Hayes John: Address in Reply 
Hayes John: Address in Reply 
[Volume:628;Page:282] 
JOHN HAYES (National—Wairarapa) 
: 
 Tihei mauri ora! E nga mana e nga reo e nga hau e wha tena koutou tena koutou tena koutou katoa. Ki a koutou nga rangatira o tenei te Whare Paremata e oku hoa mahi tena koutou tena tatou katoa. 
[ 
Behold the sneeze of life! To the authorities the languages and the four winds greetings greetings and greetings to you all. To representatives of this Parliament and to my colleagues as well greetings to you and to all of us 
.] 
I enter this House as a New Zealander who wants to celebrate the cultural diversity of all people in our country and to walk with them into the future as a strong and united people. I congratulate you Madam Speaker on your election and also your assistant my colleague Clem Simich. 
I am delighted to have won an electorate seat and to have been part of a great National Party success bringing 21 new members into this House. I congratulate each of them. 
I pledge to do the very best I can for every constituent in the Wairarapa electorate whether they voted for me or against me. Our electorate stretches well past Wairarapa into the Tararua District and beyond into Hawke’s Bay. Over many years it has contributed more to New Zealand’s prosperity through the production of meat wool butterfat and apples than it has ever claimed for the development of its infrastructure. But our infrastructure needs improvement now because it is inadequate; it is constraining economic development. 
My constituents need better incomes and lower taxes not benefits. They know how to spend their money without the assistance of Government Ministers and well-meaning officials in Wellington. 
The heartland’s potential cannot be realised with bad roads. It beggars belief that the road from Eketahuna to Porangahau is still damaged from a storm in February 2004. Our electorate cannot grow if the road transport network is in poor condition and roads are unsafe. Their poor condition puts enormous costs on the manufacturing farming and forestry sectors and that eats away at productivity and contributes to our low-wage economy. Roads are critical to the well-being of New Zealand. We need to stop repeating the politically correct mantras of the left and to recognise that rural people have no option but to travel in their cars and that businesses farms and forest industries must transport their products as efficiently as they can. 
Access to and from my electorate is via the Rimutaka hill road the Manawatu Gorge Saddle Road hill or the Pahiatua Track. Each road is winding with narrow bends and corners and three of them are steep and unsuited to modern rigs. The time has come to put a road tunnel through the Rimutakas to connect Wellington and the Wairarapa. The benefits are huge: growth opportunities for Wairarapa growth opportunities for Wellington growth opportunities for New Zealand and another route out of Wellington. It would mean better access to medical facilities at the new Wellington Hospital. There is no downside and I will pursue this goal relentlessly. 
Rural businesses cannot be expected to operate in the 21st century without access to First World roads giving access to international ports and airports. We need vastly improved communications including broadband Internet. Constituents in the south of the electorate need better rail access with more carriages and properly maintained rail-track. Masterton is in urgent need of a First World sewage treatment system to stop pollution of the Ruamahunga River. We can deliver these outcomes if we encourage real productivity—not the mind-numbing form-filling required of those running our schools hospitals and police. Expect me to stand against stupid policies wasteful expenditure and rules and regulations that my constituents I say to Georgina Beyer do not need and do not want. 
Luckily the laws of ageing do not apply to aspiration. I have always had the courage to pursue my dreams and those I have for my country. I am not going to stand by and watch this Government ruin Aotearoa for my children. I want to see a society that allows dreams to be fulfilled and not be oppressed by the tiresome rules regulations and excessive taxes of a nanny State. 
I want to say a bit more about my background. I have knocked around—whether in a shearing gang or as a steward on a Cook Strait ferry or at King Fahad’s dinner table or as a guest in a remote village in Papua New Guinea. I have been a union member and I have been in business. I am a father and a husband and I have been jolly lucky to engage in life from many perspectives. 
Two years ago I resigned after a career in the Foreign Ministry. Bureaucracy was increasingly less of a challenge because of the emphasis required by this Government on process and risk aversion. I found it increasingly difficult to feel that taxpayers were getting value for money from this Government. The Foreign Ministry had provided an interesting way to spend a life and in earlier years the opportunity to make a difference. But increasingly it seemed time to move on. I was uncomfortable with responses that the Labour-led Government made to developments in our wider neighbourhood—for example in the Solomon Islands and in Fiji. For me the year 2000 was a year of shame. We ignored several requests for help from Prime Minister Ulufa’alu to preserve democracy in his country. I did not believe in the decision to separate NZAID from the Foreign Ministry. 
Too many people were leaving the heartland for better-paying jobs elsewhere. The direction in which our country was headed post the 1999 election was in my view wrong. I faced the choice: moan or get off my bum. I decided to use my experience at community level. I love my country whether I am cooling off on a hot summer’s day in the Ruamahunga River or battling a gale through Cook Strait sitting at anchor in Tom Bowling Bay or scrambling across the Tararua peaks. I know it intimately and am dedicated to doing my best for it. I hope colleagues will find my mind open and my thinking rooted in common sense and pragmatism. 
I did not get here of course on my own. It was a huge team effort. I thank Judith Kirk Steven Joyce and the many hundreds of friends and supporters who worked so hard for the National Party to recover the Wairarapa electorate and for my election to Parliament. There are so many people whose efforts have contributed that I hesitate to name any except perhaps John McFadzean my electorate chair and my campaign chair Bob Tosswill. 
