Fitzsimons Jeanette: Address in Reply 
Fitzsimons Jeanette: Address in Reply 
[Volume:628;Page:123] 
JEANETTE FITZSIMONS (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 Mr Deputy Speaker on behalf of the Green Party I extend our congratulations to yourself and to your colleagues Madam Speaker and the Assistant Speakers on your election. I extend our greetings to all members of this new Parliament especially those who are representing their communities here for the first time. In particular I acknowledge a new party that has won the right to represent its people in the House. I welcome Pita Sharples Hone Harawira and Te Ururoa Flavell who join Tariana Turia in representing the Maori Party. We look forward to the new flavour and perspective they will bring to debate here and hope to work with them where we have common cause. 
What felt like the longest election campaign in history has come and gone and unlike in 1999 no one can stand here today and say: “We won. You lost. Eat that!”. National has gained seats but it is still in Opposition. All small parties except for the Maori Party have lost seats heavily. Among the small parties only the Greens have retained even as many as two-thirds of their seats. The Prime Minister has her third term of Government but this is surely not the kind of Government she planned to lead. It is certainly not the kind of Government her supporters wished her to lead—one that is hostage to narrow-minded intolerance Treaty bashing environmental ignorance and prejudice against immigrants gays and Muslims. It is the Government that we warned could be formed if people who supported the Greens gave their party vote to Labour instead out of fear of National. It is a Government founded on expediency and political pragmatism not on shared values and vision. It is designed to please a few businesses that oppose any form of environmental regulation sustainable development or justice for low-paid workers. That is why the Greens cannot give it our support on confidence and supply. 
The Greens played a straight bat through the election and the negotiations. We made it clear that we would not support a National-led Government and so ruled out playing off one side against the other for our own political advantage as Winston Peters and Peter Dunne did. That gave Labour an advantage in the campaign as it increased the certainty that it would be able to form a Government although that was not our reason for doing it. We did it because we believed that the voters needed to know how their votes would be used in forming a Government. Going to the polling booth should not be the same as going to the TAB. We negotiated in good faith and put our cards on the table. We offered our skills and experience to help form a Government. We accepted that the cards the voters had dealt dictated that there would have to be a multiparty Government. We did not rule out working with any other party that Labour was talking to. We had a firm understanding that Labour’s view of its support parties was that if everyone could not be in everyone would be out. 
Labour had a number of options that would have formed a stable Government but it chose to take this one. It is an arrangement that has raised concerns among political commentators and constitutional experts. Two parties whose leaders hold ministerial warrants who are part of the executive claim not to be in coalition. They claim not to be part of the Government yet they have Ministers in that Government. One of the parties even wanted to sit with the Opposition and demanded that the Greens who are not even supporting the Government on confidence and supply should sit with the Government. 
If this were the breaking down of the two-party system and the concept of “the Opposition” under first past the post and if this were a move to a more inclusive parliamentary system we would welcome it. There are many countries where multiparty Governments work well even though the parties do not agree on everything and we support having room to disagree in a coalition. A system of shifting majorities on legislation takes us closest to what the people voted for provided that parties vote in accordance with the policies they put to the electorate. However on past experience I say that that is a big if. 
But I fear that this situation is not mainly about that. I fear it is a contrivance to pander to political positioning in order to allow Ministers to have their cake and eat it—to have the baubles of office without the responsibilities of executive positions. In 2½ years will Winston Peters and Peter Dunne again be making overtures to National from their positions in a Labour-led Government? How will the new Minister of Foreign Affairs draw the line between his portfolio where he is bound to represent the views of the Government and everything else where he is not? Can he separate foreign policy from environment policy when we are party to so many environmental treaties? Can he be a Minister of Foreign Affairs who opposes his Government’s climate change policy under the Kyoto Protocol agreement that his Government helped to negotiate and is a party to? Can he separate foreign affairs from defence? Will he have to be mute in his overseas meetings on the dangers of a free-trade agreement with China leaving it to the Greens to be the sole advocates of fairer trade? Can he separate foreign affairs from immigration when immigration policy is often a reciprocal arrangement negotiated between countries? 
