Valedictory Statements

Te whare e tū nei, te marae e takoto ana, tēnā kōrua. E ngā mate maha, haere, haere, haere. Ngā tāngata whenua o tēnei rohe, o Te Whanganui-a-Tara, tēnā koutou. Tātou ngā kanohi ora e hui mai ana, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa.

[The building that stands here, the land that lies here, I acknowledge you. The many who have passed away, rest in peace. The local people of this region, of Wellington, greetings. Those of us, the living, that are gathered here, thanks and greetings to you all.]

When it came time to pen these words, my father suggested that I go back and look at the first ones I shared in this House. I remember writing my maiden speech so well. I was 28 years old. My family were living overseas, and I’d only moved back to New Zealand a few months prior.

If I’m honest, I was probably more than a little shocked to be here, a feeling that even after 15 years never quite left me. But the reasons I came here, they never left me either. They were all there in my maiden speech: climate change, child poverty, and inequality; I am, after all, a conviction-based politician, and I’ve always believed this to be a place where you can make a difference. I leave knowing that to be true.

But, despite that, I’ve become used to my time as Prime Minister being distilled down into a different list: a domestic terror attack, a volcanic eruption, a pandemic; a series of events where I found myself in people’s lives during the most grief-stricken or traumatic moments. Their stories and faces remain etched in my mind and likely will for ever. That is the responsibility and privilege of the role of Prime Minister—a role I never thought I was meant to have.

It’s fair to say that 2017 involved a surprising chain of events. At the beginning of the year, David Shearer announced he would be leaving the Opposition benches and Parliament for Sudan. It was remarked upon at the time that this was apparently a more appealing prospect than being in Opposition.

I found myself in a by-election for Mt Albert, and, soon after that, as deputy leader of the Labour Party. But that was just the half of it. It was 1 August, and we were a mere seven weeks out from an election when Andrew Little stood down as leader of the Labour Party and nominated me to take his place. I’ve always found it hard to explain what that period felt like. It was a cross between a sense of duty to steer a moving freight train and being hit by one, and that’s probably because my internal reluctance to lead was matched only by a huge sense of responsibility. Andrew, I likewise know that you made your decision with that same sense of responsibility, and while I have never known whether to curse you or thank you, I’m grateful for the faith you always had in me.

The seven-week campaign that followed was frenetic. Mike Jaspers, my chief press secretary at the time, recently reminded me that a week into the job, after a very long day, I fell asleep on a plane, woke up with a start, and asked him if I was still the leader of the Labour Party.

Those few short weeks were also a blessing. There was no time to be anything but myself, and I also had the chance to be involved in everything—a real treat for a control freak. I remember sitting at my desk in the home that Clarke and I shared in Auckland, writing a campaign launch speech. I knew I wanted climate change to be front and centre because I believed it would define our generation of politicians. I called it our nuclear-free moment. I believed it then, and I believe it even more now.

When I came here 15 years ago, we talked about climate change as if it were almost a hypothetical. Some didn’t even give it that credit. In 2008, I sat in that lobby as the emissions trading scheme was weakened, and the yo-yo of climate policy continued.

But in the intervening years, we have seen firsthand the reality of our changing environment, from Northland to Coromandel, Tokomaru Bay to Buller, and I’ve seen the people it’s impacted, like the elderly couple on the West Coast who had lived in their home for their entire married lives. They had only recently returned to it after a year’s worth of post-flooding repairs when it was flooded again. “We’re too old to keep doing this”, they told me. They’ve not returned to their home.

Now, I know there is politics in almost everything. This Chamber understands why more than anyone. But we also know when and how to remove it. When crisis has landed in front of us, I have seen the best of this place: an absolute focus on the care of others, on preserving life, and helping people when they need it most.

