Embargoed until delivery

Metiria Turei, Green Party Co-leader
Address in reply speech, 21 October 2014

Introduction

The other day I had a moment of genuine inspiration while watching The Paul Henry Show.

Clearly, this was a unique moment.

Paul and I get along, but to tell you the truth the most inspiring thing about his show is usually the urge I get to change the channel!

Paul was interviewing Dr Kirk Smith, an expert on climate change from Berkeley University.

Waxing lyrical about his humungous salary, his gas guzzling boat, and enormous carbon footprint, Paul posed the question: what could one man like him do that would actually make a difference? “I could sell my massive boat,” Paul suggested, “but no one else is going to, so what difference could it make?”

To which, the ever patient, scientist replied. Well Paul, you’ve got your own television show. You’re a leader. If you say you drive an electric car, people will take notice and who knows? They might buy one too.

Yes Paul, even a little guy on the telly can do his bit to help save the world.

That’s what leading is. And that’s the Green Party’s role in this place.

We will continue in this 51st Parliament to lead – lead through our ideas, lead through our campaigns, lead through our commitment to addressing the big issues of our time.

An emboldened National will now be able to pass any laws it wants to with the help of the sole ACT marionette to whom it gifted the seat of Epsom.

First on the Government’s hit list are our workers’ rights, followed by our world-leading environmental protection law, the Resource Management Act, and further asset sales in the form of our state homes. National has nothing but destruction on its mind.

For six years the Green Party has filled the National Government’s vision vacuum with our ideas – new thinking like school hubs, nurses in schools, the Climate Tax Cut, urban cycleways, the Green Investment Bank.

In the process we’ve shifted the debate, and we’ve set a new political agenda.

Just two years ago, National denied child poverty even existed. Now, it’s apparently top of the Prime Minister’s to do list.

The Greens have been a key part of a network that has relentlessly worked to expose New Zealand’s child poverty crisis, and which stirred the nation to care so much about child poverty that it’s now become politically unwise of National not to listen.

That’s a victory. That’s leading. That’s what we do.

Working with National

And yet there are those, even those who didn’t vote for us, who say that’s not enough; who would like us to have more influence at the table.

Since the election I’ve received a number of letters, even from National Party members, pleading with us to form some kind of arrangement with National, because they feel “guilty” about voting for a party with such a poor record on the environment.

The idea apparently, is that the Greens could act as some kind of foil to National’s anti-environment agenda, if only we just focused on environmental issues.

Let me respond to this.

The Green Party is now established as the third largest party in New Zealand and one of the most successful Green parties in the world. We are part of an internationally established movement that’s on the ascendency all over the globe.

Ours is a movement based not just on environmental principles, but on the principles of social justice and democracy. And here in Aotearoa, enabled through Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

This is who we are. We couldn’t stop caring about our environment, or our people, or our economic direction, for that matter, because it might be politically expedient to do so.

It’s not our job to move to the centre. It’s to move the centre.

We have often led the agenda, and achieved practical change by working across issues and across the political divides.

We remain open to working with National on select projects in this term of parliament.

In 2008, we drew up a successful MOU with National that saw 320,000 homes insulated across our country. This was a massive success. We kept that going as long as we could until National radically cut the program.

More Government funding, over $400 million, was committed to the Green Party’s MOU with National than was provided to projects with their coalition partners.

That is leadership from opposition.

Prior to the election we drew the line at propping up a conservative government at the expense of a progressive one.

But in the event that National won, we always said we’d try to work with them to create good green change. It is John Key, however, who has indicated he’s not too keen on working with us.

Since then we’ve heard it said that our social policies stand in the way of us working with National on the environment.

No.

In reality, it is on environmental policy where we are furthest apart.

National’s policies, including its plans to gut our environmental protection law, the RMA, and remove the principle of sustainability from the Act, will accelerate environmental destruction.

We are about increasing environmental protection.

Tackling climate change

Crucially, National has completely failed to grasp the challenge and opportunities presented by climate change.

And such a failure could not be more evident that in the fact that the most significant global environmental issue of our time, our generation, went barely without mention in the Speech from the Throne this morning, other than some oblique reference to managing our emissions.

But that’s no surprise. Under National’s management, New Zealand’s net emissions have risen 20 percent and are set to rise by another 50 percent in the next decade.

New Zealanders have the fifth highest per person emissions in the developed world.

For a country that prides ourselves on our 100% Pure image that is a 100% failure.

National has rejected the Green Party’s idea for a meaningful price on carbon and instead chosen to stick with the failed and discredited Emissions Trading scheme, which has driven up emissions and accelerated deforestation.

