Tolley AnneHon ANNE TOLLEY (National—East Coast): It's an absolute pleasure to stand in the House and speak on this very special day for New Zealand women and for the New Zealand Parliament as the 74th woman elected to Parliament. I must say it was with some amazement to find when I became the Minister of Education that I was the first ever woman Minister of Education in New Zealand in 2008. Can I also thank Commonwealth Women Parliamentarians for the breakfast this morning and for these wonderful camellias. I'm so privileged to have working in my office a fantastic artist in Robyn Watchorn and she is so proud. She's home ill and she's watching as all the women in Parliament are wearing these special camellias.It is good to remember today marking the passing of the legislation and also remembering the amendment that was made to it at that time. There was only one amendment and it removed our right to stand for Parliament. That wasn't reinserted until 1915 but it wasn't until 1933 that we had the first woman elected.In preparation for this debate today I researched what had happened in my electorate for women in public office and I have to say it's a pretty dismal story. If you look at Whakatāne where the first town council was established in 1900 it wasn't until 1953—50 years later—that Mrs Winstone was elected to the council. If you look at Ōpōtiki which was established in 1877 and had its own town council in 1899 it was 1974 before the first woman was elected to that council.Kawerau was a lot better I have to say. Kawerau's town council—and then a board of commissioners and then it became a borough—was established in 1954 and the first woman was elected in 1959. Since then they've had two or three women on every council since and of course in 1986 they elected Lyn Hartley as mayor. I should say—poor old Whakatāne; sorry I missed it out—that in 1989 Whakatāne elected a woman mayor Mrs Lorraine Brill and in 2006 in the whole of the electorate the only woman chief executive of a council was Mrs Diane Turner.The East Cape electorate has had many shapes over the years and when it was the Bay of Plenty it had no women representatives in this Parliament. When it became the East Cape electorate in 1978 Anne Fraser—now Anne Collins—was the first woman elected in 1984 and I'm the second from that part of the world.So let's turn to Gisborne. Did Gisborne do any better? Sort of. In 1925 Agnes Scott was elected to the hospital board but it was 1962 before a woman was elected to the Gisborne District Council. It was 1960 when Esme Tombleson was elected as an MP for the Gisborne area.There is an amazing story that epitomises the struggle and the prejudice that those early suffragettes faced from Gisborne. In 1915 Agnes Scott stood for the hospital board in Gisborne. There were 5000 registered voters and she got 900 votes but came fifth for four places. A couple of months later one of the members of the board resigned. Now if that were today the next highest candidate would take their place on that board. But the mayor of the town invoked a very unknown bylaw took it to the council for a vote it was tied twice and on his casting vote he elected himself to be the replacement member. So she missed out. So Gisborne could have been one of the very early places—1915.One other story from Ōpōtiki that I just want to share is that the majority of the women who stood signed the petition and then voted were ordinary housewives. They described themselves as domestic workers. That's what this is about—the ordinary women of New Zealand standing up and having a voice. Kia ora tātou.