Climate change is a crisis. It is upon us, and so one of the very few things I will ask of this House on my departure is that you please take the politics out of climate change. There will always be policy differences, but beneath that we have what we need to make the progress we must. We have not just a credible but an ambitious nationally determined contribution to reduce our net emissions by 50 percent by 2030. We have the zero carbon Act, carbon budgets, an emissions reduction plan, and a Climate Commission to guide us. We have business on board and the primary sector working hard on a shared set of goals, and it’s making a difference. We are starting to see our emissions come down, with total greenhouse gas emissions falling to their lowest levels in eight years. But New Zealand needs this place to provide them with certainty that you will keep going: so do. We owe it to the next generation, but we also owe it to ourselves.

To the Green Party, especially James and Marama: I’ve enjoyed working with you immensely, and I’ve seen how tireless you both are, even when you are thrown into your own party processes that, from the outside, look something akin to Squid Game. Thank you for the personal support I have felt from both of you.

A friend of mine taught me early on in politics that there is no point looking back in anger, and I feel no need to when there are so many things I feel proud of, things that I know are different or better because we had a Labour Government, like our work to uphold the Treaty by crossing the bridge more often. The creation of the Māori-Crown relations portfolio under the excellent leadership of Kelvin Davis—thank you, Kelvin—the stewardship of Te Arawhiti, the establishment of the Māori Health Authority, the growth of te reo Māori, the evolution of how we see ourselves as a nation through the teaching of New Zealand history in schools, and the creation of Matariki, our first indigenous public holiday.

The path we travel as a nation will not be linear and it won’t always be easy. But for the part of the trail that I had the privilege of leading, I’m glad we took on the hilly bits. It’s fair to say that, all told, we had a few mountains to climb, though. I always wanted to be part of a Government that had a focus on children. I can’t exactly pinpoint the origins of that passion, but I’ve talked many times of the distinct memories I have of children in poverty during the 1980s, and so it was with much excitement that I was lucky enough to take on the role of the children’s spokesperson from Annette King while in Opposition. Annette had already done a huge amount of policy work, a trait of any sort that she was well-renowned for—almost as much as her relentless attempts to set single people up. But there was still space for further child poverty initiatives. So we got to work creating policy that was ready to be rolled out in the first 100 days of office, including the Child Poverty Reduction Act.

In 2017, when we first formed Government, almost one in five children were living in poverty. Most child poverty measures in New Zealand were going backwards. Now, I am not here to say that everything is perfect now—it is not—but the healthy homes standards, the increases in benefits and their indexation to wages, the winter energy payment, the introduction of Best Start, and the creation of Food in Schools means that as I leave, despite the severe economic conditions, there are 77,000 fewer children living in lowincome households, all nine child poverty measures have reduced, and this winter, a sole parent will receive $212 more per week than when we came into office. But now, you just need to keep going.

Someone asked me recently whether there were things I wish I’d manage to finish. There were definitely projects I would have liked to have seen through—you know, projects like the restoration of the St James, or the beginning and completion of Tokelau’s airstrip, a project I felt strongly about after visiting this beautiful but remote Realm country. I know, as they’d told me in advance, that visiting Tokelau in the absence of a place to dock would instead mean climbing on to what looked like an inflatable rescue boat whilst it’s hanging over the side of a moving ship and then being dropped into the ocean by a very qualified—I am sure—but very young-looking sailor, all while straddling what looks and feels like a unicycle seat whilst wearing a puletasi. I would absolutely still have gone; I just would have worn bike pants.

But aside from such projects, there were very few things that I aspired to do in politics that have a natural end point. Poverty, inequality, ending environmental degradation—if you ever claim it’s job done on those issues, you’ve set the bar too low.

Politics has never been a tick list for me; it’s always been about progress. Sometimes you can measure it, and sometimes you can’t. We won’t ever know the long-term benefits of banning conversion therapy, especially for our young people, or what it means to our Pacific communities that we finally apologised for the Dawn Raids. There will be no list of the lives saved because of the banning of military-style semi-automatic weapons. We won’t know how we left women feeling about the ability to make their own choices when this Parliament decriminalised abortion, or when we improved pay equity, put period products into schools, or reached 50 percent representation of women in Parliament. While these things may not feature heavily in the history books when they write about the years 2017 to 2023—which will likely be a very heavy few chapters—they are still none the less things I feel very proud of.

