Donald Rod: Address to Her Excellency the Governor-General 
Donald Rod: Address to Her Excellency the Governor-General 
[Volume:617;Page:13184] 
ROD DONALD (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 He mihi aroha ki a koutou katoa. Loving greetings to all. Today is a time for celebration. It is also a time to reflect on how far we have come and how far we still have to go. Along with my fellow Green MPs I am honoured to be a member of this House. We are here only because members of the public voted for us and our parties; that is the essence of representative democracy. New Zealand is fortunate to have an electoral system that so fairly and accurately reflects the wishes of those voters. 
I would of course say that as one of the campaigners for MMP in the 1980s and 1990s but we were not the first advocates of electoral reform. That honour goes to Sir John Hall also an advocate of women’s suffrage who attempted to introduce the single transferable vote system for parliamentary elections in 1887. But we succeeded and we have all the more reason to celebrate as a result. If one looks around this House we see that—thanks to MMP—the make-up of today’s Parliament more closely resembles the people we are here to represent than at any time in our history. We come from a wide range of backgrounds and occupations; women MPs make up almost 30 percent of the House; the proportion of Maori members closely reflects the proportion of Maori citizens; we have MPs of Pacific and Asian descent; and last but not least we cover the political spectrum from ACT to the Greens. 
That was not the case when the first 37 MPs took their seats 150 years ago—they were all men they were all Pakeha and they were mostly from the wealthy educated elite. This House was deliberately set up as a settler Parliament. Not only were women excluded from standing and voting but virtually all Maori were too. Only males aged 21 or older who owned leased or rented a freehold estate or dwelling above a specified value were enfranchised under the New Zealand Constitution Act 1852. 
 This meant that Maori had little influence and no voice of their own in Parliament despite being clearly the majority of the population and owning communally over three-quarters of the country. In the last decade the number of Maori MPs has more than doubled due both to party lists and to the fact that the number of Maori seats is now determined on the same basis as the general seats. Although women did not win the right to vote until 1893 apparently a number of wives dressed in their drunk husbands’ clothes and voted in 1855—an excellent example of non-violent direct action. 
Voting is one thing—standing is another. As we know it took until 1919 for women to win the right to stand and until 1933 for Elizabeth McCombs to become the first woman MP. Altogether 44 women and 1171 men were elected during the first-past-the-post era. In particular MMP and party lists are helping to redress that imbalance. Today New Zealand is ranked 16th in the world up from 30th under first past the post. We can and did do better—our 1999 Parliament was ranked 8th. We can and must do better in many other respects if this institution is to be relevant in the 21st century. 
A real concern is the declining turnout at elections. Although MMP temporarily reversed this turnout is now down to 77 percent of enrolled voters. It could be worse yet with one poll revealing that 37 percent of 18 to 29-year-olds did not vote at all in 2002. Is that because there are too few young candidates standing and therefore to vote for? Are both those situations because there is virtually no civics education in our schools? Is it because young people do not see us tackling the big issues that concern them such as corporate globalisation environmental destruction wars and poverty? Or is it because the behaviour in this place is so appalling at times that we have turned them off politics completely? 
Two years ago Wellington High School students said in a report on Parliament that MPs legislate against violence in the community yet accept as normal a level of unpleasantness aggression and verbal abuse in Parliament that would not be tolerated in a classroom a playground a workplace or at home. Have we improved our behaviour? No. Should we? Yes. I believe that Parliament should also claim the right to decide which international treaties New Zealand signs by abolishing the Crown prerogative. We need to properly recognise the constitutional position of Maori under Te Tiriti o Waitangi and we need to debate the relevance of our remaining constitutional ties with mother England. Our democracy has evolved considerably over the last 150 years. We must continue that process for this House to serve the needs of present and future generations.