If we believe Climate Change Minister Tim Groser, it’s because National party voters apparently don’t care.

He told hundreds of New Zealanders at a pre-election Climate Voter event that, to many National Party supporters, climate change is nothing more than a UN conspiracy. A non-issue. “Those are the people we are carrying,” he said.

I refuse to believe this generalisation about New Zealanders.

I think Groser underestimates how important our environment is to us all, and in so doing abdicates responsibility for actually doing something about the most important challenge facing humanity.

I know that lots of New Zealanders care about the environment. I know that a love for our rivers, our mountains, and a desire to protect our clean and pure brand is not the domain solely of the Greens or those on the left.

If anything, the clamour for the Greens to go Blue should be a wakeup call for National.

People want real political action on climate change.

Here is the thing about the 21st century - a century into which the National Party has completely failed to transport itself – a shift to a cleaner, smarter economy is THE single biggest opportunity of our time.

Being green isn’t just about doing the right thing anymore – it’s about doing the bright thing.

That’s about leadership.

We will continue the push for New Zealand to make the transition to a smarter, low carbon economy.

We relish the opportunity to work across Parliament to make this happen.

Like we’ve done with child poverty and inequality, we will now move National on climate change.

Team Climate

For this reason we have decided to elevate the Climate Change portfolio to my Co-leader, Russel Norman.

This will mean both Green Co–leaders, Russel and myself, will have responsibility and lead campaigns for change on the two key crises facing our nation and our world; inequality and Climate Change.

How we respond to these distinct, yet often intertwined challenges, will define us as a nation and will define the shape of our children’s lives.

Russel will lead a team of MPs focussed on setting the environment agenda and driving the bold innovative smart green policy ideas that can have New Zealand leading the world while playing our part in helping to save it.

Already, these talented MPs have produced a comprehensive set of solutions that will address the immediate climate and environmental challenges we face.

Gareth Hughes will retain the Energy portfolio and also take on Innovation. Gareth is an ideas factory, seeking out the exciting innovations of New Zealand business and bringing them to public attention, and driving energy policy that will see New Zealand 100% renewable by 2030.

Kennedy Graham will continue his Global Affairs work, with a particular focus on international climate negotiations. It is our view that New Zealand can be a key player and leader in achieving a global climate accord.

Eugenie Sage will continue in Conservation and Steffan Browning in Primary Production. They will continue the fight to protect our environment, our precious species, fragile ecosystems and primary industries that depend on the environment from National’s 20th century pollution economy that places it all at risk.

Julie Anne Genter will continue to make the case for smarter investment in transport, while also picking up the Environment portfolio, leading the campaign against the Government’s RMA reforms that will cause so much environmental and community harm.

While James Shaw, our newest MP, will put his many years of experience supporting New Zealand's small and medium sized businesses and leading on sustainable business to good effect in the Economic Development portfolio, so that even where Government drags its heels on a smart green future, New Zealand business knows they have an ally and an advocate in the Greens.

Climate change and environmental protection must occupy an essential place at the top of the political agenda. It is not an optional “luxury” but essential to the New Zealand way of life and our national identity.

The Greens will lead on the environment.

Inequality

While we know the climate change trajectory is frightening in its enormity we have a very clear picture of inequality.

We can see the damage in the here and now, and we can calculate its fallout in the future.

We know, for example, how much child poverty costs – about $8 billion a year at the moment.

We know how many kids will stay below the breadline if we maintain the same 30 year economic plan - about 265,000 kids in poverty - approximately a quarter of all New Zealand children.

We know what those poor kids look like. Usually they’re Maori or Pasifika and often they come from single parent homes.

We know where they live; we can estimate how many among them will get sick, how many babies will die of preventable illnesses, how many will drop out of education and how many will grow up poor and go on to have babies who’ll repeat the cycle.

As brutal and cruel as it sounds - as brutal and cruel as it is - New Zealanders over the past 30 years have been slowly encouraged into accepting that sick, poor, hungry and undereducated kids simply go with the territory.

Child poverty rates are double what they were 30 years ago, yet National claims as success the fact it has managed to maintain that historic high.

Success to me would be dramatically reducing the number of children in poverty.

We at least have had in the speech this morning a recognition of the importance of child poverty, if not its urgency. I was interested to note, however, there was no mention of the fact that poverty is largely a question of inadequate income.

The question for National is: does it care enough about children in poverty to change the economic drivers that have perpetuated their poverty?

The Green Party says it is unacceptable to have kids hungry because their parents are living on a benefit.

