Willis ScottSCOTT WILLIS (Green): Whakataka te hau ki te uru whakataka te hau ki te tonga kia mākinakina ki uta kia mātaratara ki tai. Ki ngā hau katoa o te motu e piri nei i a tātou tēnā tātou katoa. Ki te mana whenua tēnā koutou. Ki a tātou katoa e rongo ana i ngā hau e pupuhi ana tēnā koutou tēnā koutou katoa. [The wind turns towards the west the wind turns towards the south making it intensely cold onshore and bitterly cold at sea. To all the winds of the nation that bring us together greetings to all of us.To those with authority over this land greetings. To all of us who feel the winds that blow greetings and thanks to all of you.]Tēnā koe Mr Speaker. Thank you and congratulations yet again. I am very proud to be part of our new Green caucus; the biggest Green caucus ever with such a wealth of lived experience from the Far North to the deep South. I am privileged to stand here today for everyone who voted for the Green Party; all of you who voted for climate for nature for people and for Papatūānuku.Over the past years I have loved working as part of a consultancy group called Climate Navigator. I've also been privileged to be part of an inspiring deep South kaupapa Māori organisation: Aukaha. I am honoured that some of my colleagues from both organisations are here today. Your mahi is essential kia kaha.I owe a huge debt to all of my friends neighbours and colleagues who have supported me on this journey. I want to thank the deep South province the kaitiaki group my fellow candidate Fran and local Green members for their huge support. I am proud to be able to represent you and I will do my utmost to uphold the faith you've shown in me. I am indebted to Ross Dan and Hugh my campaign managers: you kept me sane you kept me informed you kept me prepared and most importantly you kept me on time! To the Waitati Bookclub I salute you. To my rural Green colleagues here and right across the motu thank you.I have had a fantastic summer break with friends family and birdlife with time in the bush and at the beach. Working in my garden at Waitati I was acutely aware of being surrounded by birdsong. It's something I hope to hear one day all around the motu. Digging a vege garden is very grounding; it takes me back to my own roots to where it all began.I grew up in a small place called Otekaieke—and it's often pronounced Ohtekaik". It's in the expanse and clear air of the Waitaki Valley. It was an idyllic childhood: building huts roaming the paddocks the water-races and the hills. We swam in the river—I know that's a unique thing; that was back when it was safe to do so—we rode our bikes everywhere; we trapped possums; and we generally ran wild. All in all it was the perfect preparation for becoming a Green MP! During summers I helped my father with the beehives and carted hay. The winters were beautifully cold dry with ice in the creek and Mum's warm welcoming kitchen. But I also remember the summers when we were packed—because I'm the youngest of five siblings—into the Land Rover in the back and undertaking epic journeys to my grandparents' place in Roxburgh: fishing hunting swimming picking apricots and cherries catching up with cousins and all after digging the Land Rover out of the snow one summer at the top of Dansey's Pass—that's the South.When I was sworn into Parliament I placed my hand on top of a venerable old book. It's our Willis family tree. It speaks to my whakapapa. Originally published in 1633 it helpfully begins with Adam and Eve and therefore unites me with everybody here! But my family tree also includes some interesting people: rolling forward some 5797 years from Adam and Eve you find one particularly inspirational individual: John Walpole Willis who defended the emancipation of slaves in British Guiana in the mid-1800s and stood up for Aboriginal rights during his time as a judge in New South Wales—a defender of the vulnerable; not afraid to stand against the tide. Whakapapa is central to who we are as Tam and Kahu spoke about. It reveals the wrongs and flaws in our past but it also helps us to find those threads and qualities to aspire to and to pass on. My parents gave me a number of those qualities. In my rural childhood I got that sense of connection or tūrangawaewae. I grew up feeling empowered and connected to the land. It makes it easier to grasp that we don't own the land; the land owns us.When I visit the Waitaki Valley I know that Mum and Dad are still there in their ashes spread on the farm in the trees that were planted and in the colours of the ranunculus and the flaxes and the kōwhai.Mr Speaker I stand before you as one of the oldest members of the Green Party caucus. Consequently I have had a slightly longer journey to Parliament than many of my colleagues.I inherited a sense of adventure from my parents and siblings. I really did want to see the world. I went to university as a 17-year-old in 1987—so you can do the calculations there!—then dropped out and went to Australia. There I worked as a jackaroo truck driver and a bit of a sort of self-taught mechanic on a 1.5-million-hectare cattle station. I experienced the exhilaration of riding semi - wild horses and bull catching in cut-down four-wheel drives. But I also learnt about the quiet competence of the Aboriginal stockmen and their families. They had always lived as part of that land in the Kimberley Country. I learnt about dispossession; I learnt about naked corrosive racism; and I learnt about the indominable spirit of the Aboriginal people.In Morocco my partner Jenna and I bought a donkey and got lost in the High Atlas Mountains. There we experienced the rich hospitality of Berber tribespeople in woollen tents. We saw the ingenuity of life in that arid arid environment and we were given the hospitality of a tent and a donkey food a meal and directions over a mountain pass.In France I worked as a cook builder and donkey-trekking guide in an alternative rural community in the Cévennes. We milked goats and sheep we made cheese and chestnut jam bartered and traded. It was an experience that was about as far from centre-pivot irrigation and industrial dairy as you can get. In that community in France I learnt about an economy within an economy. An economy of enough—that nourished people ideas and an alternative vision for rural community. I learnt about agroecology and living simply.The catalysts for a journey into politics aren't always obvious. I had no intention back then of entering politics. But by the late 1990s with the birth of the transition town movement the slow food movement and our two