Fitzsimons Jeanette: Motions — Rt Hon Helen Clark—Appointment as Head of United Nations  Development Programme 
Fitzsimons Jeanette: Motions — Rt Hon Helen Clark—Appointment as Head of United Nations  Development Programme 
[Volume:653;Page:2273] 
JEANETTE FITZSIMONS (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 The Green Party is very pleased to be able to congratulate Helen Clark on her appointment to the position of Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme. What a pleasure it is to see the House in accord about something. 
Helen Clark has served this country well in many ways. We are delighted that she now has the opportunity to serve a wider constituency: the hungry the homeless the very poor the sick and the illiterate in the world’s developing countries. In the 9 years that I have worked with Helen in party to party discussions although we have not always agreed I have observed her keen intelligence her vast knowledge of international affairs her commitment to her principles of social democracy and her considerable diplomatic skills. Her appointment is a great honour for Helen and it is a great honour for New Zealand. It is a signal that our country is well-regarded in international circles for making a constructive contribution well beyond our size. It is an indication that we are not too small to count and that we can make a difference. 
And a difference urgently needs to be made. The opportunities and the challenges that Helen will face in this new job are daunting. Since 1980 world GDP has increased nearly sixfold. In the same time the number of people living on less than $2 a day has declined only marginally. Current policies are not working. There is no way that people can be raised out of desperate poverty by business as usual. For everyone to aspire to the level of consumption of resources of the United States would take some seven planets and we have only one. And that one planet is so seriously degraded that it is limiting the development prospects of much of humanity. 
In the year 2000 the United Nations Development Programme adopted the United Nations Millennium Development Goals which included halving poverty by 2015. In 2005 its Millennium Ecosystem Assessment was published; it showed that degradation in ecosystem services was a major barrier to ever reaching those goals. This substantial report by dozens of authors and peer reviewers found that there will simply not be enough clean fresh water water purification by wetlands or fisheries—to name just a few examples—to permit the basics of a decent life to be met over coming generations unless we adopt a radically different tack. 
Since then we have watched the effects of the early stages of global warming melting the Himalayan glaciers on which a quarter of the world’s people depend for their drinking water. We have watched it worsen droughts in countries already struggling to produce enough food. We have watched it increase the risk of tropical diseases from which mainly the poor suffer and threaten to inundate the homes of millions in communities in the Pacific Islands Bangladesh and South China. Stopping and then reversing the degradation of ecosystems is a precondition to international development and must become a core part of the United Nations Development Programme. I am heartened by the fact that I know that Helen understands that. 
Since the beginning of economics world leaders have relied on generalised and indiscriminate economic growth to lift the poor out of poverty. The saying is that a rising tide lifts all boats but some boats are chained to the bottom by poor health a lack of education living in war zones discrimination and violence and they will not be lifted unless those impediments are tackled directly. Beyond even that world economic activity is already bumping up against the limits to resources whether they be oil gas fresh water land for food growing—as shown in recent grain price rises—fish stocks or climate. Relying on generalised economic growth in these circumstances will simply allow the better-off to capture even more of those limited resources leaving even less for those at the bottom. 
A story that has stuck in my mind for decades since I was a young woman is that when thousands of people in Ethiopia were dying of hunger in one of their recurring droughts—I think it was in the 1960s—their country was exporting canned beef grown on their land by multinational companies. That of course showed up as GDP growth but it was the very opposite of development. 
Most fish stocks in the world are now depleted and some have crashed. They have not in the main been crashed by poor people trying to feed themselves from coastal fisheries but by global companies with the technology to strip the coast bare. Only when local fisheries are returned to local control will coastal communities be able to feed themselves. 
This job will need massive resources. It is frightening to me that the total budget of the United Nations Development Programme is only NZ$9 billion compared with our GDP of about NZ$177 billion. The budget that Helen was in charge of to run the New Zealand Government was very much larger than the budget she will be in charge of in New York. Levels of international aid need to be significantly increased not least in New Zealand if the world is to meet this challenge. Until hard negotiations forced the last Budget to increase New Zealand’s development aid budget it had been less than 0.3 percent. We hope that will not be an obstacle as the new administrator goes begging to other Governments for more funds and we hope the New Zealand Government will increase our aid budget to show support for our top international representative. 
Helen the opportunity beckons to support all those who are working for a new model of development based on strengthening local food and renewable energy production returning land to those who live there community and women’s development resource-conserving technologies and protection of natural resources. That new model cannot succeed unless global efforts to tackle climate change also succeed. You have the capacity to drive that agenda further. You go with the very warmest best wishes of the Green Party. What we wish most for you is that in the endless round of cocktail parties travel and high-level meetings and negotiations to which you are no stranger the most desperate people—who rely on the United Nations Development Programme to eat to be housed and to be healthy and educated—are always top of your mind.