Logie Jan: Address in Reply 
Logie Jan: Address in Reply 
[Volume:677;Page:435] 
JAN LOGIE (Green) 
: 
 I acknowledge this House the land it stands on and the indigenous people of this place. To all the women and people from the margins who have gone before me in this place I thank you. I will do my best to live up to your vision of a future where we can all speak constructively. To those still on the margins I promise you my best efforts to redress hardship and injustice and to live up to your expectations. And to all the amazing Green Party activists and voters again my thanks. I look forward to our ongoing journey.  
I pledge to this House and to those who elected me that I will seek to honour Te Tiriti o Waitangi the Declaration of Independence and the principles of cooperation inclusion integrity justice and fairness. I stand here today as a leftie feminist lesbian who sometimes despairs about what we are doing to each other and our planet. I stand here as an ordinary Pakeha New Zealander. I stand here knowing we could do things so much better if we did things differently.  
I grew up in Invercargill. Both my parents worked really hard to give my brother and me the opportunities that they had not had. Dad worked for the electricity department and mum was a theatre nurse. My mother was brought up in Lebanon for part of her life as a daughter of Baptist missionaries and I remember as a child watching the Israeli bombing of Lebanon on TV and her pointing out a massive pile of rubble that had been her childhood home. For me it was an early grounding in global affairs and world politics and I felt lucky to have her and to be watching from afar. My dad grew up in rural New Zealand and he passed on his love of the outdoors to my brother and me while teasing us for being townies. His history as a polar explorer was incredibly exotic and has given me a sense of unlimited possibility. Mum and dad always told my brother and me we could do anything we wanted as long as we worked hard enough. And I would like to thank them for this start and for bringing me up to care about fairness and justice the world and our precious places. I would also like to apologise in advance for all the times in the coming years that you are going to be bemused by your radical daughter—sorry about that.  
Despite having this amazing start in life my teenage years were pretty tough. Like many people many New Zealanders I suffered from an undiagnosed mental illness. I was bewildered by the changing world not sure of who I was scared I would not be able to live up to my own expectations and angry about the greed and cruelty I was seeing around me. It was the 1980s and New Zealand was in the middle of massive social and cultural change. It was the time of the women’s conferences and the catchcry “Girls can do anything.” as well of course as the media and discussion telling us we could not. It was the time of the Springbok Tour Bastion Point and homosexual law reform. During this time my friends were dealing with racism on a daily basis—as sadly friends are still now—being followed in shops stopped in their cars patronised ignored and mistrusted. Their tears frustrations anger or extra efforts to conform disturbed me then and still deeply disturb me. The 1980s was also a time of radical economic change and I saw this through the lens of a spate of suicides of fathers of students at my school who due to the removal of Government farming subsidies faced the loss of their family farms and their identity. This was a tragic lesson on the human cost of decisions made in this place.  
Being unwell I went off the rails for a while during the 1980s and early 1990s and the truth is I am very very lucky that my friends and family—and particularly my brother—managed to get me through university and hold me here until I managed to get back on track. It was an incredibly precarious time for me and I cannot express how grateful I am to have got through it. What got me back on track was discovering activism and community work. I started working for Women’s Refuge in the early 1990s and this gave me a sense of purpose of being able to make a difference and of solidarity with others wanting a better world. I finally felt as if I was part of something and had a sense of how I could contribute to the world.  
I have never lost that feeling of purpose or the sense of responsibility that comes from thriving when I really know that so many others are not. Since then increasingly I have seen the focus in New Zealand turn to individuals and individual responsibilities rather than to family community or shared endeavour. Yet societies cannot function if everyone acts as an individual. It is connection that makes our society work not isolation.  
Today one of the key stories I carry with me into this House is from the 1990s when I was working in youth health. I was doing a suicide prevention workshop with a group of unemployed disenfranchised and disconnected young people. I asked these young people about what it takes to be successful and they came up with responses like being smart and working hard. And I asked in a rather leading way whether they thought getting help from other people make a difference. They disagreed. When I asked whether they thought say Jenny Shipley or even Tupac had received help to get where they were they again refused to acknowledge that possibility. These young people were already on the margins out of school out of work and they believed it was their own fault they were in this position. They believed individual responsibility was all. But rather than that myth spurring them into action it put their lives at risk and it significantly increased their chances of remaining unemployed. All their charisma energy and ideas were left floating in the ether of individualism and self-blame.  