Labour has been very clever with the fine print of the agreement with New Zealand First. Superannuation is to rise to 66 percent of the average ordinary-time wage but only during this term of Government. Then inflation will be allowed to catch up with it again reducing it to 65 percent. Labour knows that 66 percent is not affordable over the long term as the population ages and that senior citizens although absolutely deserving of security in their older years generally are not in as desperate straits or as needy as our poorest children or the mentally ill to use two examples. Let us take the agreement to raise the minimum wage to $12 an hour which is a measure that the Greens argued for too. New Zealand First and the Greens both received the same promise in our agreements—that the rise would occur by 2008 if the economy allowed it. Well that is a huge loophole when we know that the economy will slow over this term. There are no policy concessions in the foreign policy area so Winston Peters will be the mouthpiece for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade and for Labour in his major portfolio. What will he look back on in 3 years’ time as his major achievements? 
Then there is the extraordinary situation of United Future. Its caucus has reduced from eight members to three but it holds a ministerial warrant. That certainly does not have much to do with what the voters voted for. How will the new Minister of Revenue separate his portfolio from the whole fiscal and economic stance of the Government which he is likely to disagree with? Will Labour capitulate to him over the carbon charge leaving us with no economic incentive at all to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and so increasing the financial risk of a big Kyoto Protocol deficit? Will he be held responsible for that deficit? Is he required to support the whole health policy or only the matters within his delegation? I see that the Minister of Health is having a little chuckle. 
If it were not so serious this term would be a very entertaining 3 years. But it is serious because the country is facing major economic threats and this patched-together combination of parties is not well placed to address them. We have had 6 years of unprecedented economic growth. Despite what the parties on the right would have us believe the average inflation-corrected economic growth rate over the last 6 years has been almost 4 percent.It is a very long time since New Zealand had a growth rate like that over any sustained period. That is a result Labour is very proud of. It has reduced unemployment to record low levels raised incomes for those in well-paid employment raised Government revenue and enabled more spending. But this growth was pursued with no attention to whether it was sustainable—and it is not. Not only can it not continue but just as it slows we must start to pay the enormous costs of that past growth which are coming home to haunt us. 
Economic growth has not been sustainable because it has been pursued with no whole-of-Government attempt to increase energy productivity. In fact energy use and in particular fossil-fuel use have grown faster than the economy. This leaves us facing a half-billion-dollar projected deficit in meeting our Kyoto Protocol commitments when we had the opportunity to have a surplus. We should be very clear that the costs the Kyoto Protocol may now impose on us are the fault not of the protocol but of our own refusal to take seriously enough the need to use energy more effectively. 
Economic growth has not been sustainable because it has been driven by high immigration and a bullish property market. If our prosperity depends on pumping up activity in building and infrastructure just to meet the needs of more people what happens when we decide New Zealand is full? Do we believe we can keep increasing our population forever? If not relying on that for our prosperity is a short-term strategy. It has also resulted in homes becoming unaffordable for ordinary Kiwis. 
The dairy industry and its exports have been the poster child of our growing economy. Fonterra has positioned itself well in international markets and world prices have been kind. As a result prices of farmland have risen making it even harder than it always has been for young farmers to buy their own farms. The average age of farmers is now in the mid-50s and that is not sustainable either. 
The growth of the dairy industry has been at the expense of our rivers our aquifers and our soils. It has raised demand for water to convert dry land to dairy farms depleting rivers and aquifers. It has raised nitrogen inputs by 160 percent in just 6 years in order to intensify stocking rates. The rapid increase in runoff has led to seriously polluted rivers and streams—Lake Ellesmere is biologically dead. It has increased energy demand for irrigation with further pressure on rivers for hydro development and water conflicts between farmers and energy companies. Further growth in the number of dairy cows and the inputs of nitrogen fertiliser is not sustainable. 
So where will our growth come from next? Our economic growth has not been sustainable because it has been led by a binge of consumer spending that has left us heavily in debt to the rest of the world. The gap between what we earn in the world and what we spend has never been higher. Borrowing for investment is one thing; borrowing for consumption is another and there is little sign that the warnings of the Reserve Bank will be heeded. Once if we wanted to borrow money we went to the bank and pleaded for a loan. Now the banks come to us in our living rooms every night pleading with us to put our new car or holiday on the mortgage. 
