Hudson Brett: Address in ReplyText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHudson Brett: Address in Reply[Sitting date: 29 October 2014. Volume:701;Page:374. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]BRETT HUDSON (National):Mr Deputy Speaker let me begin by congratulating you and the other presiding officers on your election. I look forward to working with you all over the term of this Parliament. Akoranga whakatipuranga ngātahi. [Learning and growing in unison.] That is the motto of Johnsonville School one of many fine schools in the Ōhāriu electorate. Those words mean: “To learn grow and flourish together as one”. They symbolise a very positive constructive environment for our children’s learning. I believe they are equally relevant across wider New Zealand. They speak to me of a country that acknowledges its past while embracing the future one that values the diversity of the new and different while honouring the unique heritage of our land and people one that encourages aspiration and believes in the equality of access to the essential foundations needed to forge a happy and successful life.That is why I am honoured to take my seat as a list member of Parliament in this National Party caucus under the leadership of the Prime Minister the Rt Hon John Key. Our Prime Minister leads a Government that is governing for all New Zealanders. Under his leadership and the Hon Bill English’s financial stewardship New Zealand was lifted out of the global recession sooner and stronger than our traditional trading partners. Our health care results have improved dramatically and our communities are safer than they have been in decades. We are investing more than ever in improving educational success for our children. At a time when others around the world are cutting social support to save costs John Key is leading a Government that is investing in breaking welfare dependency giving people and their families real opportunity and brighter prospects.I am proud to provide another forceful voice for the communities of Ōhāriu. I would like to thank the 18810 voters of Ōhāriu who placed their trust in National and helped see me elected to Parliament. The electorate is a compact one stretching 15 kilometres from north to south. It is a mixed urban/rural electorate. To the west of the main roads lies Ōhāriu Valley a rural community with a rich history in dairy and sheep farming. I am proud to live within an electorate where we have a farming industry that has been the backbone of New Zealand’s success and will continue to help shape our economy into the future. I am proud of the ingenuity and the innovation that underpinned that success remains strong and is being applied to changing circumstances. Faced with challenges to their economic returns a group of farmers in Ōhāriu Valley joined together and developed a commercial proposition that they tendered to electricity generators. As a result we now have wind farmers in Ōhāriu.Ōhāriu is largely an urban electorate and one that is broadly representative of New Zealand. The demographics show that we have a high proportion of 30 to 49-year-olds many with children and mortgages compared with the rest of New Zealand. This speaks of families with aspirations to build successful careers and with concerns for their families’ education welfare and safety—people looking to National’s plan to enable the security and prosperity they seek. I am honoured to serve as a voice for them and I commit to working in their interests along with those of our city our region and our country.This Chamber is surrounded by plaques that provide sobering reminders that the freedoms we enjoy now were hard won. It is poignant that my allocated seat is directly beneath the plaque commemorating the battles at Hébuterne a small village on the Western Front for most of the First World War. The village is where the 1st and 2nd Battalions’ Wellington Regiment fought in the spring of 1918 and is home to the graves of 53 New Zealand servicemen. It is a village in the district of Arras where the New Zealand Tunnelling Company worked so diligently and courageously from 1916 to 1918. Their sacrifice was commemorated here just 1 week after the 2014 election with the opening of the Arras Tunnel under the new National War Memorial. This was the first event I was privileged to attend in an official capacity after the election.My position directly beneath this plaque also has personal poignancy. Hébuterne is in the northernmost region of France. Within this region also sits the town of Cassel a town I have ancestral links to through the De Ridder family on my mother’s side. It is not far from Cassel to Hébuterne fewer than 90 kilometres as the crow flies and only a little more by road—perhaps a mere 40 minutes away if one was fortunate enough to be sitting in a Crown car with my father behind the wheel.I am very proud of my heritage. It includes not only French but also Danish South African and English. They have been blended over generations in this great country. I am a New Zealander through and through and although not born here I consider myself a Wellingtonian to the core. I was born in Te Atatū. That makes me a Westie. In 1972 the family moved to Porirua which is pretty much the same thing. I was schooled there attending Porirua East School Tītahi Bay Intermediate School and Mana College. I acknowledge Bob Aldred and Tony Timms from Mana College. If not for their teaching capability I may have experienced a very different life perhaps one far less likely to have led here. I must confess though that it does feel somewhat odd to be acknowledging even indirectly a Labour Party general secretary in my later election as a National Party MP.The path to this Chamber is one not travelled alone. I would like to acknowledge our party president Peter Goodfellow and board members along with our general manager Greg Hamilton and his team all of whom do an outstanding job in managing our organisation and supporting us across the country. I would particularly like to thank board members Malcolm Plimmer and Roger Bridge for their support and friendship. I acknowledge my good friend and colleague Paul Foster-Bell. It was a pleasure to lead his campaign in 2011 and an even greater pleasure to join him here now. I would like to acknowledge and thank my campaign chair Carsten Schousboe and electorate chair Sam Ratten. Their efforts and those of their teams were instrumental in our success. I salute the Young Nats. They are a force multiplier. We simply could not achieve what we do without their boundless energy and commitment. There are a number of National Party members across this region to whom I owe a debt of gratitude for their support and advice. To them I offer a deeply heartfelt thankyou.I acknowledge my friends and extended family