Delahunty Catherine: Address in Reply 
Delahunty Catherine: Address in Reply 
[Volume:652;Page:1170] 
CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green) 
:  
Me mihi ki a Papatuanuku ki te whenua hoki o Te Whanga-nui-a-Tara. Me mihi hoki ki nga mana whenua katoa. E mihi kau ana ki nga tangata whenua o te motu huri noa huri noa. Me mihi ki a tatou me nga tangata Tiriti o te Whare Paremata nei. Me mihi hoki ki taku whanau me o ratau iwi i hara mai ki te tautoko i ahau. E kore hoki e wareware nga kaiwhakakorekore me nga tikanga o te Ao; me ratou kua ngaro i te kitenga kanohi engari mahuemai nga taonga. 
[ 
My acknowledgments to Mother Earth the land of Wellington all land authorities indigenous people throughout the land us and Treaty people of this House of Parliament and also my family and their folk who have come to support me. I will never forget those in movements of resistance to protect people of the planet and the ones who have passed on and are no longer before us but left prized possessions behind. I acknowledge you all 
.] 
Acknowledgments to all my amazing friends and whanau who have travelled to share this day. Mr Deputy Speaker Te Tiriti o Waitangi is like a rope between us between the indigenous mana whenua and the tangata Tiriti. We tangata Tiriti hold on to the rope because we need it most. At our end the rope is made of the bones and tears of migrants many of whom left cold islands on the other side of the world hoping desperately for a better life. That better life came to pass through systemic violence theft and denial. Te Tiriti a frayed and stretched arrangement is the tie that binds us to this place and to the hope that violence theft and denial need not be the basis for our bonds in the future. 
An openness to the story of Te Tiriti was a precious gift from my family. We are no longer from Somerset Tipperary and Ballymacelliott in County Kerry. We are citizens of the nation Aotearoa New Zealand and we are Pakeha. I have been told that one meaning of “Pakeha” is “of a different breath”. We enjoy ongoing colonial privilege but we have an opportunity to take responsibility for this and to work for a justice-based peace. This justice is desperately needed from Ruatoki to Gaza. Our Government’s recognising of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples would be a good start. But first I thank my mother for her vital lesson that a background of privilege and racism need not distort the human heart and that an unexamined life is not worth living. I thank my father for the feisty rebellious energy and critical analysis that gave me the starting point for a life of political engagement and a healthy suspicion of powerful institutions. Thanks also to my siblings and my beloved daughter for putting up with my unnecessarily robust speeches and my acting like a megaphone next to their heads. 
Despite my healthy suspicion towards institutions I embrace this new chapter with all the illusions of a maiden. The last time I was a maiden was 40 years ago. It is refreshing to revisit that time of passionate conviction when it was our unique duty to resist the system while wearing a lot of black clothing. I am not just here to be part of that enduring resistance; I come to work with a group of people. The Green Party is not a church or a movement; it is a maturing political party with all the contradictions that implies. I joined because of the kaupapa but also because of the people in the leadership and the way they do politics. Special thanks must go to the East Coast Greens for all their work to help me here. I give thanks to the entire party but particular thanks to the late Rod Donald: you encouraged me as you encouraged many others and you represented a wholeness in your political work that drew people towards us and gave us deep roots in both social and environmental justice. Russel has a big challenge walking in your shoes but luckily he has pretty big feet. I say thank you to Jeannette: your depth and serenity has achieved more in politics than can ever be undone by the short-sighted hatchets of the ignorant. To the Green caucus I say thank you for the kindness to me now and for how kind you will have to be in future and thanks especially to the indomitable Sue Bradford for years of support and inspiration. 
But the person who pushed me into this was my partner Gordon Jackman who lives issues of justice every day. They say that behind every great man is an exhausted woman and that behind every great woman is a man trying to slow her down but I say that beside this ordinary woman there is an extraordinary and totally supportive man. Thank you to all the Jackmans for being so generous to me in all ways. 