National’s excuse - that it needs to maintain a gap between work and benefits - doesn’t pan out when 40 percent of poor kids live in working homes.

Their parents need to be paid more. It’s blindingly obvious. And yet this Government is pathologically allergic to raising incomes.

TeamKids

Over the next three years I will make it my business to generate an even bigger appetite for change in New Zealand to end child poverty.

And I am joined by an incredible team of Green MPs who believe the same: Call us TeamKids if you will.

Kevin Hague while holding the Health portfolio will also now take on the crucial Housing portfolio. The Greens have made incredible progress in improving New Zealand’s housing stock through the Home insulation programme, working with National to insulate more than 300,000 homes, and significantly improving the health of the children and families of those who live in them. But that is not enough; we need more affordable housing and improved quality. National offers none of that. The Green Party does.

Catherine Delahunty will continue in Education, promoting our Schools hubs unique plan to alleviate poverty and build strong communities around schools. School is so much more than achievement in the three Rs. Imagine, if schools were not just great places for kids to learn, but where parents could upskill too, and that the whole place was run on solar power. These are the connected solutions in education that the Greens will lead on.

Jan Logie will now take on the whole of Social Development and Employment and Denise Roche will tackle Industrial Relations and Immigration. Between them they will lead the charge to raise incomes for the workers and families who call New Zealand home - beneficiaries and workers alike, incomes that National now directly threatens with reforms of industrial relations and welfare.

Mojo Mathers will continue her advocacy for those hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders with disabilities and protecting the rights of all Kiwis to decent affordable food through the Food portfolio

Dave Clendon, will work to build a safer community by improving our legal system and reducing offending, and will also stand up for civil rights within the criminal justice system, including the children and families of prisoners.

What we can do this term.

For a little country, New Zealand has a proud history of leading on the solutions.

We were global leaders on women’s rights once. We gave women the vote 52 years before France which is celebrating only its 69th anniversary of suffrage today, incidentally.

We stood up to the mighty US in the 1980s and said no to nuclear power. Other nations noticed, in part because of how small we were, and how brave we were to take that stand.

We are the little country who can!

All the more reason to think twice before leaping when the US says war.

John Key says it is odd not to follow the US into military conflict against Sunni Militants in Iraq and Syria.

But we say what’s odder is for our brave little nation to follow the US into another military incursion when all the evidence points to it being the wrong move.

The overwhelming outcome of half a century of US military intervention in the Middle East is that life is worse for people in that region, and those of us in the rest of the world.

There is no doubt that the Islamic State threat is a very real one but there is too much doubt that the way to respond to that is by committing New Zealand to war.

Military incursions have so far radicalised many of the most radical groups.

The endless bombing of the Middle East will not solve the problems there.

The Green Party doesn’t have all the answers, but we do think New Zealand should be examining our non-military options. We are prepared to be a lone voice in this Parliament against the notion of involving our country in another pointless war.

New Zealand should take a more constructive approach.

There is an urgent need for humanitarian assistance in the region, for instance. We have the skills and experience to respond to that.

There is far more good to be done by providing shelter to those displaced by conflict than going to war.

War is by nature self-destructive. So are economic strategies that perpetuate climate inaction and inequality.

New Zealand can, and must lead with smart, modern responses to all these challenges. The world will notice.

By meeting the challenge of climate change and inequality we can transform our economy and society for the better and in so doing lead the world.

New Zealand is uniquely placed to seize the opportunities arising from the global shift to clean energy.

We have the best cards in the pack: the natural resources, the people, the intellect and know-how.

We just need leadership.

Our competitive edge is not cheap labour, more cows, and dirty oil – it’s environmental stewardship, a fair and tolerant society and smarter, cleaner economics.

Thanks and hope

Over the next three years, the Green party will honour the one in ten voters who gave us our seats in this place.

Last Parliament we led the opposition, and we return with the same number of MPs to set the agenda again.

We will hold the Government to account, and be a voice in this place, for those too little or too disenfranchised to have a voice of their own.

I note with some dismay that I am the only woman political leader in this Parliament.

But I am proud to be helping to lead the most diverse and the most representative of parties in this house. Like New Zealand, the Green caucus is half women, and a quarter Māori.

We are a collection of passionate people who have spent our lives fighting the good fight, leading, not in pursuit of money, or prestige, but of the values we stand here to represent.

A fairer, cleaner, smarter New Zealand, playing its responsible role in the world.

I genuinely wish my colleagues across this House well.

My enduring hope is that we can reach across our political barriers and make real progress for our people and our country over the next three years.

And that in doing that, this nation of journeyers and pioneers can lead the world again.

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