4 June 2012

We’re all in this together

2012 Green Party AGM Speech
Dr Russel Norman

Introduction

Tēnei te mihi ki ngā mana whenua o Te Awakairangi, ko Te Āti Awa nō runga i te rangi, me Ngāti Tama, tēnā koutou katoa

This weekend is about celebration, consolidation and facing our future.

We stand here today on the shoulders of those who started our movement. We celebrate all that has been achieved in 40 years of activism, campaigning and sheer hard work. But we face the future, because that is what Greens do.

Welcome back to Te Awa Kairangi, the Hutt River, and to this hall in Silverstream where I first spoke as Co-leader of the Greens. Thank you for supporting me, as I've learned on the job.

I can do it because of the strength you provide – each activist, each member, each voter – and there are many. I can do it because I know that we are all in this together.

And that's what I want to talk to you about today, about being in it together. Our combined strength and our shared vulnerability extends beyond our movement; it is the story of our nation, our environment, and our planet.

The challenges before us cannot be tackled alone, but together we can build a kinder, smarter, greener Aotearoa New Zealand.

We are all in this together.

Te Awa Kairangi – the Hutt River

For those of you who aren’t from Wellington, I want to welcome you especially to this place, Awakairangi, named after this defining river — Te Awa Kairangi — the Hutt River.

In this river valley once stood New Zealand’s most majestic kahikatea forest, stretching from Petone to the foothills of the Tararua ranges. One kahikatea in this forest measured twenty-one feet round, and was nearly the same size upwards for sixty feet before reaching its first branch.

Within this forest, huia, kereru, kaka, and kokako made their homes. The swamplands would boom at night to the calling of bittern.

Such abundance made this valley a valuable settlement site for Maori, and a number of iwi and hapu have connections here, particularly Te Ati Awa and Ngati Tama. They were to be severely impacted by colonisation and land confiscation.

This ‘perfect vale’, as local ecological historian the late Geoff Park has described it, was chosen by the New Zealand Company to found Edward Wakefield’s dream of a new and better Britain in the South Sea.

One of the first of that new wave of settlers to come ashore at Petone wrote:

Richard Samuel Deighton and myself were the first to land, opposite the native village or pa at Petone. We strolled a short distance to the edge of the bush. Observing perched on one of the trees, several wood pigeons. Each of us shot one.

You have to wonder what we’ve learnt since those two colonists stepped onto Petone beach. When you look at the National Government’s proposals for risky mining, deep sea oil drilling, and intensifying agriculture through irrigation and ETS subsidies, you see the reflection of the early devastation wrought in this land.

The forests of the plains have been felled, burnt, and ploughed to within a few hectares of disappearing completely. We’ve damaged and eroded our soils. We’ve polluted the majority of our lowland rivers and streams. We’ve pushed the wildlife, animals found nowhere else in the world, to the brink of extinction.

We have lived off our natural capital, and it is much depleted.

And now the gaze of new colonists has turned to what remains: The lignite under our feet, the fresh water that still makes it out to the sea, and the oil that may lie deep under our oceans.

From the beginning of colonisation there have been those who see Aotearoa simply as a place to make a quick buck.

But there have also always been those who call Aotearoa home and want to protect it, whether they were born here or came here attracted by its wondrous beauty and promise. People who understand that we are all in this together.

And that’s why I am confident that we can change the agenda. We have done it before, appealed to those who love this place. There is no mining in our national parks due to the campaign run by the green movement, and because so many Kiwis stood up to be counted. Last week the green movement won the battle to save the spectacular, wild Mokihinui River. People worked together and we made it happen.

We are in this together, and together we can clean up our act.

Naku te rourou, nau te rourou, ka ora ai te iwi
With my food basket, and your food basket, the people will thrive

And I believe that we will thrive. New Zealanders love the natural world and we will protect it.

I challenge anyone to stand under a giant totara tree in Pureora forest park and not be moved by the grandeur. This love is powerful, and I believe it is universal – it is part of what it means to be human.

There are so many sane, economic, self interested reasons for a clean green exporter and tourist destination like New Zealand to fight to protect its natural heritage. And I am happy to argue for this on economic grounds any day of the week.

But I also know that we will protect our precious rivers and forests, beaches and lakes, because of our love for those places in and of themselves. New Zealanders love our environment and we will protect it.

A more equal and just society

The stories of this place, Awakairangi, can also tell us about our care for each other and our belief in giving everyone a fair go.

When the first European settlers arrived in 1840 in the Hutt Valley Maori from nearby pa helped them to build their homes on Pito-one Beach.

In April of that year, Ti Tiriti o Waitangi was signed between the Crown and iwi of the Hutt and Wellington. It was a founding document for our nation and set out a vision of Aotearoa where Pakeha and Maori could share this beautiful country.

Tragically, Te Tiriti has been repeatedly breached by the Crown. This is true in Awakairangi, and it is true throughout the land.

But Ti Tiriti does provide a framework for Maori and Pakeha living together.

The paradox is that just as Maori were having their land forcibly taken in this valley there were some progressive developments in early New Zealand history.

In Korokoro, a small hillside suburb on the other side of this river valley, Samuel Duncan Parnell negotiated the first ever eight-hour working day with his employer.

News of Parnell’s innovation quickly spread throughout the colony and workers everywhere started demanding fairer working hours.

Patrick Street in Petone was the first site of our young nation’s experiment in providing adequate housing for those most in need.