Today I am speaking to the public gallery and to the people who lead our country from the ground up. When I first marched on Parliament it was in a pushchair protesting against nuclear weapons. At age 10 I stood with my sisters on these steps of Moehau granite as we protested against troops being sent to Viet Nam and at age 16 I led the first union of high school students to those same steps. Then there was the time we from Coromandel Watchdog dumped the Waihi mining tailings into the miners’ cocktail party at the Beehive. But the last time Gordon and I marched here it was all the way from Turanga with Te Tai Rawhiti iwi to protest against the Foreshore and Seabed Bill. We were fortunate to be Pakeha walking amongst a multitude of hapu not a hater or wrecker to be found amongst them. If this legislation can be repealed under the leadership of the Maori Party I will be proud to vote with them. 
When I left this cold city at 17 I went to live with a mountain and I learnt what love of country really means. The mountain Te Moe nga hau o Tamatekapua is the great blue rock that rises out of Tikapa Moana the Hauraki Gulf. Moehau is the mountain of the Hauraki and Te Arawa peoples. It is the image of endurance beauty and life-force which I hold in my heart. When a multinational goldmining company kindly offered to reduce Moehau to a lake the hapu and the local hippies united to resist. We were successful because of some wonderful people some living and some passed away. Never imagine that a small coalition of determined people cannot prevent corporate greed from digging up our mountains. We could we did and if need be we will again. 
Today I want to honour women you have never heard of especially Veronica Black and Betty Williams Ngati Whanaunga and Ngati Pukenga. Thank you both of you. Not only did you open my eyes to Te Tiriti issues but you also helped me to see the life essence in all living things. Betty taught us the name for the awe and joy that Papatuanuku gives us. Kaitiakitanga is not a word to be appropriated by Pakeha. It belongs to you and all the other kaitiaki. But work together we must. These women inspired my feminism. Gender equity is real when the refuges are empty and the mothers and babies are at the centre of the economy not when post-feminist women claw their way into high-status jobs. 
In the 1990s thanks to Gordon and Greenpeace I met a river. This river begins in the translucent waters of Lake Tarawera. It travels underground for a while and leaps sparkling out of the rocks at Kawerau a waterfall of light and foam. The Tarawera River then rolls green and alive through the forest and the town only to disappear again in a terrible darkness below the pulp and paper mills. What was once Tarawera is now the “black drain” a sluggish dark brown body of water whose life is polluted whose people are alienated and whose history is our shame. In 1954 this House passed a piece of law to turn the Tarawera into a drain. That enabling Act ranks alongside a number of other shameful pieces of legislation. My favourite remains the Validation of Invalid Land Sales Act 1894 whose purpose surely needs no further explanation. Yes the Tarawera is a bit cleaner now but still for Tuwharetoa Ngati Rangitihi the Black Drain is a gross attack on their identity and food sources. I can still see Jack Fox the rangatira standing at the gate of his tiny house surrounded by the vast pollution of his wahi tapu—Te Wai u o Tuwharetoa the sacred spring surrounded by mill waste—and his wife Isabel Fox lifting her angry face to the toxic chemical air and challenging us to fix this mess. 
The Black Drain represents the damage done by a timber processing industry that has failed to address pollution. This pollution goes beyond our rivers we have dioxin contamination throughout our country and throughout the bodies of timber workers and their families. Joe Harawira Kereana Akuhata and the Sawmill Workers Against Poisons I salute your leadership and courage as family after family buries poisoned loved ones and you work constructively to heal land and people. I will never forget the time when a busload of your members sat on these Moehau granite steps outside this building and displayed their ulcerated and destroyed limbs so that no one else will have to live with this misery deformity and early death. Joe the whakatauaki on your letterhead says not that honesty is the best policy but that honesty is the only policy. May this House one day embrace that truth. 
So my friends from Whaingaroa Whangamata Moerewa Tamaki and Mahia—the sewage warriors of Aotearoa—thanks for doing the dirty work that local councils cannot seem to handle. Humans might have landed on the moon but we are still dumping our bodily waste into our water. And to my friends of the last decade—the educators for social change and social justice—I say that these years have been ones of learning so much richer than any unit standard or university essay. We have travelled a road that is made by walking and we have met with inspiring community activists and workers all along the way. Thanks to the Treaty educators the disability activists the women’s liberation and gay rights workers the environmental campaigners the unemployed rights activists the community development leaders the young unions the collective gardeners and all the other targets of SIS and threat assessment unit time-wasting. 