for all we have shared over the years and for how they have helped to shape my life. I would like to take this opportunity to thank my dear friends John and Elva Jamieson. Their friendship helped to craft a young lad into a man. I have three lovely daughters: Antonia Georgia and Micaela. I do not think anything can give a parent quite as much joy as seeing their children grow into strong independent people. My love for them remains as unconditional as I still recall theirs was as young children. I am incredibly fortunate to have Lindsay Renwick as my partner. She is an incredibly giving person and adds so much to my life. She is a pillar of support keeping me grounded and focused on what really matters. I am all the better a person for having Lindsay to share my life with.I wish to pay tribute to my parents. I have them to thank for so much of what has brought me to where I am today. From them I learnt the importance of determination and resilience. I learnt that your own hard work and commitment will determine success that life will be what you choose to make of it that opportunities are there to be grasped and that how you go about your life is as important as what you do with it. They taught me and many others by example.I learnt most by growing up in a household of hard-working people. For most of my school days my mother Carol worked with the Jantzen swimwear company in Tawa. From her work there I learnt that income is determined by performance. My mother was paid on a bonus system that rewarded both the quality and quantity of her output. In the late 1980s she came to work in this precinct as an administrative assistant in the office of the Hon Stan Rodger. It was a junior role but one of the many that are so important to ensure the smooth running of Parliament and the Government.My father Alfred “Rocky” Hudson had a longer association with this House. In fact this place is very much the reason that our family moved from Auckland to Wellington in 1972 when he transferred here to take up a role as a ministerial chauffeur. My father demonstrated not only the virtue of working hard to get ahead—18-hour days were the norm—but also the importance of professional behaviour and discretion. His discretion meant that we did not get to hear much of what went on around his job but there was the odd story or two.Although he never sat in this House my father recounted that he was mentioned in it. He told of a retiring Minister who mentioned in their valedictory that there are two ways to travel domestically: Air New Zealand and Air Hudson both equally safe and reliable. I would note an equal emphasis on safety in that comment but reliability is important. During the rarest of occasions when Wellington Airport was closed due to inclement weather a Minister had an important event to attend in Auckland and only scant minutes before a plane was to depart from Paraparaumu. In a case of a ministerial driver doubling as an experimental physicist my father showed that with precise application of the right foot time can indeed be made to fold back upon itself. I would note that that Minister also made it to their event on time.Reflecting on my parents’ lessons and their work in service of this House gave me cause to consider the obligations upon those of us fortunate to be elected. That we should be expected to act in the public good and to improve prosperity and conditions for our people is self-evident. I found a cautionary note in the words of Edmund Burke the eminent 18th century politician: “Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.”. That is a salutary reminder that we would do greater disservice by doing nothing than by taking incremental steps in response to real world circumstances and limitations. Our people need pragmatism ahead of perfection.I come to this Parliament from a career in the information and communications technology industry. It is an industry that contributes to the diversification and growth in our economy which is a key part of our plans for boosting innovation into the future. Information and communications technology represents an additional string to our economic bow not a replacement. Although some seem to believe that the New Zealand economy can be only a zero-sum game where doing more of one thing must come at the expense of production elsewhere we in the National Party welcome investment the opening-up of more markets for our goods and exploring new innovations and means to sustainably increase production. Clearview Innovations and ReGen Ltd are two good examples of this. They are companies using technological innovation in fertiliser products and deployment to yield better results while minimising run-off risk. They are turning and facing our problems tackling real issues using ingenuity and technology and allowing us to continue to grow our economy and create jobs without destroying the environment. That is the New Zealand way.I join the National caucus and take my seat in the House to make a difference. I want to see the communities of Ōhāriu the Wellington region and the country as a whole thrive. I want to see us taking advantage of improvements through the Business Growth Agenda to deliver more and higher paying jobs. I want a country where our people are living healthy safe lives in communities and more of our children are succeeding in education.The Government has a very real role to play in this. Its greatest role and greatest challenge however is to extend its influence only as much as is necessary and to protect the basic right of people to the freedom of their own choices. Individuals are best placed to choose their careers their investments and their priorities. They are best placed to care for their families. To impose upon people beyond what is necessary is to erode their freedom. As a great philosopher of the 19th century John Stuart Mill noted on society: “if it issues wrong mandates instead of right or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression”. I am committed to freedom to limited Government to individual choice and responsibility to rewards for achievement and to equal opportunity. Those are our party values. Those are the values this great country was built upon.There will come a time as yet undetermined when I will leave this place. As I set my shoulder to the wheel at the beginning of my parliamentary career I do so with a commitment that when that time comes I want to be able to look back and see New Zealand in an even better state than what it was when I entered. I want to be able to truthfully say that I made a difference that I took action even when perhaps I alone could do only little that I heeded the warning of Edmund Burke and in doing so gave some honour to his memory—honour to his memory and to that of a certain former ministerial chauffeur. Thank you.