Mooney Joseph; Mallard TrevorJOSEPH MOONEY (National—Southland): It is with a sense of both pride and humility that I look forward to my first term in the 53rd Parliament as the member of Parliament for Southland. The electorate of Southland is both a regional economic powerhouse in farming tourism horticulture construction and an increasing presence in information technology. My 11-year-old daughter said to me yesterday as we walked around Parliament that she wouldn't have believed she'd be doing that a year ago and I replied that I wouldn't have either. It's been a tumultuous period in our country's history that has brought me to this House to serve the people of my electorate and this nation. It was a challenging campaign for the Southland electorate but they handled it with aplomb and I particularly want to thank my campaign chair Jeff Grant who stepped up to lead the campaign when I was selected. I also want to thank each and every member of the campaign team and all the hard-working volunteers who gave of their time freely because they believe the National Party will deliver the best for the people of my region and of this country. I want to acknowledge the Young Nats who I know are watching tonight—their help was invaluable—and also acknowledge the president and the board members who are here this evening. I also want to acknowledge and thank the Hon Judith Collins who stepped up to lead our party and our campaign at short notice and did a sterling job of doing so. I'd like to acknowledge my wife Silvia who is the bedrock of our family. She saw something in me 20-odd years ago when I had nothing to my name and she has stuck by me through thick and thin since. She's an incredible woman and I'm very lucky to have her by my side. Her parents will be watching this speech on the internet from Germany and I want to say thank you to them as well for all their support over the years. I also want to thank my children Estrella Moritz and Soleil for all of your support putting up with me when I'm away a lot of the time and for being great human beings. I also wish to acknowledge my mother Bronwen who sits in the gallery tonight and to acknowledge her long varied and often very challenging journey which has led to her tonight seeing one of her eight children making a maiden speech in Parliament—who would have thought? I was motivated to offer to serve because as a child I vividly experienced the impact of decisions made in this House and given the challenges facing our country I'll be a voice for pragmatism and of ambition for our nation but also of caution. I was a child in the 1980s when the Labour Government embarked on a radical programme of restructuring the economy. Change was needed but I can tell this House that change needs to be managed carefully. Those changes in the 1980s had a huge impact on many lives of people in the rural sector with many farmers losing their farms or experiencing significant hardship. My stepfather worked on farms but lost his job during that period and struggled to find more work. I recall my family going hungry during those times and I remember days on end when we had no food to eat and going to the river to look for blackberries for food. For a variety of reasons my younger brother and I chose to leave home when I was 11 and he was nine. We'd planned to travel from Hawke's Bay to the goldfields in Central Otago live in old mining huts and make a living panning for gold. We managed to get to Wellington but we were stymied by Cook Strait and ended up living for a bit over a week on the streets of Wellington huddling together for warmth on cold rainy nights in flax bushes trying to figure out a way to get across that Cook Strait. Let me tell you that Wellington is a cold hard place when you're a child living on its streets. I remember this every day when I come to this House and it serves to remind me that while I'm here I need to do my best to ensure the policies that go through this House do not have unintended consequences that hurt our country's children. I'm a Kiwi through and through and I'm very proud of my country. One of my ancestors was a goldminer in Central Otago. My paternal grandfather played cricket for New Zealand and was a successful Wellington businessman. My maternal grandfather was a captain in the New Zealand Army fighting in North Africa and Greece during the Second World War who suffered severe war injuries but went on to found a successful business in Auckland on his return. As I look around the walls of this House I see the names of theatres of war where New Zealanders have served and supported our democracy including Egypt and North Africa where my grandfather served. Walking in the corridors of this House I've also come across a photograph of another ancestor I recently learnt about a great-great-uncle by the name of the Hon Bill Fox who served in the Cabinet of Walter Nash's Government. A number of my forebears were successful in their lives but this did not carry through to my generation. I say this as a salutary lesson that the success of each generation is the challenge and the responsibility of that generation. The same is true for our country. Our success in the past is not a guarantee of success tomorrow and we must all work both carefully and ambitiously to continue and grow our country's success. I have both a practical and a professional background and a background in both rural and urban New Zealand. In my younger days in the Hawke's Bay where I was born I've cleaned water troughs drenched sheep driven tractors picked apples pruned pine trees and picked up thousands