While the workers' dwellings in Petone were modest in number and success, the really massive expansion in state housing happened under Michael Joseph Savage and the First Labour Government.

Naenae and Taita gave large numbers of New Zealanders high quality affordable housing for the first time.

Savage's government understood that we are in this together, and that together we can solve the biggest challenges of our times.

This sense of collective purpose, however, has been undermined by a series of misguided governments. The reforms of the 1980s and 1990s not only resulted in large parts of our economy being sold offshore — they damaged our sense of collective nationhood.

Within a generation, New Zealand has moved from being one of the most equal societies in the western world to being one of the most unequal.

He tōtara wāhi rua, he kai na te ahi
A tōtara split in two will be food for the fire

For a generation, politicians from National and Labour have told us that we are not our brother's keeper. But they are wrong. We care about each other. We will be our brother's keeper, and our sister's too.

We can build strong and caring communities based on the belief that we’re all in this together.

Our environment is our economy

And we can remake our economy to live within nature’s means.

The Green Party has a plan for a smart, green economy. We can have a resilient economy that protects our natural capital, creates well-paying jobs, and shares our prosperity fairly.

And within our lifetimes, a smart, green economy will be the only economy still working.

The National Government inherited a New Zealand economy seriously out-of-balance, living beyond its means, and subsequently rocked by the Canterbury earthquakes.

National had a remarkable opportunity to remake our economy into one that saves more and invests in productive enterprise. National could have built an economy that creates good jobs in the lucrative clean tech sector, with all the right incentives to prosper in a way that makes our ‘100% Pure’ reputation a reality.

They failed to implement the Green Party’s proposal to raise a temporary levy to help pay for the rebuilding of Christchurch. By now we’d have raised $1 billion of the $5.5 billion uncovered cost of the earthquakes. This is one of the best ways to get in behind Cantabrians at their time of greatest need. An earthquake levy is our way to say, as a nation, that we’re all in this together.

National chose to put the earthquake on the credit card and leave the cost for another generation to pay off.

A smart, green economy would tackle one of our single biggest economic vulnerabilities — debt — particularly private debt.

When you look at Treasury’s worsening forecasts for our current account deficit or our net international investment position, it’s very clear the National Government has given up on building a more balanced economy, one that lives within its means.

Like the Labour Government before them, National is hoping we can simply “grow” our way out of our structural problems. And to kick-start that elusive growth, they’ve backed nearly every Get Rich Quick scheme they can think of — asset sales, risky mining, dairy intensification, even casinos — and running up record levels of Government debt to help fund it.

By contrast, for the Greens, living within our means is critical.

The Green Party has the courage to raise a tax on capital gains (excluding the family home) to help drive investment out of property and into the productive sector and raise significant revenue in the medium term.

A smart, green economy would stop subsidising greenhouse pollution by introducing a real price on carbon. The longer we delay exposing significant parts of our economy to the true price of their polluting behaviour, the longer we’ll lock our economy into dirty methods of production and a heightened risk of an export backlash. It’s also the right thing to do if we want our children to inherit a stable climate.

A true price on carbon would incentivize investment in low carbon technologies and signal to miners like Solid Energy that their get rich quick schemes to turn lignite into diesel don’t fit with our future.

Now, educating our kids isn’t a get rich quick scheme, it’s get rich slow scheme, an investment that is sure to last. National’s attack on education is an attack on the long-term prosperity of New Zealand, and the Green Party will stand up for high quality public education. This education is the foundation of a fair society and a productive economy– without it we cannot build a strong future for our nation.

The Green Party would also reprioritise the $14 billion that National is currently spending on uneconomic new motorways.

At a time of record high oil prices, the National Party is locking us into our cars. The IMF’s most recent forecasts are for oil prices to double permanently over the next decade.

There are smarter ways to invest $14 billion, like world-class buses, trains, and ferries, and by making walking and cycling safer everywhere. And we’d still have plenty of change left over to pay down debt.

And a smart, green economy wouldn’t be selling our state-owned power companies.

Instead of selling our last best assets for a quick buck, we would re-orient our power companies towards exporting their clean energy expertise to the world. By keeping our energy companies in public ownership, we keep all the research and development, new jobs, and profits right here in New Zealand.

Research commissioned by the Green Party showed that National’s planned asset sales leave the Government accounts permanently worse off. Selling assets is not a smart way to run an economy.

We can do better, and we will. That’s why we’ve joined with Grey Power, the Council of Trade Unions, Greenpeace, Labour and other political parties to launch a citizen initiated referendum. Together we will gather over 300,000 signatures from New Zealanders who want to keep our assets for our own future.

Conclusion

I love this country and I want to protect it. We can create a smart economy that delivers real prosperity for everyone while protecting the environment.

We can harness the ingenuity of our farmers, our scientists, our teachers and social workers to build a fairer society, and a richer New Zealand.

We can protect natural capital, enhance our quality of life, and share our prosperity fairly. Such a country will be, in the words of the late Sir Paul Callaghan, “a place where talent wants to live”.

The spirit of this place has not been extinguished. Here in Awakairangi, it awakes every Saturday morning in the marae and the homes of small groups of people who go out into the hills to trap pests and replant forests.

The kahikatea they’re planting may only be knee high today, but the hope they symbolise for our future is sky high.

Kia hua ko te pai (May good flourish)
Kia tau to atawhai (May your blessings flow)
Manaakitia mai Aotearoa ([God] Defend Aotearoa)

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