Goodhew Jo: Address in Reply 
Goodhew Jo: Address in Reply 
[Volume:628;Page:414] 
JO GOODHEW (National—Aoraki) 
: 
 Madam Assistant Speaker I congratulate you on your election to your role. I also congratulate Margaret Wilson on her re-election to the role of Speaker my colleague Clem Simich on his election as Deputy Speaker and Assistant Speaker Ross Robertson. I would also like to acknowledge the Hon Rob Talbot former member for South Canterbury and Ashburton who is in the House today. I am honoured. 
I add my congratulations to Dr Brash the leader of the National Party and Judy Kirk our party president. As a member of the National Party caucus I salute your leadership because the National Party caucus is stunningly different from that of the last Parliament. The last caucus worked tirelessly to give me a platform of policies to sell to the people of Aoraki and that caucus was just over half the size of today’s so I thank you. The feeling within the caucus today is thanks to those people one of energy numbers impatience and eagerness. I feel that sense of purpose and I know that we will not let this Labour - New Zealand First Government forget the squandered opportunities of the last 6 years. I will take every opportunity to show that these same policies continued into the future will increase dependency on the State destroy economic stability and send a raft of confusing messages to the electorate. 
My speech has three parts: I will introduce myself; I will introduce my electorate; I will share my hopes for a better New Zealand. So who is Jo Goodhew and why has she come to Parliament? I am a wife a mother a daughter and a sister. I am a registered nurse a former teacher a crime prevention worker and a volunteer in many organisations. I am the daughter of farmers. I was born Joanne McCully the eldest of three children born to Bruce and Winnie. I am proud that they are here with me today as they have so often been supporting me through the momentous occasions of my life. My husband Mark and our daughters Emily Harriet and Abigail are also here today. I have said it before and I will repeat it today. I owe them a debt of gratitude and love for the many ways in which they have supported my journey into politics and shared me with the people of Aoraki. My family know the passion I have for this challenge. 
My ancestors were known as De Caillot Huguenots who fled France to Scotland. Caillot became Cully and the “Mc” prefix was added. Two of a number of brothers migrated to Ireland. In 1872 Samuel and Mary McCully sailed to Canterbury aboard the  
Crusader 
. They settled in South Canterbury where their son Henry worked for a settler who could not afford to pay him. Instead the settler gave Henry some land which he subsequently named Clandeboye after his home in Ireland. Today Clandeboye is marked by two clusters of buildings. The first is the recently closed primary school where I was educated. The other is New Zealand’s second-largest Fonterra manufacturing site. There we have rural provincial growth alongside rural provincial pain. 
Throughout the campaign and now into my career as a member of Parliament Theodore Roosevelt’s words ring in my ears: “It is not the critic that counts not the one who points out how the strong man stumbled or how the doer of deeds might have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred with sweat dust and blood.” My electorate is Aoraki. To some Mount Cook to many Aoraki the magnificence of the mountain draws many visitors to Aoraki - Mount Cook National Park. The park is also part of Te Wahipounamu - South West New Zealand World Heritage Area in recognition of its outstanding natural values. For me the spellbinding natural beauty peace and tranquillity of the Mackenzie Country explain why my family and I have spent many holidays there. Every year New Zealanders and tourists flock to this special place to recharge their batteries. 
I am here as a result of the people of Aoraki voting overwhelmingly for change. That we did not get a National administration is unfortunate so my continuing role is to strive towards returning a strong National Government to meet the needs of this rural province. I thank the former member for Aoraki the Hon Jim Sutton for a cleanly fought battle and for his stewardship since 1993. This is just the fourth maiden speech to be given in the New Zealand Parliament by a new member representing a seat that encompasses Timaru in 77 years. This is why I have taken the time to introduce my electorate. In my quest to represent Aoraki a strong team backed me. I salute today the campaign chair John Rushton for his guidance and calm and the electorate chair Allan Booth for toughing it out with National through some difficult years. I also salute the host of people both inside the campaign team and outside it who guided and assisted my progress to this day. 
In Aoraki there are five territorial local authorities: Timaru Mackenzie and Waimate districts; a small part of the Waitaki district; and the Canterbury Regional Council. The people of the region have a lot of government going on. It takes me 3½ hours to drive from the northernmost point to the southernmost point as long as I do not break any speed limits. The mighty Rangitata River and Waitaki River are natural boundaries and controversy over the use of the lifeblood of those rivers has dogged our recent history. Our biggest territorial local authority Timaru District Council has for the most part no access to the waters of either river at any part of their journey to the sea. That fact will be a decided barrier to further development in parts of the region. 