There are things I feel confident will feature, though. A valedictory is not a place to summarise a pandemic—no one has the time for that kind of group therapy. There is no question it was an incredibly tough experience for our nation at the bottom of the world and, I will concede, a tough experience personally.

I’ve spent the better part of my professional life anticipating risk and worrying about it. The pandemic put that trait into overdrive. For roughly two years, there were certain people that when they called me, I would go into a cold sweat and have to sit down. If I was on the road and in a meeting and any of my staff had to leave the room, it would have the same effect. “Not a case.”, I would quietly think.

I remember all too vividly a visit to Auckland University in August 2021, when then Minister Hipkins got one of the dreaded health calls, the one that led to the Delta outbreak and what was, I believe, the hardest part of our COVID journey. I called Clarke and simply said, “Code red.” He picked up Neve, and we had 30 minutes to pack and get to the airport, not knowing it would be many months before we returned home as a family. It was so long in the life of a small child, in fact, that when we came back to our home in Auckland, Neve asked me where the toilet was.

I’ve often been asked what the hardest thing was about COVID. There were so many, but the unknowns was definitely one of them. I had a call with my Chief Science Advisor, Dame Juliet Gerrard, very early on. I’d been thinking about how we’d manage the border in the future, and so I asked how long she thought it would be before we would have a vaccine that might help us do that. “Well, if we’re lucky,” she said, “I’d say five years.” I slumped into my chair—COVID made me sit down quite a lot, as it turned out. Thankfully, though, we had something better than luck on our side; we had science, and I remain for ever grateful for that.

But that wasn’t the only thing that got me through. Firstly, I always knew there were New Zealanders out there doing it tougher than whatever we were experiencing on any given day, and it was them that we were there to serve. Secondly, I was surrounded by wonderful, smart, compassionate people trying to do the right thing. We didn’t always get it right—I didn’t always get it right—but we were always motivated by the right things. Thirdly, and most importantly—most importantly—we went in as a nation with a goal to look after one another, and we did.

A few weeks ago, to mark my departure, Dame Juliet gave me a mug. It had on it a graph depicting excess lives lost across developed nations. New Zealand had fared the best. If it wasn’t so unorthodox for a valedictory, I’d probably hold it up for no other reason than I love a House prop and to remind everyone what it was all for. You saved people’s lives. Was it hard? Absolutely, but we’ll never know who you kept on this earth to know how truly worth it it was.

To Dame Juliet, Sir Ashley Bloomfield, Dr Caroline McElnay, Dr Ian Town, Grant Robertson, Julia Haydon-Carr, Le Roy Taylor, Andrew Campbell, Holly Donald, Brook Barrington, Rob Fyfe, and Raj Nahna, and, later, “Chippy” and Ayesha, you were part of a core team of people I relied on through that period—you and Alison Holst sausage rolls. Thank you.

We did lose other things along the way. One, in some ways, was a sense of security that we can engage in good, robust debates and land on our respective positions relatively respectfully. But for some, that didn’t happen during the latter stages of COVID, and while there were a myriad of reasons, one was because so much of the information swirling around was false.

I could physically see how entrenched it was for some people. I was in Whanganui when a visit I was meant to make to a vaccine bus was called off because of protest. After a few hours, the protest passed and I went back, not wanting to let the people down we were due to visit. There was one, lone protester still in the vicinity, who, as I left, started shouting at me. They were mostly focused on a particular conspiracy that was completely false, so I stopped, doubled back, and told them that. I was idealistic enough to believe it would make a difference, but after many of these same experiences and seeing the rage that often accompanied these conspiracies, I had to accept I was wrong. I could not singlehandedly pull someone out of a rabbit hole, but perhaps, collectively, we all have a role to play in stopping people falling in in the first place.

This is not a single-issue problem. I’ve seen the same fractured debates based on distorted half-truths and complete falsehoods emerging on a range of different subjects. This is not a question of free speech. Free speech is a right this House is unified in defending.

