Dunne Peter: Obituaries — Nelson MandelaText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDunne Peter: Obituaries — Nelson Mandela[Sitting date: 10 December 2013. Volume:695;Page:15343. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon PETER DUNNE (Leader—United Future): History records the stories of many extraordinary men and women and many of those stories are either a little bit misted by time or embellished by the passage of time. We are all privileged to have lived in the same time as one of the greatest people in history Nelson Mandela. We do not need the story to be embellished or dressed up because we know the story we have now heard it frequently and our admiration for the account of events I suspect increases every time we hear it. The idea that a man who was so seized with a cause and imprisoned for such a long period of time in such harsh and intolerable conditions would then be released as an old man and bear his captors no grudge is one that many of us struggle to comprehend. How can it be? Yet we witnessed it—not just that day of the long walk to freedom in February 1990 but in his subsequent life right through to the time of his death last week.We saw alongside the wisdom and the generosity of spirit a man who also had a true sense of humility a remarkably self-deprecating sense of humour and an extraordinary ability to engage with people to give them that moment of time when they seemed to be the centre of his world and then to also inspire them to be loyal for ever after.I recall when he came to New Zealand in 1995 two events—firstly the day he came to this Parliament. It was a sunny Wellington day as usual. You could not move around this complex for people in the grounds. Every building nearby every balcony was thronged with crowds waiting to see the great man arrive. A couple of weeks later the Queen of England came to New Zealand. There were barely 200 people in the grounds to welcome her on that occasion. That to me spoke volumes. Nelson Mandela attracted the attention of New Zealanders not just those of us who had been part of the 1981 campaign but New Zealanders across the board who wanted to pay honour to his extraordinary achievements and to acknowledge his greatness.The second recollection I have from that visit was a dinner he spoke atat the Wellington Town Hall where he demonstrated that wonderfully self-deprecating sense of humour. He told a story about being in the Kruger National Park. Two stereotypical elderly female American tourists had accosted him and in an accent that I will not pretend to repeat they told him how much they admired the great little country that he had and this wonderful place they were present at. He thanked them and moved off. He said that he then heard one say to the other “Who was that?”. The other one said: “Oh I don’t know. He was probably one of the gamekeepers.” He as the President of South Africa could tell that story just to put everyone at ease without having to draw attention to himself.But I think there is one other important feature of his life and his approach that perhaps we have not paid sufficient attention to. We know of the man who struggled for years—a lifetime—to make South Africa the rainbow nation it is today. We know of the way in which for all of that time or a large part of it the white community in South Africa decried him as a terrorist and if anyone heard the interview this morning onMorning Report with FrancoisPienaar talking about his engagement with Nelson Mandela you would have got a real sense of that. But actually when you look at what Mandela was about he was not about attacking the institutions of the State. When he became President he became a firm upholder of the institutions of the South African State. It was about who controlled those institutions. It was about who controlled the law who controlled the courts who controlled Parliament and who controlled the economy. And the fact is that for so much of his life so many of his fellow countrymen were excluded from that process.It is a remarkable chain of events now taking place in South Africa. The memorial services—the fact that there will be three funeral processions over the next few days to allow everyone to participate—mark the sort of event that we could not contemplate occurring in the normal course of our lives. But it is the mark of the world’s fondness for respect for and recognition of the achievements of Nelson Mandela.All of us have our memories. All of us know the story. All of us wish the people of South Africa strength steadfastness and determination as they go through this period and as they face the future of their country. I think that as Nelson Mandela managed to unite a nation in the last years of his life and in his post-release period he will be an even stronger uniting force in his death. He will be a memory that will create a tradition that people will want to aspire to for the future. My colleague Te Ururoa Flavell quoted that quotation before about Mandela’s prescience of his own death. He will be able to rest contented and peacefully his long walk to freedom is over his journey is done his people are safe and his country is on the road to prosperity and to progressivity in the future.Motion agreed to.