Logie Jan: Debate On Pacific IssuesText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLogie Jan: Debate On Pacific Issues[Sitting date: 18 April 2013. Volume:689;Page:9586. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAN LOGIE (Green): Very very warm Pacific greetings to my fellow Pacific parliamentarians whom I cannot really see but I am assuming you are up there in the gallery and I am feeling your beautiful faces.Peseta Sam Lotu-Iiga: I’ll wave for you.JAN LOGIE: Thank you—thanks Sam. I am really pleased to take this call for the Green Party as our women’s spokesperson and as our Pasifika our overseas development aid and our human rights spokesperson. For me all of those things go quite nicely together. It is wonderful to be able to talk to you today on some of those themes. This is my first time of experiencing—I grew up in a little town down south that most people think of as quite Palagi a place called Invercargill. But actually at the time I grew up it had the second-highest Polynesian population after Auckland in the world. So you have been part of my growing up. It is really wonderful to have you here in the House today to give us that sense of the Pacific here in this House. It is all too rare an occasion. I hear that some of you were a little shocked by our question time. I also share that shock every day so I understand. I would also like to offer my thanks to the Minister for Pacific Island Affairs and the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee for hosting this event and promoting this dialogue between us today.There is so much I could say because of course our relationship is long and deep and there are many things to talk about. But I would like to start by acknowledging that New Zealand’s past relationship in the Pacific has been a dual one. It has been at once an imperialistic and exploitative role and at the same time many iwi and the Kīngitanga movement have had really strong relationships with many Pacific people. So we have had these two relationships of solidarity and imperialism happening at the same time. I think we are still sometimes fighting between those two tensions in our relationships. As an example New Zealand is still earning more now from the exporting of products that contribute really strongly to non-communicable diseases in your countries than we are putting into the health budget through official development assistance. I think that in this discussion we need to be acknowledging some of those tensions.As the women’s spokesperson though I really do want to focus on some of the issues that we share all of us in the Pacific. One of those really important issues is violence against women. Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands have the highest levels—reported levels at least—in the world. We see that in Australia 20 percent of women experience sexual abuse. In Fiji 66 percent of women are physically abused by their partners in Kiribati 68 percent in the Marshall Islands 30 percent and in New Zealand depending on your figures between 15 and 30 percent. In Palau and Papua New Guinea 70 percent of women have experienced gender-based violence in Samoa it is 48 percent of women and in the Solomons it is 64 percent. In Tonga 23 women a month are victims of physical assault in Tuvalu it is one-third of women and in Vanuatu there have been 3600 cases reported between 1993 and 2000. Sadly we do not even have the data for the Cook Islands Niue or the Federated States of Micronesia. This is a shared problem. We are all struggling with this. If we put some focus on it it is something we could make a real difference about. It would pay off for all of us in terms of our well-being our health and our economic benefits.I am a member along with some of my colleagues here of the New Zealand Parliamentarians’ Group on Population and Development. We have recognised that economic development is intrinsically and reciprocally linked with sexual and reproductive health including maternal health. We have asked our Government to makea commitment to ring-fencing 15 percent of our overseas development assistance specifically for sexual and reproductive health. Part of that is a link to the connection to the violence against women because if we cannot control our bodies we cannot control our destiny. That is around violence and it is about sexual and reproductive health. There is a huge difference that all of us could make on this issue. I am really looking forward to having a good dialogue with all of you this weekend on those issues. Kia ora koutou.