Genter Julie Anne: Address in Reply 
Genter Julie Anne: Address in Reply 
[Volume:677;Page:432] 
JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Deputy Speaker. Tena koutou tena koutou tena tatou katoa. Te mea tuatahi me mihi ki a Ranginui raua ko Papatuanuku tena korua. Te Whare e tu nei tena koe. Ko rererangi te waka. Ko Sierra Nevada nga maunga. Ko Yuba te awa. Ko Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa te moana. Ko Ngati Merikana ko Ngati Pakeha nga iwi. No Kareponia ahau. Ko Tamaki-makau-rau taku kainga i naianei. Ko Julie Anne Genter ahau. 
[ 
Thank you Mr Deputy Speaker. Greetings to you greetings to you and greetings to us all. The first thing is to acknowledge Sky Father and Earth Mother—greetings to you two. Greetings also to the House standing before us. Aeroplane is the mode of transport Sierra Nevada are the mountains Yuba is the river and the Great Ocean of Kiwa is the sea. Ngati American and Ngati Pakeha are the tribes and I am from California. Currently Auckland is my home and I am Julie Anne Genter 
.]  
 It is with the greatest respect that I address this House for the second time. It is with gratitude and humility that I stand here—gratitude to those who have gone before; gratitude to all those who have taught me on my journey so far. Special thanks to my father John and my brothers Sean and Liam who are here today to my mother Pauline and to my grandparents who are watching from afar. I owe my presence here today to a great many people: family members friends housemates and colleagues who are far too many to name. I especially want to acknowledge the fantastic and tireless efforts of Green Party staff volunteers members and supporters who achieved an unprecedented result this past November. We hope to do you proud and to help turn your efforts into a greener and fairer New Zealand. I stand here with utmost humility. It is an incredible honour and privilege to serve the people of Aotearoa New Zealand. I would like to take this opportunity to affirm my allegiance to Te Tiriti o Waitangi as the reason I and all Pakeha are able to be here with legitimacy and call this place home.  
Like many of my neighbours in Auckland I was not born in Aotearoa. I chose this land to be my home because I love it. I love the forests I love the lakes and rivers I love the mountains and the beaches I love the people. Like many New Zealanders I grew up swimming in the Pacific Ocean though it was on the far side. The Sierra Nevada mountains the redwood forests and the crystal-clear Yuba River are among the precious places that taught me a deep love and respect of the natural world that sustains us.  
However the wild beauty in the remote corners of California does contrast starkly with the place where I actually grew up. Anyone who has ever attempted to walk along in the undifferentiated suburban sprawl of Los Angeles County along a loud and polluted eight-lane arterial flanked by asphalt deserts of mostly empty car-parks and ugly strip development will understand what I mean. As a young person I often wondered why it was so difficult and unpleasant to walk anywhere why in a large metropolis with a nearly perfect climate the only place I saw other people was at the mall and how it could be less costly for each and every person to have to make even very short trips in their own expensive 2-tonne box of glass and steel rather than by walking or cycling or taking a bus or train. In fact I have learnt it is not.  
The wealth of my homeland and the material comfort that I was raised with also contrast starkly with the endemic poverty that lies beneath the shiny movie screen surface of America. As a child I recall a few trips to downtown Los Angeles another world from the big houses in our predominantly white neighbourhood. We visited many cardboard towns of homeless people set up underneath motorway flyovers. We brought them hundreds of brown bags with sandwiches and carefully walked around broken glass hypodermic needles and rubbish that covered the footpaths. We went home to our safe quiet neighbourhood where it was easy for me to read study and achieve. Why is it like this? Does it have to be this way? Could the spaces between the buildings be places that we love? In a wealthy society could everyone have a safe place to live and have the same opportunities to achieve? These are the questions that have shaped the journey of my life so far.  
The week I turned 18 I left home to seek adventure beyond the suburbs. I ended up in a small town in the mountains in northern California where I lived and worked with people from all different backgrounds. We lived week to week on minimum wage jobs in restaurants and cinemas. We bought most of our clothes and furniture in op shops. We were happy although in the winter we sometimes had to break the ice in the toilet which had frozen overnight and we could not really afford to go to the doctor or the dentist. My friends there were all doing their best and were smart and hard-working enough to make a great contribution to society but many did not feel that path was open to them. My privileged upbringing made it easy for me to move on when I was ready to continue my studies. I studied philosophy at the University of California Berkeley to try to uncover the rational underpinnings of my political and ethical convictions. In my final year I took up French in part due to a love of Voltaire and his pragmatic approach to humanism.  
Ten years ago I left the United States. I initially went to France to gain fluency in the language but I stayed because I could not bear to return to a country engaged in the futile and destructive wars championed by George W Bush. After some time working and travelling in Europe I was fortunate enough to receive a scholarship to undertake postgraduate study at Sciences Po in Paris where I was able to study economics and political theory. My questions about the places where we live and the nature of our economy were slowly informed by my experiences as well as by my studies. I eagerly delved deeper into new approaches to urban planning transport and resource management at the University of Auckland and in my subsequent work as a transport consultant.  
