Turei Metiria: AdjournmentText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTurei Metiria: Adjournment[Sitting date: 31 July 2014. Volume:700;Page:19811. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]METIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green):I love Aotearoa. I love our country. I want it to become the country where every child in New Zealand has enough to thrive—what a future for our children. Just 34 days until early voting opens for the election until we can genuinely change this Government so that every child has enough to thrive and I know that New Zealanders will give their party vote to the Greens to make sure that that happens.It has been a long hard 3 years but we have got there. I want to take this moment to thank the Green team who have worked so hard to make this country a cleaner fairer and smarter one and who live the Green values and make it so obvious in the quality of their work. I thank the cleaners who work so hard for too little money to keep our offices clean; the messengers who though they are not paid to deal with rubbish put up with so much more of it than they deserve; and the Chamber officers here who make question time livable for us.This place is so much more than the sum of its parts. Thanks to the librarians who work tirelessly on the Green Party’s endless requests for more information; thanks to the ministerial staff who deal with our questions and Official Information Act requests; and thanks to the press gallery which spreads its love around with promiscuous inconsistency but which we continue to love in our own special way too.Thank you to the Labour Party our partner in the fight for a fairer future. And thank you Mr Speaker for keeping us on our toes while barely restraining yourself from throwing us out of the Chamber when we leap to them.The Green Party has had a great term. We have led the Opposition—you know that is true—we have set the agenda and we have outlined our vision for a cleaner fairer smarter New Zealand. We are stronger now than we have ever been this close to an election. We are ready our leadership is proven and we are prepared for real change—much-needed change—which is coming this September. “Party Vote Green”.Over this term of Parliament we have put poverty the environment and smart economics on the political agenda and I am very proud of that. But I do confess that we have spent a bit of time being confused about National’s resistance to our cleaner fairer smarter plan. With more kids in poverty house price rises increasing 10 times as fast as incomes and rivers too polluted to swim in how can it keep saying that things are getting better?As the term progressed we kept wondering what planet the Government was on. Of course the answer was provided in part by John Key himself last year when he started to paint the picture of life on “Planet Key”—the manicured golf courses the endless holidays and the mysterious lack of toilets. You might remember this. Things at that point started to make a little more sense but nevertheless our party strategists continued to wonder how National could keep ploughing ahead in denial of the reality on planet Earth.Well I have found out how. Apparently on the very first day of caucus every National MP is issued with special white-out goggles. These white-out goggles filter from their sight all the poor people all the brown people and all the poverty. They make invisible pollution and pretty much all those other nasties and misfits that they do not like. They leave the world of National members as white as the purest toilet paper—a world made of holidays long lunches endless green golf courses and a disproportionate number of middle-aged white men with Bachelor of Commerce degrees. It is a world populated with people just like themselves.It is in this white-out on “Planet Key” that the Skycity convention centre for example becomes a marvel of ministerial influence rather than a monument to ministerial interference. Auckland streets become paved with golden tokens. You do not need to constrain gambling when it causes no harm. One can look through these white-out goggles and maybe even I would have been sold on the deal because National has found gold.And poverty? Poverty is gone. Poor children do not exist on “Planet Key” so why would you bother working for them? What use is there in having payments for the poorest newborn babies if no one is born into poverty in the first place? So those members say: “Let’s just give the money to everybody else.”—to people just like themselves.The environment is so beautiful with these white-out goggles on it is no wonder the National people cannot even think about rivers needing standards to ensure that they are clean enough to swim in. When they go down to the river it looks like a music video from some kind of angelic gospel song except of course all the folks who are wading in the water are white. What an amazing place “Planet Key” is with these fabulous goggles on. I cannot see a thing most of the time when I wear them but what I do see does look awfully white. Hell I cannot even see myself. It is no wonder Anne Tolley did not like my jackets—they must have looked very odd as they wandered through the Chamber all by themselves.Of course National Ministers must wine and dine the oil companies and hope that they will drill our shores because with these goggles on there is no chance of an oil spill. They can drill all the way to China. And of course there is no reason to stop intensifying the dairying industry. The rivers are safe from pollution because just like the people on “Planet Key” the cows on “Planet Key” do not shimmy either.But seriously I am going to take the goggles off for a moment—just the goggles mind—and for a moment reflect on the reality that is planet Earth. This beautiful place Aotearoa New Zealand is a great country which has risen above the fray in the past and whose time to shine has come again.Over the past years the Green Party has challenged the dim and privileged view of the future that National has for us. We have challenged John Key’s lack of aspiration for our environment for our economy and for our people and his unwillingness to spread the benefits around. We have exposed his denial of the families who are living in the greatest need in this country. We in the Greens have been described as the real Opposition as we have mapped out our vision for a cleaner fairer and smarter future and our vision is grounded in the possible.John Key governs as if there are three things that are inevitable: child poverty dirty rivers and a third term. No—no. The Green Party says that none is inevitable at all. Poverty as Nelson Mandela once said is not an accident. Like racism and apartheid it is man-made and can be removed. Every child can have enough to thrive. It is the duty of those of us who have the power to ensure that they do. Poverty is not the cost of prosperity just as dirty rivers are not the cost of progress.In the same way that New Zealand led the world by making a stand against nuclear power we too can make a stand against child poverty and for our environment. We can have a smarter cleaner fairer economy that innovates and that measures its success in the well-being of the people whom it serves. We can have a society where every child has enough to thrive because the benefits of the wealth of our society are more fairly shared. We can have as a birthright for our children an environment that is clean and that continues to provide for our economic well-being well into the future.We have an opportunity this 20 September to challenge the old fossil thinking and to steer a course for a cleaner a fairer and a smarter future—one where every child can thrive. This will be the country that I love the best. Thank you.