Jones Shane: International Finance Agreements Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Jones Shane: International Finance Agreements Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
[Volume:642;Page:11899] 
SHANE JONES (Labour) 
: 
A kia ora anotatou e te Whare iteneiahiahi. Te mahi tuatahi me mihi au ki te kapu. Ae teneikapuwhai mana ahakoangakapua o te raruraru e tauana ki rungai a ia nau mai hoki mai ki waengatonuitenei Whare i roto o Aotearoa. 
[ 
Greetings once again to us of the House this afternoon. The first thing for me to do is to acknowledge the cup. Yes indeed this prestigious cup despite its being shrouded by problems that have landed upon it I welcome you upon your return to the inner chamber of this Parliament House of New Zealand. 
] 
Before I launch off and offer some lucid thoughts in contrast to the drivel I heard from my whanaunga from up north and that very vague sort of recitation of a half-baked career I heard from the member for Wairarapa I will acknowledge the presence of the Parliamentary Rugby World Cup which has been brought back to Aotearoa. It sits unfortunately under a cloud of some discontent controversy and tumult inspired by a half-baked campaign from Mr Power. Let us hope that our national team brings home the real Rugby World Cup and that we retain both of them in 2011. 
I spoke earlier about the International Finance Agreements Amendment Bill and I do not propose to repeat a great deal of what I said earlier. This bill enables us to burnish and deepen our credentials in relation to how we are intervening in less developed countries and in those nation States that require our assistance. 
There is one thing the member for Wairarapa said that I actually agree with. There is if not an arc of instability a range of troubles lying not too far from our borders in the Pacific and it is our obligation in Aotearoa to ensure that we are developing the best remedies for that. One of the best remedies is to grow the size of the economies in those islands. New Zealand businesses are unwilling or afraid to put too much capital at risk if there is no prospect of their either recovering their assets or collecting on their receivables. By joining the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency we improve the prospects of our businesses extending in that direction. 
Of course my whanaunga Hone Harawira seems to connect this measure with the failed attempt of Mugabe and his supporters of Gaddafi and his supporters to assume the mantle to talk for Maori rights and the Treaty on behalf of the people of Aotearoa at the United Nations. Let us leave the United Nations to those nation States that are suffering collapse so that they can learn so that they can resume the journey of knowledge that will take them back to 1648 when the Peace of Westphalia created the first notion of a nation State. Let us leave the United Nations for handling those sorts of problems. I ask whether one single person in Aotearoa believes that by associating with Mugabe and associating with Libya our race relations and the endeavour we are putting together as a people driven by a common purpose—to create a more prosperous stable and harmonious Aotearoa—will be advanced one iota. Who believes that we will be advanced one iota by an association with that half-baked idea? 
It has taken 24 years to arrive at some indigenous rights accord that is meaningless vague impractical and completely incapable of being implemented. It has very little application here unless we are capable of deepening the sense of shared responsibility in our own country. I know of not a single New Zealander who treats his or her country with pride who would be pleased to have the United Nations lecture us. So the less I hear from the United Nations and the less I hear from the people who hope to vote to impose that accord on us—an accord that has absolutely no application to how people here live their ordinary daily lives—the better I will feel. I accept that it is an instrument of exaggeration and that it will be a device used to confuse our people throughout the marae that somehow this measure represents a diminution of the country’s sovereignty or a diminution of Maori rights. That shows just how far the Maori Party has got to go to connect with the hard relevant and real issues that confront Maori families every day—not these flights of fancy wandering around with Marsh Arabs and whoever else bedevils the United Nations. 
Let us come back to this contribution that our country is making. Not only will we put a small amount of capital into the putea so to speak but most important the bill reminds us that we cannot have a civil society in a failed nation State situation without a growing economy—and economies cannot grow as islands unto themselves. So if this legislation allows us either through Government agencies or private investment to deepen and improve infrastructure and enables people to take commercial risks in a situation that is politically diabolical then we should celebrate that. 
That is a better option than the inhabitants and members of those societies thinking that Aotearoa will be a soft touch for them. In the light of the problems for example that ravage Fiji’s economy if the people there are foolish enough to believe that 4.2 million people in Aotearoa will welcome them with open arms they are wrong. We would rather see people develop their own countries. We will play a constructive role but we will not have them rely on the belief that they can come here and sustain their own countries through remittances etc. So I say to the opponents of this bill that it has nothing to do with overwhelming those countries’ sovereignty. It has nothing to do with undermining their capacity. Many of those failed nation States those small Pacific Islands have already undermined themselves. 
This is an attempt for us to take a place of pride—small though our contribution might be—to ensure that our Pacific Island neighbours grow large and prosperous. They may even—perish the thought—emulate the girth of the last speaker John Hayes. He is a man who in a career that took him to far and distant climes demonstrated that the wines of New Zealand not only could be taken to distant areas—into dusty irrelevant and boring rooms—but also could be consumed. The man comes back into the House to demonstrate that he indeed had a long varied—I could not say “rich”—and obviously enjoyable career if his physical shape is an indication of the high level of living that his career afforded him. 
I join my colleagues on this side of the House—and Jill Pettis—in commending this bill to go forward. I remind listeners not to listen to a single thing that came from the member for Te Tai Tokerau Hone Harawira who said that the United Nations’ decision was somehow an advance on race relations and an elevation of Maori aspiration. No let us leave the United Nations to those nation States that are warring with each other whether they be Kurds or whether they be from Darfur or Zimbabwe. Leave the United Nations to them. Let us bring our take of Maori and Pakeha in Aotearoa on to our own maraes—and this is the highest legislative marae in the country—and we will find our own solutions in our own country. Kia ora tatou katoa.