Those who try to dress up the issue of disinformation as being an attempt to silence people are, ironically, themselves shutting down a discussion that must be had. Debate is critical to a healthy democracy, but conspiracy is its nemesis, and the answers aren’t easy. So, having witnessed what it can do to the corners of our beloved country when perhaps we considered ourselves immune, I can tell you they are answers I will keep looking for.

There were many moments that have left me bereft, though. I still struggle to talk about March 15. There is an image from the day after the attack that was taken of me through a window, and I don’t believe I’ve mentioned what was happening in the moments it was taken.

We’d brought together a group of politicians to travel to Christchurch, and the Defence Force carried us. On the way down, I’d seen the front page of the paper and the image of a member of the Muslim community covered in blood in the aftermath of the attack. It was a devastating picture. As we arrived at the meeting venue in Christchurch, we were greeted by a range of community members. Sitting in the front row was the same person who had only hours before been photographed. As he stood to speak, I did not know what to expect, but what came next was one of the most profound memories I have of that period. He thanked us. Here was someone who had been through the most horrific experience I could imagine, and he thanked New Zealand and expressed gratitude for his home.

There is much we must all continue to do in the aftermath of March 15. I consider the work of the Christchurch Call to Action amongst them, and I feel honoured and grateful to continue work on the issue of radicalisation and violent extremism online. But the most significant task for us all, as a nation, is to live up to the expectations that those who experienced it have of us: to deserve their thanks. To the Muslim community of Aotearoa New Zealand, you have humbled me beyond words. Al salam alaikum.

Having, sadly, seen our nation in horrific moments of grief, I’ve concluded that countries don’t move on from tragedy; rather, they become part of your psyche. But the way these moments weave themselves into our being will be determined by how we confront them.

We’ve never lost more lives in a single tragedy in New Zealand than we did in Erebus. Time may have passed, but the deep loss from that event has not. Apologising for what happened was the right thing to do; now the least we owe families is a memorial.

As for the Pike River families, it was an honour to see through the promise we made to you, but an even greater honour to get to know incredible people like Anna Osborne and Sonya Rockhouse, who I consider friends. Thank you for what you have done to try and help us all learn from your experience, and may it never happen again.

I’ve often said that whatever I did here, I never did alone. It’s quite a literal statement; one of the massive adjustments when you take on this job is you have a new shadow in the form of diplomatic protection. While I never tried to purposefully lose them, like some past Prime Ministers, it was an adjustment, especially when there were some things that I didn’t think needed to change, like the fact that I still liked to make the odd-TradeMe purchase. I still remember them looking a bit shocked when I told them we were off to pick up a chair from a random stranger in West Auckland. They weren’t quite as shocked as said random stranger.

To all of the Diplomatic Protection Services team, thank you for everything, and to the VIP drivers, thank you for your company and your kindness. I’d like to think of your newfound practice of keeping a carsick clean-up kit as a homage to my family.

To the Labour Party, who have been like my family, especially the presidents I had the pleasure of working with—Nigel, Claire, and Jill—thank you.

My nana joined the Labour Party in 1949. My Auntie Marie was the next to take up the baton, and she never passed it to me as such; more like, she whittled a second baton and told me to run with her whilst yelling instructions along the way. I’ve long said that I started as a volunteer in the Labour Party delivering flyers, and that’s where I will return, happily.

To the Mt Albert team and, prior to that, Auckland Central—gosh, you are patient—thank you all. To Therese Colgan, who had served multiple Prime Ministers, but, most importantly, has served thousands of people—you are one in a million. Barbara Ward, who has been by my side through every major political event, but much more importantly, for every major life event—thank you for being my friend.

To those who went before me and taught me much: Helen Clark, Phil Goff, Marian Hobbs, Trevor Mallard, Darren Hughes, and, of course, Annette King, who has become my mentor, friend, and one of Neve’s favourite aunties—thank you.

To the Prime Minister’s office team. My senior private secretary, Le Roy, who flatted with me some 20 years ago, never would I have dreamt when I used to cook you minute steak that one day we would find ourselves on the ninth floor, but I am so glad we did. Jo, my favourite Irish; Rachel, Bridie, and Chrissy; Philippa and Ian, who both led amazing teams; Dinah Okeby, who literally read every piece of correspondence that came our way and still maintained such a positive disposition. The wonderful adviser team I had in both the project management office, but also in the policy advisory group—you were all exceptional.

