Borrows Chester: Address in Reply 
Borrows Chester: Address in Reply 
[Volume:628;Page:323] 
CHESTER BORROWS (National—Whanganui) 
: 
 My congratulations to the Hon Margaret Wilson on becoming the Speaker for a second term to my colleague Clem Simich on his appointment as Deputy Speaker and to you Madam Assistant Speaker and the honourable member Ross Robertson on your appointments as Assistant Speakers. 
I acknowledge the previous member for Whanganui Jill Pettis. Jill is a tough campaigner. She and I never see eye to eye but the conflict is always engaging and every milestone is hard fought and hard won. 
Tena koe te Rangatira Tariana. Ka pirangi ahau. Ki te mahi ki to taha mo nga tangata o te rohe o Whanganui. Greetings Tariana. We can work together for the benefit of the people of Whanganui. 
The Whanganui electorate stretches from the Whangaehu River to the Kaupokonui Stream and lies between the territorial borders of the South Taranaki District Council the Wanganui District Council and the coast. So the seat encompasses not only Wanganui City but also Kaponga Manaia Eltham Hawera Patea Waverley Fordell and the Whanganui River settlements of Koriniti Ranana Atene Jerusalem and Pipiriki. 
Within its borders are many people with boundless energy and various businesses and communities of interest. Bits of Wanganui design and manufacturing circle the globe as components on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s space shuttle. Valueless animal gut is made into musical instrument and racquet strings which sell for between $1.5 million and $6 million per tonne and are judged the best in the world. The biggest single-site dairy manufacturer in the world which produces 2.5 percent of New Zealand’s export earnings is in Hawera. The Universal College of Learning’s fashion design school in Wanganui runs a degree course for which the fashion houses of Milan pay a premium. Fox and Disney recommend that their staff obtain qualifications from its graphic design school and its fine arts course is world renowned. These are no less remarkable than the many volunteer organisations Government service agencies and conventional businesses. It is my privilege to represent these people and these ambitions accomplishments and successes. 
 I need to thank those who have set me on the path leading to Parliament today. Firstly I thank my team my campaign chairs from three campaigns: David Bennett Viv Chapman and Gerard Langford. They have led volunteers who door-knocked pushed pamphlets attended meetings wrote letters sold raffle tickets and gave wise counsel. I thank our president Judy Kirk who rang in March last year to convince me to stand again after I had taken the decision to concentrate on the law and flag away politics; and of course I thank those who lobbied her to make that call. 
I want also to thank a very good friend and an understated bloke by the name of Neil Walker. Neil signed me up to the National Party. Neil is also the person I point to as the significant influence on my decision to stand for Parliament and he is the person who has driven me both across and up and down the country to meetings and conferences chewed the fat with me planted germs of ideas and challenged others and supported me in every way to put my head above the parapet. Neil knocked on my door canvassing on behalf of the National Party just after the election in 1987. I had been up all night chasing burglars—unsuccessfully—in a little town called Patea where I was the sole-charge cop. Normally I would have told him where to go and shut the door and gone back to bed but Neil knocked on my door about 2 weeks after I had made the decision to join the National Party. 
That decision had come after about 30 years of preparation. My mum and dad who are here today raised a couple of kids to have a very strong sense of social justice. Dad has voted National twice in his life—in 1975 and 2005. Mum will not let on but I think she saw the light a little earlier. They believed as I believed for 30 years that the social gospel of our Christian faith was best reflected politically in the policies of the Labour Party. I had always believed this without question. 
My father got me a job on the wharf and slipway in Nelson with hard-working and hard-living men some of them gang members—people vastly different from me. As a 16-year-old casual labourer I learnt how to weld and spray paint; I climbed through bilges and tanks because casual labourers were on the bottom rung. I am sure this was what my father was thinking: that there were lessons for me to learn there that I could not pick up anywhere else—and he was right. They were lessons about values and they were valuable lessons. Many similar experiences through the years in the police volunteer social work community work and youth work gave me plenty of opportunity for reflections on social justice. 
My decision to join the National Party though was in response to the then Labour Government removing the Project Employment Programme (PEP)—the work-for-the-dole scheme of the late 1980s. The Minister of Labour decided to stop trying to provide work for the unemployed because of the cost of administration. I saw this as an abdication of social responsibility. What happened was that on the first day after the withdrawal of PEP with no reason to go to work and with time on their hands the local Black Power in Patea got drunk and had a scrap. There was only me to deal with it. I walked up to that scrap thinking: “Where the hell are you now Prebble?”. I needed to do my bit to teach the Government a lesson. And then Neil knocked on my door. 
In listening to the speeches of other new MPs I find it interesting to see how similar starts in life have taken us to different places with divergent philosophies. I like others who have spoken have worked with people’s lives. The trouble with that is there is no visible tangible result of our labours. One cannot hang a life up on a wall and say: “When I started working with this person and that person their lives were a mess but look at them now—achieving to their full potential and fully participating.” Unlike my late father-in-law a carpenter who could point to buildings as testament to his craft or my farmer grandfather who starting in the Depression took waste gumland in Northland and made clean and productive pasture the results of my work seem to be intangible. But they are no less satisfying. 
