11 February 2009
EMBARGOED UNTIL 5.30PM TODAY
Maiden Speech

Maiden Speech by Green MP Catherine Delahunty
Parliament Buildings
Wellington

Me mihi ki a Papatuanuku, ki te whenua hoki o Whanganui a Tara.
Me mihi hoki ki ngä manawhenua katoa.
E mihi kau ana ki ngä tangata whenua o te motu huri noa huri noa.
Me mihi ki a tatau me ngä tangata tiriti o te whare paremata nei.
Me mihi hoki ki täku whänau me rätou me o rätou iwi i hara mai ki te tautoko i ahau.
E kore hoki e wareware ngä kai whakakorikori me ngä tikanga o te Ao; me rätou kua ngaro i te kitenga kanohi engari mahue mai ngä taonga.

Acknowledgements to all my amazing friends and whänau who have travelled to share this day.

Mr Speaker, Te Tiriti o Waitangi is like a rope between us, the indigenous manawhenua and the Tangata Tiriti. We, Tangata Tiriti hold on to the rope because we need it most. At our end the rope is made of the bones and tears of migrants - many of whom left cold islands on the other side of the world hoping desperately for a better life. And that better life came to pass through systemic violence, theft and denial. Te Tiriti, a frayed and stretched arrangement is the tie that binds us to this place and to the hope that violence, theft and denial need not be the basis for our bonds in the future.

An openness to the story of Te Tiriti was a precious gift from my family. We are no longer from Somerset and Tipperary and Ballymacelliot County Kerry. We are citizens of the nation of Aotearoa New Zealand and we are Pakeha. I've been told one meaning of Pakeha is "of a different breath". We enjoy ongoing colonial privilege, but we have an opportunity to take responsibility for this and work for a justice-based peace. This justice is desperately needed from Ruatoki to Gaza. Our Government recognising the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples would be a good start.

But first I thank my mother for her vital lesson that a background of privilege and racism need not distort the human heart, and that an unexamined life is not worth living. I thank my father for the feisty, rebellious energy and critical analysis, which gave me the starting point for a life of political engagement, and a healthy suspicion of powerful institutions.

Thanks also to my siblings and my beloved daughter for putting up with my unnecessarily robust speeches - and acting like a megaphone next to their heads.

Despite that healthy suspicion towards institutions I embrace this new chapter with all the illusions of a maiden. Last time I was a maiden was 40 years ago. It's refreshing to revisit that time of passionate conviction, when it was our unique duty to resist the system while wearing a lot of black clothing. I am not just here to be part of that enduring resistance; I come to work with a group of people.

The Green Party is not a church or a movement. It is a maturing political party with all the contradictions that implies. I joined because of the kaupapa but also because of the people in the leadership and the way they do politics.

Special thanks must go to the East Coast Greens for all your work to help me here. Thanks to the entire Party. But particular thanks to the late Rod Donald, you encouraged me as you encouraged many others and you represented a wholeness in your political work that drew people towards us and gave us deep roots in both social and environmental justice. Russel has a big challenge walking in your shoes but luckily he's got pretty big feet.

Thank you to Jeanette - your depth and serenity has achieved more in politics than can ever be undone by the short sighted, hatchets of the ignorant.
To the Green caucus, thank you, for kindness to me now and how kind you will have to be in future; and thanks especially to the indomitable Sue Bradford for years of support and inspiration.

The person who pushed me into this was my partner Gordon Jackman who lives issues of justice every day. They say that behind every great man is an exhausted woman, or behind every great woman is a man trying to slow her down, but I say: beside this ordinary woman is an extraordinary and totally supportive man. Thank you to all the Jackmans for being so generous to me in all ways.

Today I am speaking to the public gallery, and to the people who lead our country from the ground up. When I first marched on Parliament it was in a pushchair, protesting against nuclear weapons. At 10, I stood with my sisters on those steps of Moehau granite as we protested against troops being sent to Vietnam, and at 16 I led the first union of high school students to those same steps.

Then there was the time we, from Coromandel Watchdog, dumped the Waihï mining tailings into the miners' cocktail party at the Beehive. The last time Gordon and I marched here, it was all the way from Türanga with Te Tairäwhiti Iwi to protest against the Foreshore and Seabed Bill. We were fortunate to be Pakeha walking amongst a multitude of hapu, not a hater or a wrecker to be found amongst them. If this legislation can be repealed under the leadership of the Maori Party, I will be proud to vote with them.

When I left this cold city, at 17, I went to live with a mountain, and I learned what love of country really means. The mountain Te Moe ngä hau o Tamatekapua is the great blue rock that rises out of Tikapa Moana, the Hauraki Gulf. Moehau is the mountain of the Hauraki and Te Arawa peoples. It is the image of endurance, beauty and life-force, which I hold in my heart. When a multinational gold mining company kindly offered to reduce Moehau to a lake the hapu and the local hippies united to resist. We were successful because of some wonderful people; some living and some passed away. Never imagine that a small coalition of determined people cannot prevent corporate greed from digging up our mountains. We could, we did and if need be we will again.

Today I want to honour women you have never heard of, especially Veronica Black, and Betty Williams Ngäti Whanaunga and Ngäti Pukenga. Thank you - both of you. Not only did you open my eyes to Te Tiriti issues but you also helped me to see the life essence in all living things. Betty taught us the name for the awe and joy that Papatuanuku gives us. Kaitiakitanga is not a word to be appropriated by Pakeha; it belongs to you and all the other kaitiaki. But work together we must.

These women inspired my feminism. Gender equity is real when the Refuges are empty and the mothers and babies are at the centre of the economy, not when post-feminist women claw their way into high status jobs.