The tireless, wonderful, tough, and also randomly emotional Andrew Campbell, and the press secs, including the B-team, who had the worst job in the world, given my reluctance to be in the media. Holly, who has the biggest heart but the sharpest mind—your dad would be so proud of you. Same to Zoe and Amelia—to us, you are family—Clare-Louise, for moving your entire life to support me for the better part of a decade. Finally, to my chiefs of staff, Mike Munro, GJ Thompson, who provided the cover we needed, and, finally, Raj Nahna. It’s hard to describe Raj; he likes it that way. He became known in various forums as the guy with the hair, and not just domestically.

I recall with some fondness visiting Europe to further our free-trade agreement (FTA) aspirations. We met with what for the purposes of this story I will describe simply as a leader within the European Union. At the beginning of our meeting, he greeted Raj as the one whose hair he’d admired in the bios he was given. Clearly, admiration from afar was not enough, and by the end of the meeting he could no longer restrain himself. Rather than shake Raj’s hand, he reached up and zhuzed Raj’s hair as if he were a hairdresser in a Pantene commercial. I put at least some of our FTA success down to that head of hair.

Raj, I hand-on-heart believe you sacrificed as much of any of us for five years—you and your beautiful family, Jane, Magnolia, and Saffron. You preferred to be behind the scenes, but I want it to be on record that New Zealand owes you a debt of gratitude. You were there for March 15, for Whakaari, for the pandemic, and you were there for me. Thank you.

To my family. People knew we were connected, and you copped a lot of flak. My dad stopped watching the news for five years. Mind you, he comes from a long line of media protests; my nana used to turn the television off whenever Muldoon came on.

My mother took a different approach. During COVID, she took up the practice of sending me her own personal thought for the day. They were so uplifting that on occasion I’d read them out at our small staff meetings. That was with the exception of one, which I thought was a bit grandiose, even for a dedicated mother. It read, “Remember, even Jesus had people who didn’t like him.”

To my family, thank you for all your patience, your love and support, and that goes especially to my wonderful mother, my wonderful father, and my beautiful sister, Louise, but also the Gayfords, the Dussans, the Cowans, and Frasers—I love you all.

To my darling girl, Neve. Gosh, I love how independent you are already—she’s up there; she’s just on the floor somewhere—and it means you won’t grow up being known as the ex-Prime Minister’s daughter, but, rather, I will happily be known as Neve’s mum, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

And to my love, Clarke. Not many politicians have a partner where when they say “I’m thinking of leaving politics” reply, “I think you should stay”, but that’s who you are. You’re fiercely loyal, and you always had my back, but you are also a fighter. You believe in three things fiercely: social justice, protecting our oceans, and that a good tea should have decent brew time. Thank you for keeping my cup full, and for personally enduring so much rubbish. You’re a keeper.

And finally, to this team of people around me. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I have never worked with better people. I know without a shadow of a doubt that you were here for the right reasons; I saw it regularly. Every Tuesday at the end of caucus, I would read a letter of the week, something from the large correspondence files that captured what was going on in people’s lives. It reminded us all why we were here, but you never needed reminding.

I leave behind great friends among many of you. But I do want to pay special tribute to Grant Robertson. Grant has been both an office mate when I came in to work in Parliament, and then a bench mate. He often credits himself with having taught me to swear, when it suits him. I recently had a wee slip of the tongue in this House when referring to David Seymour, and I didn’t see him take any ownership of that wee comment, despite, I should add, being caught on the mike agreeing with me rather profusely. It’s fair to say I took the title of Deputy Prime Minister very literally. For me, we were a team. That is how I’d like the history books to record the major milestones and challenges that we faced. I did not take them on alone; I took them on with great people, and especially with Grant. Thank you for the role that you have played and will continue to play for New Zealand. You are a brilliant finance Minister and a brilliant friend.