Our economic growth has not been sustainable because the benefits have not been shared. Although the Government is to be commended for the record low rates of unemployment they are not so low for Maori and there are still literally hundreds of thousands of people who cannot obtain jobs at all or who cannot get work doing what they want to do at pay rates high enough to sustain a reasonable quality of life. Tinkering at the edges of the benefit system is not going to solve this problem nor is putting off for another 3 years raising the minimum wage to $12 an hour. It is a real pity that Labour will not take the brave step needed to increase the minimum wage to $12 an hour now as advocated by the Green Party the Council of Trade Unions New Zealand First and also I believe the Maori Party during the recent election campaign. Working for Families and the accommodation supplement are between the two of them a massive taxpayer subsidy to employers. It is time employers paid their fair share. 
At the same time high rates of child poverty continue. The Green Party is saddened that extensions to Working for Families will only increase discrimination against the children of beneficiaries at a time when sole-parent families are disproportionately disadvantaged already. Labour and its partners seem determined to continue to intensify the income gap between working and non-working parents which is something that only makes life harder for the children of beneficiaries and leads to poor health education and employment outcomes for yet another generation. 
So high growth has left us in a very vulnerable situation. On top of this comes rapidly rising oil prices. The Greens have warned of this since 2003 and wearing various other hats for the last 30 years in fact. It has been as plain as day for three decades that the day would come when oil supply could no longer increase at the same rate as demand and all the evidence is that that is starting to happen this year. How long it will take before oil supply actually decreases and how fast it will decrease are still debatable but the fact that we are at or close to the peak is much clearer than it was when the Greens first warned of it. I know from campaign meetings around the country that the people know it. Business knows it. Bush and Cheney have known it for a decade which is why they are in Iraq. It seems that some members of this House may be the last ostriches to keep their heads in the sand. 
For decades successive New Zealand Governments have behaved as though cheap oil was inexhaustible. We have built more and more big roads we have imported cars that use twice as much fuel as they need to—we still do not even label them to help consumers—and we have ignored public transport in the belief that no one will use it yet as soon as another commuter train is put on in Auckland it is full. High and rising oil prices combined with a slowing economy and a big balance of payments deficit will not make it an easy ride for this Government. If one thing is clear it is that it cannot be “business as usual” in this term of Parliament. Even Labour which after the Greens has the best grasp of this stuff has failed totally to address the unsustainability of the growth it is so proud of. How much will Labour be able to do now that it is saddled with its new partners? 
So where will the Greens be as our country struggles with those challenges? It appears the former member for Tauranga cannot keep his pre-election promises about abstention so we will keep them for him and abstain on confidence and money supply. We will vote case by case on the issues. The difference however is that the Greens have made substantial policy gains and have some hands-on projects to run in the next 3 years. The urgency is such that we will grasp any chance to begin the transformation we need to a sustainable and fair economy. While others preen themselves around the cocktail circuit with titles and limousines we will be working to make real change. My aim is in 3 years’ time for New Zealanders to look at our work and say: “The Greens didn’t get the baubles of office they didn’t get the resources and staff that Ministers have but with only six MPs and a small staff they have made more positive difference to our lives and the future of our country than those who did.” 
In this term I have been given responsibility for improving New Zealand’s energy efficiency under the legislation I brought to the House and had passed 6 years ago. The Energy Efficiency and Conservation Act has not yet fulfilled its promise. It has not led to a whole-of-Government approach. We still have no standards or consumer information on vehicle fuel consumption. The new building standard for homes is dragging its feet. We are insulating and damp-proofing some houses but at the pace we are going it will take around 50 years to retrofit the 300000 homes that have inadequate ceiling insulation alone. New plant is still being built that will cost its owners dearly in wasted energy over its lifetime. The Government commitment to solar energy has been derisory with it providing only $400000 a year for a loan scheme even though the industry has made great strides in that time. I have been inundated for years with letters from people who see the sense of using the sun to heat their water and want to invest in it but find that the price is too high. We will bring down the price of solar water heating only by building capacity in the industry and with bulk purchase by competitive tender. That is what I want to organise so that we can get half a million solar panels on Kiwi roofs over the next 5 years. 
My late colleague Rod Donald was to have been given responsibility for a Buy Kiwi Made campaign to identify New Zealand - made products and raise awareness that whenever we spend a dollar it is a political act. We can choose to spend it to support Kiwi businesses and Kiwi jobs and reduce our balance of payments deficit or we can use it to support jobs and profits in other countries and worsen our economic difficulties. The Greens are committed to undertaking that work both in honour of Rod Donald and because we know its importance. We will be working with the Government to finalise who will drive this work. 