Aoraki relies heavily on an economic base of agriculture and agricultural processing as we know does the rest of New Zealand. The average income of the people of Aoraki is just under $29000 somewhat below the New Zealand average. The people of the electorate are mainly of European descent with all other ethnicities represented in lower numbers than the New Zealand average. Over-65-year-olds make up more than 17 percent of the constituents. Unemployment is low. There are approximately 500 unemployed but nearly 3000 people on other benefits in the Timaru Work and Income area. I believe that these people represent significant numbers and should not be forgotten. Despite that low unemployment I still have people coming into my office and asking me to help them get a job. 
The people of Aoraki are great examples of strong communities. There are towns such as Omarama Otematata Kurow and Twizel that are reinventing themselves as holidaying destinations after the doomsayers predicted that they would gradually die after the Waitaki hydro schemes were completed. There are rural service centres such as Fairlie Waimate Temuka Geraldine and Pleasant Point that are challenged by the centralisation of primary production service centres by the closure of schools and by the lowering of rural workforce numbers. So too these small towns reel from business closures brought about by the need for business to be lean and mean pay high taxes and exist in a high compliance cost environment. 
Now my hopes for a better New Zealand: I want New Zealand to be a place where families are strong and communities are caring; a country whose people are encouraged to work hard and smarter by the reward this should bring; and a country where there is an expectation that if people can do something to help themselves they will. I want our country to be a place where our taxes are spent on delivering health and education not on paying more bureaucrats to shuffle more forms. Our children deserve to be represented by politicians who are not here solely for the technology of power and manipulation which was Vaclav Havel’s description of undesirable politics. These children deserve to be represented by New Zealanders who have had to juggle work and family who scorn political correctness who value self-reliance and who believe that working hard should bring personal benefits not increased taxation. 
My background has taught me that when someone comes to another for help the cruellest thing one can do is simply hand over the help for in doing so we set them up to rely on other people. When I was door-knocking thousands of doors before the election I met many beneficiaries and many of them thought I would try to make their lives difficult if elected. But I convinced them otherwise. On hearing that under National an employer could take a risk and employ a long-term beneficiary for 90 days without fear of personal grievance their eyes lit up. They said to me: “You know that means I can show what I am able to do.” For them this represented hope. I defy anyone to find a beneficiary who is also a parent who wants his or her children to share that same fate. Of course they do not. We need to raise expectations in this country for those who experience hopelessness. We need to raise our expectations that those who are able to do some work will work. 
I also want to say something about the volunteers of Aoraki. They have a strong sense of community and a willingness to help out their neighbours and the rest of New Zealand. I am not suggesting that the people of Aoraki are unusual in that respect but I do believe that that sense of community is stronger in rural provincial New Zealand than in urbanised areas. Why? Because it is either do or die. This community spirit is worth millions to the economy of New Zealand. In its simplest form it is the people who deliver Meals on Wheels to the elderly and help them stay in their homes. In a more complex example it is the many hundreds who banded together in the Relay For Life to raise $147000 over a weekend for cancer care and research. This community will continue to rise to the occasion as long as we parliamentarians allow it. Why would we stop New Zealanders giving away the scant dollars they have left after taxation? Put quite simply bossy interfering patronising Governments threaten the goodwill of those strong communities and have forgotten that “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”. Or maybe these same interfering lawmakers have not forgotten they simply want to fix everyone because a small percentage needed fixing. 
The lawmakers are running the risk that they just as surely as high fuel prices threaten the goodwill of New Zealand’s volunteers. I will make it my crusade to ask these questions: “Will this new law change more good practices than bad or poor practices? Will it make the boat go faster?” Will the volunteers who are told that their organisation will be more professional if they comply with this or that rule or regulation say to the Government that relies on their goodwill: “Take a hike!”. This is not the volunteers’ profession; it is their voluntary passion. Examples include volunteer drivers charity collectors and organisers of public events. Some of the volunteers will say to me: “It’s OK if we jump through the hoops we can access the money.” I say to the volunteers that petty rules and bureaucracy hold them to ransom and that their time is immensely valuable and should not be undermined. 
In conclusion I say that I stood on the doorsteps and I promised to work hard for the people of Aoraki. They have like many other rural provincial electorates sent a clear message to the Government that all is not well. Twenty-three new National Party MPs are the faces of that message. The people have asked me to represent their views on many issues that are about access: access to education and health-care options; access to water; restricting access to private property; access to improved funding for aged-care services; access to timely determinations under the Resource Management Act; access to a fair deal under tenure review; access to a business-friendly approach to legislation; and access to improvements in roading and energy infrastructure. 
The people of Aoraki want access to their MP and I will represent their views. We as parliamentarians must enable and empower those who are not self-reliant. We must always have a welfare system that is there for those who need it but a temporary measure for most not a trapdoor to poverty. We must cherish and support our volunteers who enrich our communities not bog them down with paper wars and petty rules. I finish with Vaclav Havel’s description of desirable politics: “that is politics not as the technology of power and manipulation … or as the art of the useful … but politics as practical morality as service to the truth as essentially human and humanly measured care for our fellow humans.”