of hay-bales and transported them around the countryside stacking them into haysheds. As a teenager I went to high school in Auckland. I should say that it was with mixed success as my high school career was ultimately unsuccessful and I left without University Entrance and then went on to spend a number of years in the school of hard knocks. I was fortunate to have a lot to do with the Māori community growing up and it fostered a deep interest in our country's history and the Treaty of Waitangi to the extent that I first came to Parliament as a teenager to interview an MP about its place in New Zealand. I also helped build small companies both in New Zealand and overseas and experienced the challenges of building and managing teams making sure that both staff and the bills got paid all the while dealing with seemingly endless regulations while trying to make sure the job got done. That ultimately prompted me to study law as I realised that law was in effect the DNA of our society. I went to university as an adult student with small children and managed to get an honours degree in law with children climbing my shoulders while I studied maybe proving that failure at school doesn't necessarily mean an absence of academic ability. While at university and afterwards I also volunteered as a firefighter—a rewarding and sometimes challenging role being part of a close-knit team being of service to the community—and I've also spent time in the army reserves. It has emphasised to me the value of volunteers in our communities who do so much to weave the fabric that binds our communities together and makes them work. I went on after graduation to eventually build my own law practice from scratch in Otago and Southland and made it a success. We are seeing a contest of ideas and ideals both globally and nationally. I strongly believe that the narrative of hard work and self-responsibility being the surest path to success is vital for the future of our country. We all need to do our bit to grow the pie rather than trying to divide it into ever-smaller pieces. I know from my life experience that if parents don't have jobs kids go hungry. So it is one of the key responsibilities of Government to create a policy framework that empowers businesses that empowers employers and that empowers employees. I strongly believe in the success of our primary sectors to ensure domestic food security employment and export earnings. Tourism is also a hugely important part of our economy and of my region. We need to do all we can to support the industry and its people until the borders can open and I will just take this opportunity to strongly encourage this Government to urgently work on opening the trans-Tasman bubble with Australia which the scientific experts are telling us can be done safely. Broader afield we're also witnessing conflicts brewing between big powers that haven't been seen in a very long time and they are right on our back doorstep in the Asia-Pacific. I believe we will need to carefully manage our economic and security interests in an increasingly unstable geopolitical environment where nationalism and protectionism seem to be growing apace. In particular we will need to proactively advocate for the continuation of a rules-based multilateral trading framework. It is crucial to our economic survival as a small trading nation at the bottom of the Pacific. The Southland electorate is an incredible place. I think it may well be the most incredible electorate in the world but of course I'm biased. It has the snowy peaks and deep glacial-carved lakes region of Glenorchy and Queenstown and the historic old goldmining regions of Clyde Alexandra and Roxburgh that now produce fruit and wine and electricity. There's some of the Catlins the southernmost part of the Mainland with some of the best big-wave surfing in the country at Papatowai and a great community heart in Ōwaka. Then there's the heartland of the South: the land of milk and honey that is West Otago from the likes of Clinton Tapanui and Moa Flat through the central heartland Southland towns of Gore Mataura and Winton. This is the productive machine of the South with hard-working pragmatic folks who get on with things and do an amazing job of both looking after the land and producing products for our country to sell on the world stage. Out towards western Southland is the land of big country big skies big mountains and big fiords. I'm of course talking about Te Ānau Manapōuri most of Fiordland including Milford Sound. It's a breathtaking and incredibly diverse region. But the greatest treasure are the people who are folk with big hearts who are hard-working and are very sharp but don't tend to boast about it to the rest of the world. That reminds me of the Māori whakataukī or proverb 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 the people the people the people. I'm proud to be a representative of the National Party. The National Party has a philosophy based on true concern for the needs and aspirations of each individual and is the party best suited to meet future challenges because its roots and philosophy is visionary reformist purposeful and based on an understanding of human qualities and aspirations. A strong and successful country depends on strong and successful communities and those strong and successful communities in turn depend on strong and successful families however those are constituted which in turn depend on strong and successful individuals. The State is not an end in itself but is a means of helping people achieve their own goals. If there's one thing we can be