In 1976 I frequently worked in the cells under the Auckland Magistrate’s Court with David Lange’s voice reverberating round the courtrooms while I was in the cells keeping an eye on his clients. Written on the walls of the cell block was a statement reading: “Twas an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth—and the world was blind and toothless.” The inscription was not scratched on the walls by a remorseful offender but by another policeman examining the futility of society’s response to crime and punishment as some would have us do it. 
Then later in 1989 I was working as a detective in South Taranaki. Family benefit was paid on Tuesdays and Thursdays and some parents celebrated it by getting pissed—and their children got hurt. I vividly recall a visit on an ordinary day to an ordinary State house and to the typical 6-feet-square fibrolite shed behind it which was filled with rubbish bags because nobody had the energy to take them a few metres to the gate to be collected. I had been talking to the father of the household that day in prison. The father had been charged with raping his sister-in-law. He had attempted sex she had resisted and he had broken her jaw then raped her. So dad was in jail and mum was a few metres away on the turps with her mates. Their 7-year-old son took himself off for a sneaky smoke in the shed. He tripped and fell and somehow a fire started in the rubbish. He was trapped and incinerated before any of the adults knew what had happened. He was exactly the same age as my son. I watched my son sleeping that night and blubbed and decided that it was time to get active. 
A few strongly held beliefs do not save one life. Although the vast majority of people in similar circumstances did benefit raised good kids and went on to become independent and self-respecting one size does not fit all. Everyone who ends up in custody will cost over $50000 a year. Why would we not spend a fraction of that to avoid those outcomes? With 500000 people between the ages of 5 and 20 and 5 percent of them being easily identifiable by early childhood or year-1 teachers as children at risk why would we not do something to walk alongside those children to help them avoid the risks dodge the bad influences and reverse the negative expectations? Even from a purely financial perspective it is worth it. But the social cost of human and spiritual capital is far far more expensive. In New Zealand our homicide rate approaches 100 a year. For our population this is about four times that of the United Kingdom with all its threats of terrorism and all its racial tensions and organised crime. Why do we have such a culture of violence? That is a question too big to debate today but it is a debate we must have. 
Communities love to claim the achievers in sports and academia the artists and the good kids. But all the kids are ours—those who make us proud and those we would prefer to ignore. Nothing is more inspiring than seeing a young life—or sometimes a life not so young—that in spite of all pedigree predictions trends and analyses beats the odds to achieve beyond his or her wildest dreams. They are people who refuse to be relegated to the third place as underachievers by those social labellers who neglect everyone’s right to achieve to his or her highest potential. They are the people who did not want an easy road but had their buttons pushed by their will to win in their own right who cut their own track and who were able to stand in front of those who would lock them into low wages and low prospects and say: “No damn it don’t patronise me and don’t pat me on the head and leave me in the corner. Let me have a crack at self-esteem. Give me a chance to break the mould.” 
I want to live in a country that claims all children as its own and accepts the glory and the responsibility of that—the responsibility to create opportunities for them to stand straight with chin up and chest out and not to slouch on extended welfare for their whole working lives never to stand proudly unaided. I want to live in a country where all talents and abilities are rewarded; not just the flavour-of-the-month occupations but the brain surgeon and the drain digger the social worker and the rocket scientist the chippy and the chairman of the board. That Madam Assistant Speaker is why I joined the National Party and why I stand here today. 
Many of us who come here have connections from outside politics. My wife’s former boss usually sits over there. My former lecturer hard little snot that he is sits down here—I got 51 percent—and he is also a newly found relative as is the Hon Annette King. We share great-great-grandfathers. She may be happy that the relationship is not any closer. 
In 1996 I attended a conference titled Beyond Dependency and heard Parekura Horomia then of Te Puni Kokiri speak and it was a fantastic and moving speech. On the way to the venue I passed Sue Bradford at the front of the demonstration. We had met before in similar circumstances though she may not remember. But a couple of weeks ago Sue Bradford and I were sworn in together—the protester and the policeman. Tena koe. 
The world is bigger than this House but acknowledgment of that does not mean we should not try to work together. I am not so naive as to think that situations do not demand a fight or that the scrap does not involve the loss of some skin or hair from time to time. Sometimes one just has to have the fight. All sides of the debate need airing; that is the nature of democracy. 
People have asked me why I want to be here—because some people think we are all nuts. My quick response is that I am egotistical enough to believe that I can make a difference and I am pleased to say that others do too. But my inspiration comes from a passage from Scripture outlining the requirements of my chosen faith: to do justice to love kindness and to walk humbly before my God. 
I have fought three successive campaigns to get here and in the intervening years I have given up a career of 24 years been to Victoria University and obtained a law degree—just eh Chris—worked for 2½ years as defence counsel and spent 15 months campaigning full-time without wages. In all that time I have enjoyed the full support of my wife Ella my son Zac and my daughters Abi and Katy. I doubt that any political aspirant has ever enjoyed the level of support they have shown me. It feels terrific to be in this House—in spite of the reputation of politicians—and credit for winning Whanganui and finally making it to this House belongs to that level of support. Thank you Ella. 
My final thanks go to the people of the Whanganui electorate many of whom voted against their tradition of voting for the left and voted for the right. I acknowledge that my job now is to show them that their decision was a good decision. I take nothing and nobody for granted. I will work even harder in the interests of the Whanganui electorate to stand up under the task asked of me and never to forget the special privilege of being an electorate member of Parliament.