Yang Jian: Address in ReplyText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeYang Jian: Address in Reply[Sitting date: 29 October 2014. Volume:701;Page:382. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr JIAN YANG (National):I really enjoy the maiden speeches and sometimes I wish I could have another opportunity to make my own maiden speech. I could do it even better.Congratulations to you Mr Assistant Speaker Tisch on your re-election as Assistant Speaker. I would like to take this opportunity to thank my team for the campaign. Particularly I would like to thank my friends Carissa Meng and Frank Zhang and I also thank the National team for their help.In this election there were about five Chinese candidates. Of course in the end only I came back to Parliament. In a sense it is a pity that we do not have more Chinese MPs here. On the other hand it does reflect Chinese support for National and I often say “support National with or without me”. It is more important to have a ruling party a very good ruling party than just a few Chinese MPs. So I feel very privileged to be able to represent National in the Chinese community.It is no wonder basically that the Chinese voters supported National so strongly—I would say overwhelmingly supported National. We did some polls and also the media did some polls that demonstrated that Chinese voters supported National really overwhelmingly. There are reasons of course.First of all I would say the Chinese community really shares the values of the National Party. We believe that we should pay attention to education we believe that we should reward those who work very hard and we believe that we should have equal opportunity but respect different outcomes. So we share the values of the National Party. For that reason I feel very fortunate to be able to represent the National Party in the Chinese community.Also if you look at National achievements in the past 6 years we experienced the global financial crisis we experienced the Christchurch earthquakes but we overcame all these difficulties and we came out very strongly. Now our economy has been growing very strongly our unemployment rate has been dropping and our crime rate has also been dropping and is now the lowest in over 30 years. And look at our surplus. We have been able to return to surplus this financial year despite all the difficulties we have experienced in the past 6 years. And there are public services.We often say that we value education. We have invested continuously in education and of course our health sector has been doing extremely well. As deputy chair of the Health Committee in the last term I understand well that we have done a lot and invested a lot. We have kept investing and increasing our investment in the health sector in the past 6 years.But at the same time the Chinese also value our National Party’s support for immigrants. We have a consistent policy on immigration unlike Labour Party members who did not really know what they were doing in terms of immigration. They sometimes said we should cut immigration numbers but then in the end could not explain why. We were consistent and also we support new immigrants. We started Language Line and in the past financial year there were about 55000 requests for interpretation. It is very important for us to welcome new immigrants because a quarter of New Zealanders were born overseas and immigrants are particularly important to our economy. I am going to chair the Education and Science Committee. I will be very pleased to work with other members and do well. Thank you.