Boyack Rachel; Brownlee GerryRACHEL BOYACK (Labour—Nelson): Thank you Mr Speaker. It is not a pleasure to take a call on this matter but as my colleague the Hon Damien O'Connor has put so succinctly today it is our duty—it is our duty as parliamentarians—to speak out on this important matter of the continued killing and slaughter that we are seeing in Gaza.The UN Security Council has finally—finally—called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza because finally the United States has stopped using the veto power that it has used before to stop that from happening. That is a good thing but we need to go further and the point I wish to make is that language matters. When language matters—I actually want to talk first and foremost about the language of the Government at the moment because the Government has been calling for steps towards a ceasefire" and "for the conditions to be met for a ceasefire."Now in what part of thousands of children killed in Gaza are not the conditions met for a ceasefire? This is an extremely serious matter for the world and for so many reasons and I want to speak firstly to the conditions that have led to the UN Security Council finally calling for the ceasefire—because it is the month of Ramadan. So I acknowledge for our Muslim community it is the month of Ramadan. For our Christian community of which I am a member it is Holy Week; it is the end of Lent as we approach Good Friday and Easter Sunday this weekend. For our Jewish communities we are approaching Passover at the end of April.But this is not a religious war. Too often we call this a "religious war" and we allow people to hide behind religion to kill other people. This is a war about land it is a war about power and ultimately it's about people and the death of thousands and thousands of innocent people being used behind religion as an excuse to kill other people. As a Christian as a member of one of the three great Abrahamic faiths I say no to that.One of the things that has really bothered me in the last few weeks is around the need for us to have a humanitarian visa coming into New Zealand. I've heard last week in the House the Minister of Immigration talk about why we cannot have that visa and that is because it is so difficult to get people out of Rafah. The Labour Government put in place visas for Ukraine and Afghanistan and members of my community—people who I helped on Zoom calls in the middle of night get out of Afghanistan and families I supported to get their family members out of Ukraine—had visas and it took months to get out. We did not use the excuse—that it would take months to get people out—for not issuing the visa in the first place.It was that Minister of Immigration who called on us for the Ukrainian visa even though we knew it would take a very long time. So I call on this Government to do the right thing and to give the people of Gaza and the people in the region the hope—and their families in New Zealand whose families are struggling—that they could get to New Zealand. It is not a matter for Immigration to get people out; that's actually for other agencies like Defence. So I call again on this Government to actually do the right thing as we did.The other thing I'm calling on this Government to do is to join the International Court of Justice case that South Africa are taking against Israel in the court. They have issued an interim measure and one of the things they have stated is that Israel must take all steps in its power to prevent the commission of all acts under article 2 of the UN's 1948 genocide convention. Actually it's also for member States to follow that ruling too. We as New Zealand are required to uphold that ruling; we must take all steps. We must use the proud strong independent small but mighty international voice that we have to put the pressure needed on Israel to end this war once and for all. Of course we call for Hamas to release the hostages—of course we do. No matter where you were born no matter your religion no matter the colour of your skin no matter your ethnicity or who your parents are every person in this world has the right to live in freedom and safety and we need an urgent lasting permanent ceasefire now. SPEAKER: This debate is concluded.The debate having concluded the motion lapsed."