, have left so many of our people behind—Māori, Pasifika, migrants, disabled communities, solo parents, seniors, rainbow, our prison whānau, and those with families in Gaza—who are the people they’re referring to?

Our older brother Fa’anānā Efeso Collins said in his maiden speech, “ ‘E le tu fa’amauga se tagata’—‘No one stands alone, no one succeeds alone’, and, for [him], no one suffers alone.” Aotearoa has not even begun to hear our stories, what our communities can bring and the millennia of history, wisdom, and ancestors we bring with us. It is time to take back our voices, our momentum, our people power, and if it means that we are no longer referred to as the model minority, you know what, I am OK with that.

To the many amazing people in the Green Party, it has been an honour and privilege to work with and alongside you over the years. You gave me my first role in a grassroots organisation when I had no idea what a karakia was, nor the consensus decision-making process. And look at me now: I can list pretty much every single acronym the party uses. To quote a certain critically acclaimed MMORPG, which stands for massive multiplayer online role-playing game, the playable character was told to “hear, feel, think”—all great qualities I have learnt from my various roles within the party. I want to thank those of you on Kaunihera: Miriam, Alika, Vicky, Wiremu, Charlotte; the co-leaders, Marama and Chloe; and also my co-partner in crime, Alyssce. Thank you for all the good times in our meetings—and you know I genuinely mean that. To all of our volunteers in branches, provinces, and networks, thank you for everything you do for the party every day. To Team Auckland: Linda, Linda, Claire, Chris, Byronny, Simon, Lisa, Ron, as well as Miriam and Sarah, thank you for standing by me all these years as I figure myself out. You’ve truly, and now terrifyingly, seen me at my best and worst.

To my brother, Matt, I love you more than you can imagine, and I will continue to express that love in the most Chinese way possible, through excessive worry and nagging. To my mum, thank you for everything you do for us, and for being the most unapologetic, feisty, and stubborn person I know. Michelle Yeoh and Constance Wu’s got nothing on you. Finally, to my partner, Kadek, thank you for your kindness, your wisdom, your presence. Thanks to you, I have now levelled up on my foraging skills and unlocked some serious plant identification achievements.

To conclude my statement, I would like to go back to the song I sang at the beginning. The song goes like this:

Ain’t scented like a flower

Ain’t tall like a tree

I’m just a blade of grass that nobody knows

But I ain’t ever lonely

I ain’t ever worried

Look my companions are all around the globe

Spring wind, o spring wind

You make me greener

Sunshine, o sunshine

You shine your light on me

Rivers, o valleys

You have nourished me

Great earth, o mother

You embrace me tightly.

This is a song that I grew up with; it was the last song that my paternal grandmother sang to me. I share it with all of you as a reminder—a reminder of the relationship we have with each other and the relationship we have with our environment. A reminder to every single person that you are the protagonist, the hero of your own epic story, and you’re never alone. And a reminder of our thriving Green grassroots movement, and that we will for ever and always be committed to our people and planet. Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa.

Waiata—“Ko Te Tiriti”

Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.