Peachey Allan: Address in Reply 
Peachey Allan: Address in Reply 
[Volume:628;Page:290] 
ALLAN PEACHEY (National—Tamaki) 
: 
 I believe in freedom: in the freedom of all New Zealanders—regardless of where they were born of how they were brought up or of what sort of house or community they live in—to be the very best that they can be. So I come to this House freely chosen by the people of Tamaki to represent them. To the people of Tamaki I repeat the pledge given in this House by my distinguished predecessor the Rt Hon Sir Robert Muldoon when he moved the Address in Reply debate as their newly elected member 44 years ago: “I intend to represent all the people of Tamaki irrespective of whether they supported me at election time or not …”. 
Freedom is always eroded under socialist rule. The Government has become more intrusive more coercive more meddlesome and less effective. It absorbs too much of New Zealanders’ incomes and hampers our economy with bureaucracy and restrictive tax rates. Most of our nation’s problems have their cause right here in Wellington. Our capital has become the seat of a nanny State system that functions for its own benefit growing increasingly insensitive to the needs of the New Zealanders who pay the taxes. 
The role of a Government is to provide a framework of security and civil order in which New Zealanders are free to plan and live their lives. Too much power in the hands of politicians and bureaucrats to plan the lives of individuals is a threat to freedom. New Zealanders are looking for a new generation of leaders who respect initiative independence enterprise individualism and freedom. Those leaders are on the Opposition side of the House. 
It is for those reasons that I have left a most satisfying 32-year career in education to enter Parliament. I take a moment to reflect on the profession that I have just left and—with your permission Madam Speaker—to say to the schoolteachers that you do the most important paid work in New Zealand because you can transform the lives of children. You determine who gets to read to write and to compute. For some of our children you can decide who will enjoy success in life and who will not. Society does not give you the recognition and the respect that it should. 
I am in Parliament because of the work of members of the National Party in Tamaki work that is entirely voluntary. It is an effort made willingly by New Zealanders who want a better country the freedom to run their businesses and to raise their families in the way that they choose and the freedom to realise their aspirations and to be the best that they can be. So to men and women like Richard Yates Andrew Hunt Adirana Gunder Murray McKinnon Tony Hannifin Matt Malaghan Brian Grigg Kit Parkinson John de Latour Dan Gardner Sarah Meek and Bronwen Coster I give my respect and my thanks. While speaking of the Tamaki electorate I would also like on behalf of the people of Tamaki to express appreciation to the Hon Clem Simich for his service and to wish him well with his new responsibility as Deputy Speaker of this House. 
I understand New Zealanders and their aspirations as do my colleagues on the Opposition side of the House although the trade union functionaries and academics on the socialist side of the House do not. New Zealanders need leadership that encourages them to work hard and get ahead and that ensures they can send their children to a school where those children will have teachers who will make them learn. They need leadership that gives them the freedom to be the best that they can be. New Zealanders are thirsting for leadership that looks to the future not the past: leadership that recognises the opportunities of individual initiative and the dangers of big government and welfare dependency. They want leadership that reflects the call of President John F Kennedy: “Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future.” 
It troubles me that so many members of this House persist in looking at the past instead of to the future. They think of people primarily as belonging to a class or interest group and not as individuals. They seek to explain the problems of our nation in terms of socio-economic background or school decile rating or of a class division that should not exist. In the 21st century knowledge and how that knowledge is used will determine the success of the individual and of the nation. There can be no place for a mean-spirited and socialist ideology that subordinates the individual to the ill-defined greater good of the State. History will shame those who seek to impose the crushing mediocrity of collectivism upon our communities. 
The challenges of the Tamaki electorate are the challenges of the New Zealanders who live there: schooling health housing and law and order. A significant problem is that this socialist Government is intensifying the density of State housing in Glen Innes still further and once again it is being done without a supporting infrastructure. As a result of the Government cramming more and more State tenants into an area where there is a marked imbalance between private and State housing it is inevitable that social dislocations will occur. 