Metiria Turei will be working closely with the Minister of Education to build capacity for environmental education so that eventually the very good guidelines and strategies developed by the Government some years ago can be implemented in every school. If we are to face the challenges of the future we must have citizens who are ecologically literate and understand cause and effect in our use of resources and our management of wastes. 
Sue Kedgley will be working with the Minister of Health on a range of initiatives to improve the nutritional quality of the food New Zealand children eat especially in schools. We know that one-third of New Zealand’s children are overweight or obese. We know that many of them will get serious illnesses like type 2 diabetes. We know that much of the food they eat offers huge doses of fat sugar and salt but few of the nutrients they need to learn and to grow. We know that that will cost us millions of health dollars in the future unless we act responsibly now. If we are serious about improving the well-being of our children and their readiness to learn we must reduce the overwhelming commercial pressures on them to eat unhealthy food and we must create environments that encourage healthy eating. That means starting with schools. We want all our schools to teach children basic nutrition cooking and gardening skills and to encourage healthy eating. 
The agreement between the Government and the Greens acknowledges the intention to increase support for public transport to extend eligibility for student allowances to increase the level of overseas development assistance and to further reduce levels of child poverty. In addition it commits to several new policies and Budget initiatives. 
The Greens made it clear that although we would not insist on the reinstatement of a moratorium on the release of genetically modified organisms we would expect some progress towards greater security around genetic engineering. The Government is committed to working with us to provide segregation throughout the production chain between any GE organism that might be grown in the future and other products. That will give producers greater security that they will continue to be able to provide the level of product purity for GE-free food that their markets demand. The Greens continue to believe that the release of any live GE organism would be an act of crazy self-destruction in the farming sector but we still consider it worthwhile to improve the rules governing any such release that might occur in the future despite the wishes of the 70 percent of the people who do not want that release as shown in successive polls. 
Sue Kedgley will also be working with the Minister of Agriculture on a Budget initiative to provide enhanced advisory services to the organic sector. New Zealand lags way behind Europe and other countries in organics with less than 1 percent of our agricultural land in organic production and we are missing out on the expanding international niche market for organic food. Our organic sector needs the sort of reliable political and institutional support that organic sectors in Europe receive. We hope to work closely with the Minister over the next few years so that we can encourage approximately 200 farmers to convert to organics each year and can achieve the goal of organics becoming a billion-dollar industry by 2011. 
The Green Party believes that the Maori seats should be entrenched in the same way that the number of South Island seats is entrenched. The Government has committed in our agreement at least to retain the Maori seats for as long as Maori wish to do so. 
We have negotiated a conservation Budget initiative to provide intensive habitat management at additional sites in order to restore populations of endangered species in cooperation with local communities. This combines two key issues for the Greens. We are still not turning the tide of extinctions of native species and more effort is needed to protect the places where they live. But that cannot be done by only a Government department. We strongly believe that communities must be involved in conservation and this is an opportunity for the Department of Conservation to work jointly with local people who care about their environment. We look forward to discussion with the Minister about where those additional sites will be. 
The Greens are keen for New Zealand to carve out a role as peacemaker—not war-maker—in the world and through our agreement with the Government we will be working closely together to enhance New Zealand’s role in peacemaking. We will also be defending the traditional legal protections of citizens and will argue against any new anti-terrorism legislation of the sort that has recently been introduced in Britain and Australia and has been much criticised by civil libertarians. 
Tomorrow we welcome Nandor Tanczos back into our parliamentary team not to fill the shoes of Rod Donald but to fill his own shoes again. He left a big gap in our caucus when we just failed to win enough votes for a seventh MP. Nandor Tanczos will be taking on the environment and justice portfolios where I know his experience and interest in sustainable land management waste management permaculture prison reform and restorative justice will serve the Greens well. 
So the Greens are ready for another parliamentary term. We are still grieving for the loss of Rod Donald but we are encouraged by the mark his life made on so many people and determined to honour his memory in the way he would most have wanted: by actively pursuing the causes of social and international justice peace ecological integrity and democracy; by taking responsibility wherever it is offered to us to create the transformation this planet and its people need; and by holding the Government to account when it needs reminding where the public interest lies. We have a sense of urgency that there is not much time to make these changes. The planet’s capacity to endure the effects of human greed is limited but we also know that change to be lasting must be non-violent evolutionary understood and broadly accepted. It is about states of mind not just laws. That is where our challenge lies.