Delahunty Catherine: Obituaries — Hon Parekura HoromiaText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDelahunty Catherine: Obituaries — Hon Parekura Horomia[Sitting date: 07 May 2013. Volume:689;Page:9605. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green): He mihi nui ki te tangata whenua o Mangatuna o Te Aitanga-a-Hauiti me ngā iwi katoa o Te Tai Rāwhiti tēnā koutou.[The locals of Mangatuna Te Aitanga-a-Hauiti and all the tribes of the East Coast are greatly appreciated. Well done.]I would just like to stand and acknowledge all who have come from Te Tai Rāwhiti. I had the privilege of living and working in your rohe for some time. I acknowledge your loss and your contribution by giving us one of your favourite sons. There is a whakataukī: “He aha te mea nui o te ao? He tangata he tangata he tangata.”[What is the most important thing in the world? It is people it is people it is people.]Parekura certainly was a great man in many ways. He was great in size great in appetite great in rhetoric and great as a leader who showed us what leadership can mean. I did not know him as well as many of you but living on the Coast and working in the rohe you could not avoid the reputation and the experience of seeing him everywhere.I will always remember one morning at 7 a.m. I was driving down from Ūawa to the coast and there he was fencing. He was the Minister of Māori Affairs at the time and he was fencing with a couple of other people just getting out there doing stuff before he started his day’s work. I think that is the kind of MP we need along with everybody else.I would like to acknowledge the fact that he was a shearer because I also spent 10 years in a shearing gang and one thing you learn in that environment—sometimes it is more relaxing than Parliament—is how to avoid wool-gathering. You know when people are wool-gathering you know how to identify wool-gathering and you also haveto work with some real dags which I think was good practice for the new careers that both Parekura and I took up—there was certainly plenty of that.But I would also like to acknowledge that as the Prime Minister said we have lost a few MPs in our time. I would like to thank him for bringing Rod Donald into the room. I acknowledge that for Labour it is different. All of us will feel the loss—all of his friends the Māori caucus in particular across Parliament—but for you it is different because you have to carry on every day. The party has to carry on every day. We know what that feels like and we appreciate the rawness of his absence. It is going to be felt every day by your party. We lived through that and we had a lot of support for which we are grateful but when somebody goes before we thought they would go it is hard on the people closest. So I just want to acknowledge that—both the whānau and the colleagues who worked particularly closely with him.I would just also like to briefly say that I was involved with the Community Employment Group when Parekura was the leader and he was spoken about in reverent tones because no one really knew what he did but they knew he was making things happen. One of the things I would like to honour is that from Moerewa to Wairoa Parekura really got the funding to places where it needed to be and he really understood what community economic development was. In his own unique way he made a big difference to those of us who were community workers at the time. And I just want to acknowledge that. It should never be forgotten. It was an awesome organisation and he was a real rangatira. He really led and he really made sure that the resources were there with the people who needed them.I would like to also acknowledge the tangi—what an incredible moment. The karanga just brought all my own grief back to the surface like it does for all of us in the most wonderful way and made me feel so honoured to be there. The paepae was just extraordinary. You know you saw this line of incredible rangatira and their speeches were fantastic. The kitchen was pumping and all of the rangatahi of Ūawa were out there doing their thing and directing traffic and Maryan was out there directing traffic and there were the bosses. It was a fantastic experience to come to the tangihanga but always there was sadness in the knowledge that we were saying goodbye. I reckon that if Parekura had looked down he would have thought: “What is going on there? What are they doing there? I better get there.” because it was such a big tangi and he would never have expected that for himself and that is leadership in another way.I would finally just like to say that the concept of public service is not always acknowledged in the 21st century. This man was a true public servant and as someone else has pointed out he was very unwell and we took him for granted—we thought he would always carry on. Those of us who were working with him from more of a distance did not realise; we did not know. But he did give his life in public service and that is the measure of a true rangatira. Moe moe e rangatira. Tēnā koe.