Davidson MaramaMARAMA DAVIDSON (Green): E Te Māngai o Te Whare tēnā koe. Huri noa ki ōku mema hoa mahi o Te Whare Pāremata tēnā tātou katoa. [To you Mr Assistant Speaker thank you. My appreciation throughout to all of us my fellow working member colleagues of Parliament House. Well done.]Aotearoa New Zealand must support the Standing Rock opposition to the construction of the Dakota oil pipeline. I stand as the Green Party spokesperson on indigenous rights and human rights because the opposition to the pipeline in North Dakota is directly linked to the political campaigns here in Aotearoa New Zealand to care for our waters for our land and for the sovereignty of our very own first peoples. The pipeline in North Dakota will cross the Cannonball River and the Missouri River threatening indigenous waterways and primary drinking sources. This pipeline will carry around 470000 barrels of fracked oil per day over about 1200 miles from North Dakota to Illinois. I have written an open letter to the United States Ambassador to New Zealand Mr Mark Gilbert to ask the US Government to listen to the call of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and the millions of people around the world who have joined the campaign to stop this construction altogether. Since April over 90 First Nations groups have gathered at Standing Rock to peacefully and non-violently resist the construction of this pipeline over their lands and sacred places. In doing so they are exercising their sovereignty as First Nation peoples. They are also doing so in a long line of oppression that the United States has had over its First Nation peoples. I have written to the ambassador Mr Mark Gilbert not just to call for the halt of the construction of that pipeline but also to protect those protesters at Standing Rock against the intimidatory police violence. Under US international law police arrests cannot be used to intimidate people who are holding peaceful assembly but that is absolutely what has been happening. The police have been shooting protesters with rubber bullets pepper-spraying people—old women old people—in the face and dragging people out of sweat lodges. They have set dogs on to peaceful non-violent direct resistance. Here in Aotearoa from our own campaigns such as Te Whānau-a-Apanui resistance to Petrogras and Te Hiku and northern iwi resistance to Statoil we understand the global fight to uphold indigenous sovereignty and to have a clean-energy future that protects our environment and our waters and earth for everybody. We understand that these fights are connected and we ask the New Zealand Government to show some leadership in upholding the very issues that are being fought here in our own waters. As an indigenous woman and as an MP I understand that when I am standing on the banks of the Ōmaru Creek in Glen Innes to call for that river to be cleaned it is directly linked to the resistance of indigenous peoples around the world who are speaking out against and showing up violent campaigns of dirty fossil fuel extraction. They are doing the work for all of us for cleaner energy and for a climate that we can actually all survive in. So it is my job and my privilege as an MP as an indigenous woman and as a mother to ask for all of us to support the Standing Rock opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline. Kia ora.