I know I leave this place in good hands, especially with the leadership of Deputy Prime Minister Carmel Sepuloni and Prime Minister Hipkins, or “Chippy” to me. I was thinking of ways that I could summarise who “Chippy” is for me. It’s not just who he is in a crisis; it’s who he is in life. In the aftermath of Cyclone Gabrielle, I called “Chippy” to see how he was. I could hear I was on speaker phone as he described another busy day. “What are you up to now?”, I said. “I’m making the kids’ lunches for tomorrow”, he said. He then went on to describe in quite some detail what he was planning to put in each corner of their bento box. It’s fair to say he lunchbox-shamed me. “Chippy” is thoughtful, focused, and—importantly—he’s caring. We’re all in good hands.

Now it’s time for me to leave this place to the amazing people around me. But I want to spend just the last few moments I have here talking not about why I joined them but why others should—and not just in Parliament but in leadership.

Most of you know my story. I don’t consider myself to have had anything in my life that made me especially extraordinary. I was a child of the 1980s, born to the son of a drainlayer and the daughter of a farmer. My parents worked hard—really hard. My father was a policeman; my mother ran the canteen at the local school. They also ran an orchard for a few years, all while working full time. My sister and I were the first in our family to attend university. I was anxious about taking a student loan on, so I worked multiple jobs and entered speech competitions—or, to be precise, my mother entered me into them to try and earn a little extra money to put myself through university.

I was a worrier. I anticipated that everything that could go wrong, would. Some might say the worst possible character trait to have as a politician, or the best, depending on how you cut it. While I convinced myself that you cannot be a worrier and be in this place, you can. You can be that person, and you can be here.

I’m sensitive, or, as Maggie Barry once called me, “a precious petal”. I remember in my early days being thrown by the odd nasty comment or negative commentary. I even went to Trevor Mallard for advice on how to harden up. I thought that I would need to change dramatically to survive. I didn’t change. I leave this place as sensitive as I ever was, prone to dwell on the negative, hating question time so deeply that I would struggle to eat most days beforehand, and I am here to tell you: you can be that person and you can be here.

I am a crier and hugger—it’s instinctive to me. I remember going into the aftermath of Whakaari and seeing a comment about how I was just going in to hug people again. It stuck with me, so much so that when a first responder was emotionally telling me about their experience, I had an internal argument with myself as to whether I should comfort them when I knew I would likely be criticised. I would rather be criticised for being a hugger than being heartless, and so hug I did—a lot. You can be that person, and you can be here.

I’m a mother. I obviously didn’t start out that way. When I ran for Parliament in my 20s, I remember being afraid that I was choosing a path that meant I wouldn’t get to have children, because who has a personal life in Parliament? I was lucky. The job brought me to Clarke, but having kids was a whole other challenge.

When I was 37 years old, I was told there were a range of factors that meant I hadn’t been able to get pregnant, and stress was probably one of them. We decided to use the help of science. But, as so many couples experience, that wasn’t straightforward. I’d not long experienced a failed IVF round when I became leader of the Labour Party. I thought that I’d found myself on a path that meant I wouldn’t be a mother. Rather than process that, I campaigned to become Prime Minister—a rather big distraction, as far as they go.

Imagine my surprise when a couple of months later I discovered I was pregnant. There is no question, I’ve had incredible support to be the mother I wanted to be, from the office team, who tried to get me home for story time, and Neve’s village, who were there when I wasn’t. But I leave knowing I was the best mother I could be. You can be that person, and you can be here.

Now, I cannot determine what will define my time in this place, but I do hope I’ve demonstrated something else entirely: that you can be anxious, sensitive, kind, and wear your heart on your sleeve, you can be a mother or not, you can be an ex-Mormon or not, you can be a nerd, a crier, a hugger—you can be all of these things, and not only can you be here; you can lead. Just like me.

Nō reira, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa.

[Applause, hongi, and harirū]

Waiata—Tūtira Mai Ngā Iwi

Karanga

Waiata—Paikea, Toro Mai, Te Aroha

Sitting suspended from 6.10 p.m. to 7 p.m.