If we cannot see we are interdependent then we will not ask for help when we need it and we will be left floundering in polluted waters unable to breathe. We are all beneficiaries and should be proud to be so. I am the beneficiary of years of support from family friends the State not to mention the beneficiary of colonisation and at times the unemployment benefit. There should not be a stigma in accepting help when you need it. And there is benefit in sharing and helping others when they need it. Individualism locks in inequality and oppression and as a result we all lose out.  
I also carry with me today into this House all too many stories of gender-based abuse and violence. One in three girls one in seven boys one in 11 women and up to one in two transgender people will experience sexual abuse in this country. One in three women experience psychological or physical abuse from their partners in their lifetime. On average 14 women six men and 10 children are killed by a member of their family every year. Police are called to around 200 domestic violence situations every day—that is one every 7 minutes on average. Police estimate only 18 percent of domestic violence incidents are reported. Like most of you I carry some of these stories etched into my heart from experience—my own of others and those I have worked with through Women’s Refuge and the Wellington Sexual Abuse Foundation helpline. The people of these stories who have been victimised by what is predominantly men’s violence are from all ethnicities of all ages genders and sexualities across an ability spectrum and from every economic stratum. This is not an issue of poverty.  
It is important to me that I bring these stories into this House because these stories need to be shared and the shame taken away from those who are holding the stories. We representatives of the people of this country have a duty to honour the extraordinary strength of survivors and ensure first and foremost that they have adequate support to heal. They also need to see that we are working to prevent the same thing from happening to others or to them again. We have a duty too to those perpetrating the abuse to help them learn the fulfilment that can come from equal relationships rather than ones of power and control. It is not enough to have a task force. We need to implement the recommendations of those task forces. And it is not in any way acceptable that funding for sexual abuse counselling through ACC has been cut in half and that domestic violence support services have effectively been cut while their workload has increased by 12 percent. There are immediate changes we can make; they need to be a priority for all of our sakes.  
I also bring with me today stories of hope into this House. One is about the launch of the Assume Nothing exhibition at the Dowse Art Museum in 2008. Assume Nothing is a photographic exhibition by Rebecca Swan celebrating diverse gender identities. The exhibition showed a range of people who do not fit traditional gender roles or narrow definitions of male or female looking strong and beautiful. Attending the exhibition having recently returned from overseas I felt so proud to be a New Zealander proud to live in a country that has such spaces and people willing to share so intimately of themselves in the pursuit of understanding and the celebration of our diversity.  
I am here in this House to work for a world where we can enjoy our differences of gender sexuality culture ethnicity ability and age—in every aspect of our society. We are a diverse population and I hope to see the potential of this diversity realised. Would it not be wonderful to see Government as a whole drive to increase innovation and productivity by addressing the barriers that are holding all too many people and communities back? I will work to grow this hope so that we can all see the beauty of difference rather than the fear of the “other”. We all need to know we count. We all need to know that together we can make a difference for ourselves our families our friends and our communities.  
Through my work in the community sector I have learnt the importance of creative solutions involving people in change of having politicians who will work with you keeping to your values and how to do a lot with very little money. I bring these skills and others to this place.  
All the stories I have shared today demonstrate who I am and who I am working for. To remind myself of these values I got a tattoo over the holidays with the Audre Lorde quote “My silences have not protected me.” I will do my best to speak out for all of us so one day we can all be protected and free. But my sister-in-law has suggested I should get my other leg tattooed with “Discretion is the best part of valour.” I am not quite ready for it.  
I am very proud to be a Green Party MP because the Green vision is a new vision. It is a vision that holds equity economy and the environment together and acknowledges we are all important and have a duty of care for each other and the planet. I would like to thank the Green team and all the parliamentary staff in advance for doing all the work that enables us to make a difference. I hope I can. Finally I would like to thank all my family—mum dad Noel Ian Anna Liz Maria Kyran Deb Whetu Jac Caroline Denise and Billy—for all your love and support.  
With your food basket and my food basket the people will thrive. No reira tena koutou tena koutou tena koutou katoa. 
Waiata