I also question policing in the Tamaki electorate. Today we have a magnificent police station in Glen Innes and residents from Orakei to St Heliers and from Panmure to Mission Bay had great hopes that local policing would greatly improve their personal security and the security of their properties. That station cost $3.7 million and some 50 sworn staff are based there. However it is open only from 9 a.m. to 4.30 p.m. Monday to Friday. At a time when the residents of Tamaki most need the assurance of readily accessible policing their police station is closed. That makes no sense to me. Something else makes no sense to me. I am told by the school principals of Tamaki that schools cannot get a police officer to visit when needed and principals cannot get to meet with Youth Aid officers. They tell me that there are no inquiry cars in Tamaki when they are most needed. 
Too many people in our community feel that it is acceptable to break the law. The police approach to dealing with young people has become too tentative. Too many youngsters see policing as toothless and gutless. There is an urgent need for us to focus on tagging vandal damage and tinny houses. Youngsters who get away with tagging an elderly person’s fence go on to the next level of crime. If we stop that we stop a lot of other crime. The sense of immunity that young people feel when committing crime at the behest of their elders must be shattered. The people of Tamaki whether they live in Glen Innes Orakei Kohimarama St Heliers Mission Bay St Johns or Meadowbank need a change in the way their communities are policed if their right to live in a stable community is to be protected. 
In making these comments I want to reassure every police officer who works in Tamaki that I am 100 percent behind his or her work. I know that it is the law not the police officer that allows antisocial youngsters to offend and reoffend with impunity. It is time that a sense of social responsibility was required from all of our community. And I know something else: it is the responsibility of this House to create an environment in which the police can do their job. It is the responsibility of this House to make law that upholds civil society instead of law that tells young people when they misbehave that the police cannot touch them. Too often it is the decent police officer not the law-breaker who is in trouble. 
This nation cannot continue to stand still. As New Zealanders we want our nation to move forward yet today the dark shadow of economic decay again hangs over New Zealand. Inflation is back rising interest rates are back productivity remains low and wages are low by international standards. A nation must be growing and thriving in order to provide jobs and world-class health and education. New Zealand needs leadership that offers progress not the strangulation of initiative. New Zealand needs leadership that offers truth instead of promises that go unkept behind the excuse of MMP and leadership that offers hope and optimism not defeatism and mean-spiritedness. New Zealand needs leaders who share the values that make ours a great way of life. It needs leadership that is independent of the forces that create our problems: this Labour Government the Wellington bureaucracy interest groups trade unions and the petty self-serving arrangements arising from MMP including the cynical grasp of the baubles of power by the leaders of minor parties. 
For New Zealand to move forward there is much that must change. So let us have leaders who share the New Zealand dream. Let us have leaders who cherish the ideals of freedom. Let us have leadership that stops the steady erosion of those institutions such as the family that form the foundations of our freedom and prosperity. Too many New Zealanders have grown up in families trapped by the State into welfare dependency and its accompanying bigotry of low expectations. No New Zealander can be truly free while he or she remains dependent on the welfare system for a livelihood. No New Zealander can be free as long as the Government keeps that person trapped in the cycle of poverty and dependence that arises from being stranded in communities where State-provided housing is poor where criminals are free on the streets and good New Zealanders are prisoners in their homes where the streets are crime-infested and where too often the schools are struggling. 
Failure to improve the performance of our schools is not just poor social policy; it is poor economic policy as well. Ignorance and illiteracy breed failure in our social and economic systems. They cause delinquent behaviour chronic welfare dependence a loss of productive capability in the economy and an increase in tax-supported welfare benefits. Let us have leaders who know there is no substitute for the freedom that New Zealand families get from owning their own homes and leaders who know there is no substitute for the freedom gained from a schooling system that equips every individual with knowledge and with the ability to read write and master mathematics. 
I conclude with a personal reflection. The eldest of the four children that Jeanette my wife of 30 years and I have raised was a member of the 1997 Youth Parliament. My late father Noel was at the time of his death in 1985 chief messenger to this House. Days before his death he was quoted in a newspaper article about his work. 
He said of MPs: “I suppose I was like so many. You saw a group who were just sitting upon their backsides getting well paid for doing very little. But my eyes were opened very quickly when I saw the hours they put in quite apart from being in the debating chamber or select committees and doing electorate work I found essentially they can’t have a private life.” Like my late father and in the example of my mother I believe in hard work I believe in individual responsibility and above all else I believe in freedom.