In Te Tai Rawhiti the great ocean Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa beats ceaselessly against another maunga Te Kuri a Paoa those wild white cliffs crumbling into the bluest water. It was there that Paoa of the Horouta waka lost his dog and the mana whenua first saw the sails of Captain Cook inch into the great bay. Within days Cook’s men had shot the first of the tangata whenua and Cook had attempted the first great renaming of Aotearoa. “Poverty Bay” speaks of the poverty of his leadership and the killings of the Ngati Oneone men. It does not speak of the richness or culture and whenua of Te Tai Rawhiti. When I first moved to Turanga I was overwhelmed by the crystal dry scent of the air and the shimmering eastern sky. The blatant Pakeha racism and the obvious gap between the wealthy drinking delightful wines and the poor tangata whenua living in shacks and crowded flats also overwhelmed me. I did not mean to get embroiled in the most basic of struggles—those of beneficiaries to get the most basic entitlements. But we did because we had to. I can never represent the pain and anger in the faces of the young and disenfranchised. No matter how many prisons you build they will keep coming demanding their share in a wealth that was their birthright until one day when the white sails came around the corner and created Poverty Bay. 
To my whanau the Tairawhiti Beneficiary Advocacy Trust and all the beneficiary advocates kia kaha and to the wahine toa from Ngai Tamanuhiri and Rongowhakaata and Ngati Porou especially Kay Robin ano Jody Toroa we are in this for keeps. The hardest issue I have ever learnt about remains riddled with denial and taboo. As a “TAB” a temporarily able-bodied person I grew up with all the prejudices our society has developed to justify our discrimination against people living with impairments. We are primitive cruel and wasteful in our recognition of the full humanity of people who are in our own families and may suddenly be ourselves. I am here to listen to the people who say: “Nothing about us without us.” It is high time. 
What about this Parliament? The Government has had its 90-day trial and some of us say it has failed to perform and we are going to have to let it go. But in lieu of the power to actually fire the Government I would like to make some suggestions. Can we at least reduce the waste in the Chamber perhaps to a daily time-limited ritual chanting session by the two major parties? They could take turns chanting: “You’re stupid and wrong because you’re the wrong party and we’re clever and right because we’re the good party.” And once that was over we could all get on with the urgent work the citizens might have hoped we came here to do. 
Last of all to my daughter Esther and her partner Nick thank you for my grandson who was born on the day this new Parliament was sworn in. For Leo and every tiny person starting out in life you deserve something so much more precious than individualism. In a healthy group the individual can thrive. It is not a war between nanny State and the free market. The real struggle is between earth-based collective well-being and a polluted globalised greed. Unless we wake up fast it will not be a case of “We won you lost eat that!”. It will be a case of nobody won we all lost especially our descendants from whom we have stolen the basics of life. I quote Auntie Betty: “The international financial crisis is inextricably linked to climate change and if we can’t work out the linkage then Papatuanuku will spell it out for us.” It does not have to end like this. There were always alternatives to Rogernomics and we need them now. Parliament needs to listen to the people who have given their lives to the nourishment of the whenua and the collective well-being. My time and loyalty here are given to them. 
I have dreamed on this mountain 
Since I first was my mother’s daughter 
And you ain’t gonna take my dreams away. 
You may drive a big machine 
But I’m a big strong woman 
And you ain’t gonna take our dreams away. 
This old mountain’s many daughters 
Some died young and some still living 
But you ain’t gonna take our dreams away. 
Not with me watching. 
No you ain’t gonna take our dreams away. 
Not with me fighting. 
I have dreamed on this mountain 
Since I first was my mother’s daughter 
And you ain’t gonna take our dreams away 
No reira tena koutou tena koutou tena koutou katoa.