wonderful sons Bruno and Lucan I wanted to make a difference. I returned to university as an adult student and spent several years reflecting and teaching on alternative rural living and global food politics. Then I was invited to spend some time as an intern at the European Parliament in Brussels researching EU rural policy. Meanwhile Bruno began his schooling on his fifth birthday with complete immersion in a French speaking école primaire and Lucan learnt his numbers from his pushchair by counting dog turds on the streets of Brussels—un caca de chien deux caca de chien. Now that's great preparation for the political arena! After that time in Belgium and France we returned to Aotearoa and I co-founded and managed an NGO in Blueskin Bay north of Dunedin. Our mission was to deliver local climate solutions. It allowed me to meet and work with some truly inspirational people like my friend and mentor Jeanette Fitzsimons. Jeanette along with other Greens like Sue Kedgley Gareth Hughes Eugenie Sage Mojo Mathers Metiria Turei and James Shaw began to draw me inexorably towards the Green Party as an agent of change.I learnt something else very important from Jeanette as well as from others like the Aboriginal community of the Kimberley Country like my Taekwondo colleagues like my French friends in the Cévennes like my parents. They all taught me the value of perseverance. We might get knocked down but we should never lose hope. Things may not go according to plan but values and solutions are worth fighting for and we should never give up.During my 12 years as manager of the Blueskin trust I experienced a crash course in the realpolitik of progressive environmental change in Aotearoa. There were some great highlights and frustrations. Two of the highlights: firstly developing Aotearoa's first peer-to-peer electricity retail service allowing people to share renewable electricity. Second building the first climate safe house—a model for how to rapidly build transportable modular eco-homes to address the flood risk and the housing crisis.And two of the frustrations. Well firstly the inability to sustain the first peer-to-peer electricity retail service due to the power of the gen-tailers to manipulate the electricity market. Secondly the rejection by the Dunedin City Council of Aotearoa's first community wind farm at Blueskin Bay on "visual impact" grounds. The wind farm experience in Blueskin revealed two things. It showed the incredible potential to build community resilience but it also revealed the inadequacy of the Resource Management Act which we are going back to. It pointed me directly towards the broken policy process in Wellington as the most significant barrier to any real progressive change on the ground.Misinformation from a small group of people and canny use of a flawed policy environment managed to derail a decade-long project to create an energy-resilient community. From this I learnt a hard political lesson: it is easier to stop things than to make good things happen. Unfortunately that is exactly what we saw in Parliament prior to Christmas. The coalition Government had the same approach: stopping things and rejecting solutions to the climate crisis rather than making positive things happen. This is the political reality we now confront. It's familiar to everyone who works in the search for transitions to a better energy future. It's the daily reality of a whole lot of people here today who are energy innovators. The reality we all know is that our energy policy is almost entirely designed to make those transitions as difficult as possible. I am inspired by those groups those NGOs those individuals who battle on against these policy barriers and continue to advocate for innovative solutions—like Otago farmers who want to host small wind farms; like 350 Aotearoa whose petition to support Homegrown Energy I presented to the House last year; like Toast Electric here in Wellington; like the Te Arawa Climate Change Working Group and the South Dunedin Future programme. But energy policy is working against them and I stand before you as someone who will champion everyone trying to work towards cleaner cheaper smarter power for energy wellbeing and for climate justice for all. And for anyone in any party who gets this I stand ready and willing to work with you to help unlock New Zealand's energy potential as the Saudi Arabia of wind power.If the Government does eventually want to move and journey from saying no to saying yes on a more sustainable and secure energy future then there are already a great host of people working on and demonstrating those alternatives. Everything we need to transition to cleaner cheaper smarter power already exists. Our critical political task is to remove the policy barriers that are stopping those solutions coming to fruition.Finally I began this speech by recognising the importance of family and whakapapa and I stand here because of the support of my family. To my parents who gave me so much I wish they could be here but it is now up to us to take their values forward. I want to give a shout-out to my sisters Susan and Liz who made it here today somehow and to Robin and Richard who couldn't make it. Thank you for everything thank you for fishing me out of the Coal Creek pond throughout this journey.My parents-in-law Helen and Stephen have been absolutely wonderful and Bruno and Lucan: I'm so proud of you both. I'm pleased that I'll get to spend a bit more time with you both in Wellington and I'm really impressed that you wear my suit so well. And Jenna I know this is not an ideal situation for us and I know—well I know that but you've been so supportive despite everything and thank you for accepting this journey. Je t'aime mon amour.I have a dream for Aotearoa and for Bruno and Lucan and their partners. My dream: Aotearoa will have clear-running rivers and bush bursting with birdlife. It'll be a place where everyone lives in a warm cosy home and with good local seasonal food on the table. A place where we harness the wind the sun and the water to power our homes our businesses our mobility. A place where everyone has enough—not too much not too little but enough to live a good life. A country where we live within our means and we engage that endlessly renewable resource—our creativity—to ensure everyone whether rural or urban can thrive. This shouldn't simply be a dream. It's all within our reach—it's merely a political choice—and we shouldn't stand for anything less. Kia ora.[Applause hongi harirū]Waiata—"Tūtira Mai Ngā Iwi"The House adjourned at 6.22 p.m."