In the 1990s, thanks to Gordon and Greenpeace I met a river. This river begins in the translucent waters of Lake Tarawera; it travels underground for a while and leaps sparkling out of the rocks at Kawerau, a waterfall of light and foam. The Tarawera River then rolls green and alive through the forest and the town only to disappear again into a terrible darkness below the pulp and paper mills. What was once Tarawera is now the Black Drain, a sluggish dark brown body of water, whose life is polluted, whose people are alienated, and whose history is our shame. In 1954 this House passed a piece of law to turn the Tarawera into a drain.

That Enabling Act ranks alongside a number of other shameful pieces of legislation. My favourite remains the "Validation of Invalid Land Sales Act 1894" whose purpose surely needs no explanation.

Yes - the Tarawera is a bit cleaner now, but still for Tüwharetoa, Ngäti Awa and Ngäti Rangitihi the Black Drain is a gross attack on their identity and food sources.

I can still see Jack Fox, the rangatira, standing at the gate of his tiny house surrounded by the vast pollution of his waahi tapu. Te Wai u o Tüwharetoa, the sacred spring is surrounded by mill waste, and his wife Isobel Fox lifting her angry face to the toxic chemical air and challenging us to fix this mess.

The Black Drain represents the damage done by a timber processing industry which has failed to address pollution. This pollution goes beyond our rivers - we have dioxin contamination throughout our country and throughout the bodies of timber workers and their families. Joe Harawira and the Sawmill Workers Against Poisons, I salute your leadership and courage, as family after family buries poisoned loved ones, and you work constructively to heal land and people. I will never forget the time when a busload of your members sat on those Moehau granite steps outside this building and displayed their ulcerated and destroyed limbs, so that no one else will have to live with this misery, deformity and early death. Joe, the whakatuaki on your letterhead says not that honesty is the best policy, but that honesty is the only policy. May this House one day embrace that truth.

To my friends from Whaingaroa, Whangamatä, Moerewa, Tamaki and Mahia, the sewage warriors of Aotearoa. Thanks for doing the dirty work that local authorities can't seem to handle. Humans might have landed on the moon but we are still dumping our bodily waste into our water.

And, to my friends of the last decade - the educators for social change and social justice - these years have been ones of learning, so much richer than any unit standard or university essay. We have travelled a road that is made by walking and we have met with inspiring community activists and workers along the way. Thanks to the Treaty educators, the disability activists, the Women's liberation and gay rights workers, the environmental campaigners, the unemployed rights activists, community development leaders and young unionists, the collective gardeners and all the other targets of SIS and Threat Assessment Unit time wasting.

In Te Tairäwhiti the great ocean, Te Moana nui a Kiwa, beats ceaselessly against another maunga Te Kuri a Paoa, those wild white cliffs crumbling into the bluest waters. It was there that Paoa of the Horouta waka lost his dog and the manawhenua first saw the sails of Captain Cook inch into the great bay. Within days Cook's men had shot the first of the tangata whenua and Cook had attempted the first great renaming of Aotearoa.

"Poverty Bay" speaks of the poverty of his leadership in the killings of the Ngäti Oneone men. It does not speak of the richness of culture and whenua of Te Tairäwhiti.

When I moved to Türanga I was overwhelmed by the crystal dry scent of the air and shimmering eastern sky. The blatant Pakeha racism and the obvious gap between the wealthy drinking delightful wines and the poor tangata whenua living in shacks and crowded flats also overwhelmed me. I did not mean to get embroiled in the most basic of struggles: that of beneficiaries for the most basic of entitlements. But we did because we had to. I can never represent the pain and the anger in the faces of the young and disenfranchised. No matter how many prisons you build they will keep coming, demanding their share in a wealth that was their birthright until one day when white sails came round the corner and created Poverty Bay. To my whänau, the Tairäwhiti Beneficiary Advocacy Trust and all the beneficiary advocates kia kaha, and to the wahine toa from Ngai Tamanuhiri and Rongawhakaata and Ngati Porou, especially Kay Robin and Jody Toroa - we are in this for keeps.

The hardest issue I have ever learned about remains riddled with denials and taboos. As a TAB -- a temporarily able bodied person -- I grew up with all the prejudices our society has developed to justify our discrimination against people living with impairments. We are primitive, cruel and wasteful in our recognition of the full humanity of people who are in our own families and may suddenly be ourselves. I am here to listen to the people who say "Nothing about us without us"; it's high time.

But what about this Parliament? Well, the Government has had its 90-day trial period and some of us say that they have failed to perform and we are going to have to let them go. But in lieu of the power to actually fire the Government I would like to make some suggestions.

Can we at least reduce the waste in the chamber, perhaps to a daily time limited ritual chanting session by the two major parties? They could take turns chanting "you are stupid and wrong because you're the wrong party, and we are clever and right because we are the good party," and once that was over with we could all get on with the urgent work the citizens might have hoped we came here to do.

Last of all, to my daughter Esther, and her partner Nick, thank you for my grandson, born on the day this new Parliament was sworn in. For Leo and every tiny person starting out in life, you deserve something so much more precious than individualism. In a healthy group the individual can thrive, it is not a war between nanny state and the free market, the real struggle is between earth-based collective well-being versus a polluted globalised greed.

Unless we wake up fast it wont be "we won, you lost, eat that", it will be nobody won, we all we lost especially our descendants from whom we have stolen the basics of life.

To quote Auntie Betty:
"The international financial crisis is inextricably linked to climate change and if we can't work the linkage out then Papatuanuku will spell it out for us."

Mr Speaker it doesn't have to end like that, there were always alternatives to Rogernomics, and we need them now. Parliament needs to listen to the people who have given their lives to the nourishment of the whenua and collective well-being. My time and loyalty here is given to them.

No reira
Tena koutou katoa

ENDS

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