Gilmore Aaron: Maiden Statements 
Gilmore Aaron: Maiden Statements 
[Volume:651;Page:876] 
AARON GILMORE (National) 
: 
 About 25 years ago I sat in the living room of our family State house in Corhampton Street in Aranui. It was early August and freezing cold. It was night and we did not have enough money to put in the electricity meter to give us power. We had some light from some large candles that sat on the table and my grandmother and I were having Weet-Bix for dinner. The next morning we could not afford breakfast and I went hungry until a kind teacher of mine bought me lunch. That day and many others like it while growing up in the eastern suburbs of Christchurch taught me valuable lessons: the merits of hard work of a good education and of the freedom of choice over compulsion; and the importance of family. 
Today I stand before members in this wonderful House before many other talented New Zealanders. Some members are old enough to be my parents. Some are like me new young faces in this Parliament. I look forward to working with all members. In my career to date I have found that a good team will beat a great individual any time—and our Government is a great team. 
I represent the so-called Generation X. It is my generation who will soon take the torch and have the responsibility to lead New Zealand and look after those who raised us in better economic times. Too many of my generation have decided to make their lives in other countries. I took a stand to create a global business career here in New Zealand most recently working in the export manufacturing sector running new technology ventures for a major multinational. As a trained economist with a lot of time in the corporate sector I believe I have the necessary skills and experiences that this Parliament may require in these tough economic times—though someone said to me the other day that the purpose of astrologers is to make economists look good. 
I come to this House as its luckiest member this term—elected on our party list by fewer than 40 votes across the entire country. Sir Edmund Hillary once said to me in 1990 when I was a member of New Zealand Youth to Everest that it is funny how good luck follows those who are determined and work hard. I would like to thank 40 of my 56 cousins for voting for our party for the first time in 2008. A member needs only enough votes to get him or her here but I have no plans to remain the most marginal member of this House. 
Today is a good day to be a New Zealander with our National Government led by our wonderful Prime Minister the Hon John Key. I am honoured to be a junior member of this Government and under his leadership and I look forward to spending many years working with him. Of course I would also like to pay thanks to the Speaker for all the good work and sound guidance he has provided. There are a few other people I would like to thank: my campaign team the wisdom and wit of my regional chair Roger Bridge and the formidable determination and grace of our party president Judy Kirk. 
But today is also a great day to be from my home. Today for the first time in 154 years my community has a new voice in Parliament to represent it in our nation’s capital. I am humbled to be that voice. You see National has never until now in its proud parliamentary history had an MP from my community. Over that time my mother’s family who are from Tuahiwi have lived in eastern Christchurch while my father’s family comes from Taumutu. My mother Kay was expelled from two schools due to abuse experienced at home and was placed in foster care when young. She went on to a career as a seamstress and is well known through Parklands after 20-odd years on the school parent teacher association making uniforms for sports teams and being mum to three stroppy boys. My dad Garry suffered constant taunts from an abusive stepfather as the sole fair-skinned red-headed boy growing up in a Maori village so much so that he changed his name at 18 to Gilmore which is our family name today. He has spent most of his life working as a cobbler. 
Money—or rather the lack of it—has always been a hot topic in our house and in our wider family and that has driven me to be careful with it. We have always as a wider family worked together to share our meagre resources to make sure no one goes without for too long. I will bring the same focus to Parliament. 
Named after the great Elvis Aaron Presley I am the son of Kiwi battlers. My parents worked 18-hour days for years to save enough money to buy our small family house where we and my two brothers Craig and Nigel lived. 
The two communities my parents were from were founded by the survivors from the greatest military loss in our history. This was not from the killing fields of Europe but from the greatest loss of life in one day for the people of Aotearoa which occurred in 1832 at Kaiapoi Pa north of Christchurch. In one day the largest single population of Maori in New Zealand at that time was massacred. Over 3000 people were lost and only a handful of survivors remained to tell the story. This tragedy is one that needs to be taught about in schools and to be rated alongside that of Passchendaele Gallipoli and the Somme which are honoured in this House. 
The electorate I come from is my home. It is where I was born and raised attending my then local primary school decile 2 Parkview School and becoming its first-ever MP. I recently spoke to some 5-year-olds from my old school. I hoped I would offer them the inspiration and the ambition to break through the glass ceiling put before them that I experienced. I also attended Shirley Boys High School in Christchurch and in its 51-year history I am its first MP as well. I will not be the last MP from my old schools. 
 Christchurch East was historically one of the poorest electorates in New Zealand but no longer is that the case. It is one of large contrasts. Some of the poorest people in New Zealand are still there and have progressed little under previous Governments. As well as having many new suburbs with many affluent people it is rural in the north and urban in the south with the heavily polluted Avon River running near its bottom. The eastern suburbs like many growing areas need more schools roads and jobs and lower pollution and crime. The lack of broadband is a laughing joke in the area. National will actively work to fix many of these things while it is in Government. 