sure of it is that the future will be unpredictable. We need to provide the systems of Government that enable our individuals our families our communities and ultimately our nation to be successful. All citizens are equal before the law and therefore all citizens have an equal opportunity to develop their inherent talents and pursue their aspirations. The National Party also has deep roots in the New Zealand Liberal Party which was the first organised political party in the country. I raise this because the National Party has a very long history of taking care of the vulnerable while also building the framework for every New Zealander to realise their own aspirations. The Liberal Government established the basis of the later welfare State with old-age pensions. In 1893 the Liberal Government extended voting rights to women making New Zealand the first country in the world to enact universal female suffrage. The Liberal Party was also the party of Sir Apirana Ngata who served as the MP for Eastern Māori for nearly 40 years and made a vital contribution to the revival of Māori in the early 20th century. He used his knowledge of the Pākehā world and his professional skills to assist his people to develop and farm their land while also encouraging Māori to preserve their culture and to maintain their own identity. We are a nation of adventurers of risk takers of nation builders of dreamers and doers—people who have collectively chosen to make their home under the roof of the southern skies and its constellation of stars. All of us come here with an adventurous DNA whether it traces back hundreds of years or whether we personally made that journey to travel to these islands ourselves. Many of our ancestors navigated their way to these islands looking towards and guided by those stars and now some of our countrymen and women launch fiery rockets into the starry skies from Māhia Peninsula in the Hawke's Bay. They embody the sense of vision and ambition that we need to foster and celebrate in this country. I know Māhia well from surfing the kinetic energy of its ocean swells as a youngster. It was a remote place then which was about as far removed from space-going rockets as you could get. Now that is where rockets launch satellites regularly into the stars and is a perfect reflection of how the future can quickly become our reality with the right people ambitious dreams resources hard work and the right policy frameworks. We are a nation that came together and agreed on making sacrifices to eliminate COVID-19 from these shores to the best of our ability. Let us also be a nation that comes together and says we are a place where our children feel valued and welcome and can realise incredible opportunities that harness their talents their hopes and their dreams. Let us be a nation where our children get the best start in life by receiving the best education facilitated with the help of cutting-edge technology. Let us be a nation that comes together and says we can have the best and most effective healthcare services in the world because a healthy population means a successful population. Let us be a nation where the best and the brightest in the world dare to live dare to dream dare to aspire dare to action those dreams and dare to be and do their best. Let us be a nation that encourages the growth of technology leading the world into the stars the oceans the land biotech nanotechnology fintech and others. Technology is how our species has lifted itself up and achieved its best and we have the tools and the space in this remote yet hyper-connected nation to be at the forefront of some of the best technology which can solve our biggest issues from health to education to housing to climate resilience. Let us be a nation that is ambitious in its infrastructure development and has a time horizon looking ahead 20 to 30 years so that the next generation has the tools it needs to be world leaders. Let us be a nation that comes together and looks to its abundance of land and resources and enables our people to solve their own housing needs by building many more warm and healthy homes. Let us be one of the most productive and effective nations and encourage and celebrate the people the businesses and the policies that can make that a reality. Let us be a people who rejoice in our great fortune to be fellow travellers under these southern skies to celebrate our great collective heart and our practical pragmatic minds to treasure and celebrate the achievements of our people. For there's more that binds us together than divides us in this land. It is with a great deal of optimism and hope that I look towards the future of this great country and the great region that I am so fortunate to represent in this Parliament. I look forward to making my contribution in this House by helping bend the arc of history towards the realisation of the vision and ambition that will ensure our people can make the most of their gifts and their talents and are motivated to give their very best for themselves their families their communities and our country. Tēnā koutou tēnā koutou tēnā koutou katoa.[Applause]WaiataSPEAKER: Can I now ask the supporters of the last two speakers to move out as quickly as they can in order to allow the next group to come in. Thank you. It's very unusual for me to say "Open the doors." but open the doors. Can I just ask any security staff who can hear me to open the two doors to the Speaker's gallery as well so that we can have people coming in through three doors instead of one. Thank you. I call Christopher Luxon to make his maiden statement."