My mum June is listening to her radio. She demonstrates huge strength in the face of adversity and I thank her for setting me up to cope with life’s challenges. 
Think about being married to a partner who waltzes through the door and says: “OK we’re off to live in New Delhi Riyadh Bahrain Port Moresby Tehran.” Or who then turns up and says: “I’m going to stand for Parliament.” Helen has been hugely staunch throughout our married life including through times when she could have ended up carrying the can if my luck had run out. Thanks too to our children for making us proud and for their support. Em your campaign advice and drafting skills were really appreciated. I thank Captain Povey down in the Chatham Islands tonight and his crew—some are here—for keeping me and the  
Maranui 
 sailing and my feet on its deck. 
I want to recognise Ian McLean Don McKinnon Robin Gray Wyatt Creech and the late John Falloon who travelled this path before me and helped guide me here. The year-long campaign was a fascinating learning curve. I discovered that central government agencies have little or no understanding of the needs of the heartland. I discovered that one size does not fit all in a big electorate. In Dannevirke the community wants an emergency unit added to the hospital. But in Dannevirke this Government’s water quality policies will double community debt. In Alfredton Labour’s preschool regulations will see the only facility close. 
Colleagues our generation will be judged by how well we look after our old people. This Government needs to know that throughout my electorate aged-care funding is inadequate and especially so in Martinborough and Pahiatua. 
It seems so simple to close a rural school but closing a rural school rips the heart out of a community. The demise of our once fine Correspondence School is another example of failing infrastructure. There are serious funding problems for small schools. Their operational budgets are inadequate. It is unreasonable to demand water tests for schools on a monthly basis without providing the funding to meet their cost. 
Our region’s education statistics make sobering reading though not I should say for lack of effort by many teachers and principals who are passionate to see the best outcomes for their students. So how do we encourage excellence not just in sport and culture but also in literacy and maths? How do we entrench excellence as the cornerstone of our education system? The “one option only” State system which Marian Hobbs so heartily endorsed on Tuesday is a nonsense. We need to acknowledge diversity and provide inclusive funding for all students whether home-schooled—as many are in my electorate—correspondence schooled State schooled or private schooled. Boarding facilities are essential in our rural electorate. Just because parents choose a private school does not mean the State should not contribute to a child’s education. 
I have a message for public servants: “Please keep your feet on the ground.” Our country has the population of Sydney. Sydney does not support a Foreign Service operating in 50 countries with a thousand staff. Sydney does not run an aid programme costing $400 million annually. Nor does Sydney pay for an army navy or air force. My message to public servants is this: “Before you engage in activity or propose it on the back of taxpaying citizens please look really carefully at the value being returned to your community.” My yardstick is a constituent in Kuripuni who earns $10.50 an hour. Think about how difficult it is to meet the costs of accommodation and food paying for holidays and providing for retirement on this sort of income! Poor incomes set the framework for social problems and we need to address them. 
I note the self-congratulation for securing Sir Ken Keith’s place on the world judicial stage. I ask what the millions of dollars of time and expense spent chasing this outcome will deliver to my constituent. It is one thing to secure influence in the World Trade Organization as Mike Moore achieved under a National Government but quite another to spend taxpayers’ resources on a position that will deliver nothing to them. That is all the more so when we could have spent that time and energy pursuing apple access in Australia. I have constituents who are about to lose their businesses because of the inactivity on this issue. 
I will look hard at aid expenditure. Members should not expect me to sit silent while more than $28 million is given to Niue and its 1400 people—my town has 2000 people—without any obligation to overhaul its political system which has 20 members of Parliament. I am all for helping Niue but in doing so I am also thinking about a constituent who came to me this week who needs to find $90000 because our Government will not meet the cost of a cancer drug she needs. I think too of the doors that I knocked on while campaigning where I met older citizens wrapped in blankets on a cold day because they could not afford to pay for electricity or others without sleep all night and in pain because they had been waiting 18 months for a hip operation. 
I stand against the unrealistic expectations of the United Nations committee on decolonisation which expects a community of 1500 people subsisting on three atolls 270 miles from Samoa to have the cash to pay for their own Government. The decolonisation model being followed is the same as that for Niue. It damaged that society and was a failure. We must not repeat the same mistakes. And it is outrageous that 10000 or so Tokelauans living in New Zealand are to be excluded from this vote. 
I should report that my constituents do not like the MMP electoral system. I am proud to represent a party that has a policy to give a binding referendum on the question of MMP. I do not suggest that we go back to the first-past-the-post system but it is time to look at other options. The result of our election shows that it was better to be a loser to be rejected by one’s electorate to hold on by a thread with a diminished party vote then grasp the bauble of office. I hope the Government will note the huge support for National’s policies or are we going to find that Labour’s “inclusiveness” extends only to the supporters who enabled Helen Clark to make Labour Party history? 
No one pretends that our democracy is perfect or all-wise. But having lived in countries without it I know that it is the best system for achieving peaceful solutions. My constituents are people who want a good education and a first-rate health system and to live in a safe community where they can build a house plant a tree love live side by side in dignity be able to engage in free thought and have a Government that operates on the basis of moral values. Only Parliament can ensure this and that is why I want to be here.