I returned home 4 years ago. I am a loyal Cantabrian. Our beaches our forests our rivers and above all Canterbury’s people are what I love. The fact that I can now help people in my community makes me happy. To get this far has been an effort combining family members friends and teamwork and it has been a triumph over obstacles. All my life people have said I will not make it. As a kid I experienced poverty; I did not like it. In recent years with hard work and wise investments I have experienced relative wealth; I liked that better. I have stayed in $2000-a-night hotels in India. They were quite nice but not as nice as sleeping under the stars on a warm summer’s evening beside Lake Sumner in the Southern Alps with some friends—that was free. I have lunched with billionaires and beggars and learnt something from both. 
More people can achieve the same wonderful contrasting experiences if they too get a good education and work hard. I was lucky to have the love and guidance of my late grandmother Doreen Kennedy-Spiers-Humm who pushed me to read widely to go to school and to go to university. By going to university I achieved something no one in my family had ever achieved before. My parents Garry and Kay instilled in me some great values which I hold true today: integrity honesty openness respect for others hard work a love of the outdoors determination and a good sense of humour. Representing young families I also hope to be an example like many others in my caucus that people from disadvantaged backgrounds can with hard work and determination succeed against significant odds. 
I acknowledge my biggest supporters today. Jenny the love of my life and the best woman a man could have is my rock in the often turbulent waters of our hectic lives. And of course to my beautiful children Blake and Evelyn I say Dad loves them more than they can imagine. 
I want to be an example of what other kids out there can achieve. Ours is a Government of ambition and aspiration for all. Together we need to ascend to the heights of our aspiration. When I was 10 I was told I would never finish school and would only be trouble. I proved those who said that wrong and went on to complete two university degrees. The street I grew up on was deemed by the police to be one of the worst in New Zealand 2 years running due to insidious gang violence. That is not an excuse to fail; it is an opportunity to succeed. When I was 19 I was told I would never make a living doing what I wanted to do in New Zealand yet I have done well enough in New Zealand to be resented by some and labelled a rich prick. When I was 25 I was told after contracting a rare eye condition called keratoconus that I would never see again but today with the miracle of modern New Zealand - developed technology I can. 
Those who know me well know I am also passionate and loyal. I like to live my life by a saying that I understand comes from Mario Andretti: “If everything seems under control then you just aren’t going fast enough.” 
Sir Jack Marshall in his maiden speech many years ago spoke of four parts of liberalism. I identify with much of what he said. The one pillar that we are still a long way from achieving in New Zealand is the one that we should be most concerned about: the pursuit of economic liberty. New Zealand in my lifetime has gone only backwards on the goal of achieving economic liberty. We need to fix that by giving people greater freedom to grow the economy with less intervention by improving productivity and by having a smaller Government and a smarter investment in people and technology. 
New Zealand can be the most prosperous country in the OECD—at the top not in the top half. We need to be a nation that is more than the world’s farmer; we need to create wealth from our minds. We must work smarter to compete on the world stage. We must be prepared to take new risks on young people and on technology. We are blessed with natural resources and smart people. Let us use them to our advantage and not lock them away or encourage people to go to other places. Let us embrace technology for the good it can do and not shun it in fear. Let us dream a little of a New Zealand that I think we all want: a New Zealand that is safe clean prosperous and of course fun; one where people from all walks of life have a quality of life second to none; and one that is a melting pot of the world’s cultures. 
I have worked in 11 nations and I have seen good and bad in all of them. We should model ourselves on the best bits of them but retain our unique Kiwi identity. We are ourselves a nation of immigrants from many of those places. I myself am an amalgam of many races—Irish Scottish Danish and a little bit Maori—but I am 100 percent Kiwi. New Zealand should be the same—the best combination of the world today. But today that is only a dream. Too many people define themselves by their race and not by our nationality. We need our kids to aspire to greatness whoever they are and wherever they come from. For too long we have said that people cannot succeed due to poverty the colour of their skin or where they live. We are one small nation; we just need to work together. The comedian Billy Connolly had it right when he said: “New Zealand wasn’t the end of the world but you could see it from there.” So more than any other nation we all need to paddle in the same direction or we will sink. 
Our nation is great at sport. Eastern Christchurch today may be middle New Zealand but it is home to many of New Zealand’s greatest sportspeople. But I want our kids to aspire to more than just sporting greatness. We need our kids to aspire to be a Richard Branson as well as a Richie McCaw. We need our schools to be the best in the world so that more poor kids can improve their lot. Low-decile schools like those that I attended are not what they used to be. Kids in these schools do not achieve. Education as we have heard many times in the last few weeks is the pathway out of poverty to prosperity. Large numbers of young people are still leaving school with insufficient skills for the global economy while too many of our most talented choose to leave New Zealand and never return. We need more people to have high-income jobs in New Zealand driven by high technology and good old-fashioned hard work. We need our country to be safe so that only the criminals feel unsafe. We need a country where we are compassionate and care for the old the poor the sick and the infirm; and where our natural areas remain international examples of splendour that we cherish and do not pollute. 
Today that is all a faraway dream. Well when I was a child eating Weet-Bix by candlelight in my grandmother’s State house I realised that dreams come only to those who work to make them happen. Now the challenge we have together becomes to deliver on my dreams. My only fear is that there is not enough willingness across this House to deliver a New Zealand that we all want. So I say to members the words of George Patton: “Lead follow or get out of the way.”