Williams Arena; Brownlee GerryARENA WILLIAMS (Labour—Manurewa): Manu tiriamanu werohiaKi te poho o Te RākaKa tau rērereKa tau mai i te ruhiE tau e koiaKoia koiaKo tara-raurikiKī mai i MāuiEhara i te WhituMe te Waru eE tau e koia.Koia![Bird of the planting timebird of the ground-breaking timeupon the chest of Māui's fatherLanding after a long flightLanding here exhaustedit will land at our kūmara-digging time.Dig dig!The first kūmara shootsFrom Māui are already filling outBut don't plant them in NovemberOr in DecemberSettle down and dig.Dig!]I begin with that waiata that whakataukī which has been repeated through the generations of Ngāi Tahu since time immemorial. It is a part of the history we as Ngāi Tahu uri tell ourselves and tell to our children and today my colleague Rino Tirikatene joins the history of Ngāi Tahu in those things which make us who we are. The Tirikatenes represent three generations of proud Labour MPs who have served this Parliament with dignity with honour and with loyalty to their values and to their people. I want to speak more about my colleague Rino. He's been really important to me. He's someone that I've held in the highest regard while he served here on the caucus benches with me and I'll miss him very much.Before I talk to my other colleagues—and I'm getting some ribbing from my colleague here Kelvin Davis about not speaking about him—let me first turn to the topic of this debate. Around the House we have heard since question time those criticisms from this side of the House about what this Government is planning to do and what vision we see but I want to take us back to 2018. On this day in 2018 I was a young mum. I had a three-month-old baby at the time and we'd just bought our first house in west Auckland. I was watching the news and it was the day that the Rt Hon Dame Jacinda Ardern had introduced in this House the legislation that she had talked so much about in her parliamentary career and that she had always wanted to bring to this House about child poverty reduction and for me as a young mum I saw that piece of legislation as a moment that articulated everything that Labour stood for for me. I got involved in Young Labour as a teenager because my family had always been involved in Labour. My dad had been a Labour member since he was at teachers college at Ardmore. This was a moment where Labour was putting forward a vision for a New Zealand that put children first and that centred the needs of the child and not just those children whose parents could ensure that they could get to school and not just those children who had a good start in life. This was about an Act to hold successive Governments to account to ensure that everyone in this Parliament had a set of principles and a set of goals that would hold us to ensuring that child poverty was reduced. Compare that to today when we're looking at a Government programme that is full of repeal that—as the Hon James Shaw has said—is a revenge Government and that walks back the progress that we have made that was often bipartisan. Around this House we came to agreements on those big-picture things like the future of our country when faced with the threat of climate change. We are looking now at a Government with no vision and it is not speaking to those people like me with a young baby in their arms looking for something that we could be proud of in the New Zealand that will be our home for many decades to come.It is a Government of broken promises. Those broken promises are very usefully detailed in the media at the moment. There's a really useful RNZ story—and I'd recommend that everyone go and have a look at it—about the cuts that are proposed for the different Government departments and those weren't necessarily the Government departments that were discussed as needing to look for cuts in the election campaign. So it's useful for all New Zealanders to know just what we're looking at here and those aren't necessarily just back-office cuts. They're the cuts to things like public services that people rely upon and it makes you wonder when looking at that list and the departments that are up to find a 6.5 or 7.5 percent cut what kind of services we can expect to be able to rely upon in the future—things that make us pay more for the everyday lives that we already lead. You have to wonder whether things that have made a huge difference in the lives of the South Aucklanders that I represent in Manurewa are going to stay—things like the school donations programme which means that parents in Manurewa don't have to pay the donations that were actually compulsory payments to our public schools. You know I believe it's right that everyone should be able to attend their public school regardless of whether they can pay a donation or not and so that's why the Labour Government introduced that programme.You've got to wonder whether those things are safe and sacrosanct given that all Public Service departments are being asked to find these cuts. Things like the maintenance of those walking tracks that the Department of Conservation maintains for all New Zealanders to be able to use over the summer—you know I walked one of those over the summer and I'm sure many in this House did. We've got to make sure that those things keep on being maintained in our regions so that people in the cities can get out and enjoy our natural environment and have a connection to those spaces.It's important then to look at those broken promises in the context of what New Zealanders can expect as leadership from our politicians and again here I speak to those 10000 people who came and made the pilgrimage to Tūrangawaewae when asked by the Kīngitanga to come and have a kōrero about the principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. Do you know what struck me then? It wasn't the sheer number of people who came along to Tūrangawaewae—because it was absolutely overwhelming—but it was the number of young people who came just to listen just to participate in the youth forum just to swim in the waters of the Waikato and just to talk with each other about why they were here and why they had come and what they were studying at school or where they had come from and what small town. It was an atmosphere of young people expecting leadership not only from elected members but from their iwi leaders and from their local politicians—from the people who seek to make decisions that matter for their lives.So all the politicians there—and I congratulate everyone who made the time to come along—heard the strong message from rangatahi which was Be a part of the ongoing conversation. Listen to us." We do not need to relitigate the principles of the Treaty because we have been having that debate for many many years. For successive generations we have been defining as tangata Tiriti as Māori what it means for young people to live in a country where the Treaty is a founding document. What we need is a vision for the future from our elected representatives to move forward and define something that not only honours those principles of the Treaty but also realises the dream of the Treaty to protect our taonga to protect our natural environment and to have a climate where people can breathe and live in our country. Those are the promises of the Treaty that our rangatahi want elected members to fulfil and that is the burden we take on our shoulders when we seek election to represent them.I want as well to speak about the contrast between being in a forum like that and having the vision of these young New Zealanders resting so weightily on my shoulders and then hearing from what is a shambolic and divided approach to the Treaty of Waitangi from this coalition Government. We hear some members calling for unity and other members acting divisively. You cannot have both of those alongside each other—those two things cannot be true.So it makes me look to those leaders who I admire the most. I got into politics as I said when I was a teenager but it was because of people like Nanaia Mahuta who I saw carving the way for young wahine Māori in a forum that was often hostile turf. She led on affordable water and it cost her personally. She was trying to do a set of reforms that we all know in our heart of hearts need to happen. Someone needs to pay for the pipes. The councils can't pay for the pipes; we should probably pay for the pipes. She paid for it personally because she had to wear the misinformation the vitriol and the personal attacks that come with being out in the public eye because you are a wahine Māori. She did that and I'm proud of her. We haven't yet had a chance to mihi to her in here and I hope that we do.Another leader in our party is Kelvin Davis. He will give me a growling after this but when I speak of the history that we tell ourselves growing up in Te Ao Māori about our leaders about our elected representatives we will tell his story. I am so proud of Rino Tirikatene and his grandfather and his aunt who have served in this Parliament too but Kelvin also stands on the shoulders of his tupuna Karaitiana Takamoana who was a representative of Eastern Māori in 1871. Kelvin has a proud history of leading within his community and within his school. He is someone who is approachable who is kind and who always has time for his people and for those colleagues like me who annoyingly make speeches about him in the House and ask him a bunch of questions. I'm so proud of the work we've done in this House to unite and to bring about a kotahitanga that we can continue to progress and continue to realise under the Treaty of Waitangi and its promises. I will continue to work for that and I hope everyone in this House can too. SPEAKER: I now call to make her maiden statement to the House Rima Nakhle."