Every one of us travels most every day and every one of us consumes goods that have been transported from farther and farther away. We are all very personally familiar with the annoyances and the injustices that inevitably occur when we are running late and need to get somewhere. But there is a much bigger picture. The places where we live are fundamentally shaped by the transport system and policies put in place by Government. In turn this affects the money and time we must spend travelling the quality of our air and water and the fact that nearly 40 percent of our energy use is for transport. We increasingly see that it affects our health the value of our land the cost of development and the affordability of housing. It even affects the amount of interaction we have with our neighbours. Perhaps most pertinently for this Government it affects our balance of trade and the amount of money we have left over each week to save or to spend in the domestic economy. The latest research in transport and urban planning tells us it is entirely possible to foster healthier safer and more livable towns and cities. Doing so will even save Governments households and businesses money while facilitating economic development so why are we not doing that?  
It was when working as a consultant with district and regional councils Government agencies and private developers that I realised there are no technical economic or cultural even barriers to sustainable towns and cities. The impediments holding us back from doing things smarter are mainly political and this is true in areas beyond transport. That is why I joined the only party with a good understanding of transport and indeed a coherent vision for the future of our economy and society.  
I am sure all members of this House will agree that we face some very daunting challenges. The global financial crisis the end of cheap energy climate change and increasing inequality are the four big ones and they are all interrelated. The flip side of these challenges is that we have an opportunity to approach things differently. We have an opportunity to improve the ways we live and do business and it will enable us our children and our grandchildren to meet these challenges successfully but to do so we will need to approach problems differently than we have in the past. We will all need to listen to one another. We will need to move past ideology and look beyond our prejudices.  
If the House will indulge me I would like to talk about an emerging view in cognitive science called the argumentative theory of reason. Since the Enlightenment it has been commonly assumed that each person has a uniquely human faculty of reasoning which they could individually use to deduce the truth. However the evidence from psychology does not support this; in fact people do quite poorly on reasoning tests. But as it turns out we are all very good at arguing especially in this House. People are very good at finding evidence to support their arguments. That is part of the reason why we struggle with confirmation bias: that is we tend to find evidence to support the views that we already hold. This is well-documented in psychology.  
This theory does not suggest that reasoning cannot lead to good decisions. The idea is that humans evolved in groups and reason actually functions socially through argumentation rather than individually. We can see this as the wisdom of crowds which is informing our digital age. It has interesting and inspiring implications for deliberative democracy. We often assume life would be better if we could just get on with it whatever our favoured course of action happens to be. But doing more faster without the buy-in of everyone is not necessarily advantageous. It turns out that we make better decisions collectively when more people are involved in the debate even if it takes longer. Having multiple perspectives represented means more valuable information is included in the evaluation and more minds weigh up the validity of the arguments put forward. It gets round our confirmation bias and makes for more robust decisions. It is why MMP is so crucial because it allows many more perspectives to be represented in Parliament.  
I am proud to be a member of the Green Party which uses a consensus model of decision making. Consensus does not mean we all agree. In fact we often have heated arguments but by taking the time to allow everyone to have their say and continue until everyone can live with the decision I believe that makes our policy much more robust. Greater participation in decision making could help us with the challenges we face in at least two ways. Firstly it will prevent us from being seduced by expertise that may create more problems than it solves. As the members of this House will hear me say many times I am sure in the next 3 years our transport predicament is at least in part due to the perfectly understandable but misguided approach of traffic engineering that focused on increasing the volume and speed of vehicles to the exclusion of all else. When we take wider impacts into account some of which are represented by the public health sector and some represented by local communities we get a better idea of the true economic impact of our infrastructure projects.  
Secondly groups that have profited from the status quo and have become very powerful have a vested interest in maintaining it. They will claim that any move to a more sustainable and fair economy will kill jobs or drain New Zealand of innovation. It is understandable that they react this way. They want to protect their short-term interests but over and over again we see evidence that when small powerful groups have too much sway it benefits no one not even them. We have seen special interests consistently lobby for deregulation that ended up costing everyone more in the medium term. Examples include leaky homes US car manufacturers arguing against fuel economy standards hedge funds and deep-sea oil contractors—and these are barely the tip of the iceberg. All arguments are not equally strong. By not favouring certain points of view just because they are powerful or have claims to expertise and by having more people involved in the debate I believe we can collectively find solutions that will enable us to create a better world.  
For my part during my time here I hope to use my unique perspective and experience to contribute to law and policy that will enable us all to flourish. I would like to encourage and enable greater participation in our political process. I hope to move beyond the traditional assumptions and to persuade members from all sides of the House that New Zealanders will greatly benefit from a much smarter transport and urban land use policy; that we will all benefit from a fairer more transparent and less punitive justice system; and that we will all benefit from an independent publicly funded broadcasting system.  
I believe that every member of this House has come here because they believe in the possibility of democracy and that their contribution can have a positive impact on our fellow citizens and on this beautiful place we inhabit. To the 50th Parliament I say that I acknowledge and respect our shared passion for service and I look forward to working constructively with each of you where we can find common ground. I believe that we can move beyond our traditional assumptions and find new ways of doing things that will leave us all better off. Kia ora koutou.