Tuiono TeanauTEANAU TUIONO (Green): Kia orana Mr Speaker. It's me again. The struggle of power is the struggle of remembering against forgetting. And I was thinking about that phrase when in the news again the island of Banaba had appeared. The desalinisation machines that they have there to get their water sorted out had failed yet again and I am hoping the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade will get in there and help them to get that up and running again. But it was also a reminder for me that climate change is the legacy of colonisation in the context of the Pacific. And I don't mean that metaphorically and poetically but you can be metaphorical and literal about it I mean actually.The great poet Teresia Teaiwa who comes from the island of Banaba in Kiribati once said that Agriculture is not in our blood but our blood is in agriculture." From the perspective of indigenous peoples and in particular as I was remembering that piece of history and remembering the impacts of colonisation within the Pacific like many indigenous peoples there are very close connections to the land. People reflect on that the blood and bones of their tūpuna are also embedded within the land as well.Banaba was at one time a primary source for rock phosphate. Here's a bit of a definition: rock phosphate is formed from bird droppings or animal droppings that have dried up and built up over a long period of time—talking millenniums here. And of course with the people there as well the connections that they have with the environment informs their cultural practice. This combined with sulphuric acid to make super-phosphate was the main fertiliser used in New Zealand's pastoral farms since the 1930s. From the early 1920s until the mid-1980s phosphate was New Zealand's main export from the Pacific.It is connected with colonisation. And I'm reminded that it was the Pacific Phosphate Company which controlled the early phosphate trade in Nauru Banaba and also in the Makatea. And for me on a personal level the issue is around the commodification of the environment. It is around how capitalism was the engine for colonisation but it was also about the extraction of surplus labour of young Pacific Islanders who would go to mine that phosphate. And I know that on a personal level because my grandfather was sent to the Makatea Island—one of those islands—to mine phosphate at the age of 14. I've got a kid that's 14 years old; that's high school ages. So that's just previously after World War One—the extraction of surplus labour from Pacific Islanders to mine phosphate to fuel the dairy boom here in Aotearoa New Zealand.That ended in—and I have a few quotes here sort of linked to the colonisation aspect of it. And this is from the words of the British civil servant and phosphate commissioner Arthur Grimble who made this explicit in 1928 when presenting a mining agreement to the people of Buakonikai in Banaba: "If you do not sign the agreement do you think your lands will not go? Do not be blind. Your lands will be compulsorily acquired [by] the Empire." And this is backed up by the industrial agriculture New Zealand phosphate commissioner Albert Ellis when he said—and he clarified the process—that "there can be no civilisation without population no population without food and no food without phosphate."The legacy that we find ourselves in at the moment of climate change is that it was environmentally devastating for the people of Banaba and environmentally devastating for that island as well. But what we have also seen here is the addiction to synthetics the addiction of the agriculture sector to synthetics—I'm talking about synthetic fertiliser and the way that it exacerbates the intensification of dairy farming and all the run-off impacts of that in terms of climate change and impacts on the environment as well. But the practice hasn't finished because phosphate mining ended in the Pacific in the 1980s but it continued on in Western Sahara. So the same process which happened which used the labour of Pacific Islanders in the Pacific devastated the island has continued in the case of Western Sahara and actually the indigenous peoples there have asked New Zealand to stop importing what they call "blood phosphate". And that phosphate comes at a cost—comes at the cost of war and tension and conflict as well.We can look at more regenerative ways of doing things. We can look at organic and regenerative agricultural methods because that is how we take up the challenge of colonisation and climate change in the Pacific."