Shaw James: Address in ReplyText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeShaw James: Address in Reply[Sitting date: 28 October 2014. Volume:701;Page:285. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAMES SHAW (Green):Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker. May I start first by thanking the Attorney-General for his most whimsical of contributions.I would like to take this opportunity to speak a little about the past a little about the present and a little about the future. The privilege to serve in this Parliament was given to me by all those who gave their party votes to the Green Party in this year’s election. I thank them all. I pledge to do my utmost to live up to their hopes and their expectations. In particular I would like to thank the people of my electorate Wellington Central 30 percent of whom voted Green at this year’s election. Over 300 people volunteered on the Green campaign in Wellington Central this year. Thank you all so much for everything that you did. You are an amazing group of people. That 30 percent belongs to you. I am proud to be associated with you.I am proud also to be a Wellingtonian. I was born here in 1973. Surviving on only her teacher’s salary my mother Cynthia Shaw raised me and somehow managed to save enough to send me to a private primary school Scots College. Later I transferred to Wellington High School where occasionally I went to class.My mother grew up on a farm called Waiwhero near Ōpōtiki. She and her brother and sisters were the last generation to grow up on that farm which had been in the family for nearly a century. They were the first generation to go to university to live in the cities and to travel the world. My first ancestors in New Zealand were Charles John Shaw and Annie Mathilda Baggett. They were married in St John’s Church in Christchurch in 1867. Annie was the granddaughter of a Jamaican plantation slave worth £80 in an 1807 inventory. Charles Shaw grew up in Somerset in the UK. His older brother William died fighting in India in a struggle for independence that the victorious empire referred to as the Indian Mutiny. After that Charles’ father thought that his prospects might be brighter in New Zealand and he packed him off here with a saddle a bridle spurs and a double-barrelled shotgun.My mother is here today with my brilliant beautiful wife Annabel. Annabel and I were married in January of 2013. Six months later the right to marry the person whom you love was extended to same-sex couples couples like my mother and her partner of 30 years Susanne who helped raise me. They are here along with many members of my family. I thank them and I acknowledge them all. My story is woven in with their stories.In their speeches friends of mine in the seats opposite are fond of occasionally referring to their conservative heroes like Margaret Thatcher. Well Margaret Thatcher was one of the first world leaders to warn about the problem of climate change. Thatcher trained as a chemist. She understood that you cannot change the chemical composition of the atmosphere without consequences. In a speech to the United Nations in 1989 she said: “What we are now doing to the world … by adding greenhouse gases to the air at an unprecedented rate … is new in the experience of the earth. It is mankind and his activities which are changing the environment of our planet in damaging and dangerous ways.”Thatcher was right. In 2013 New Zealand was hit by our worst storm in 60 years. It left 30000 Wellington homes without power; some for up to a week. It set the city back $4 million in direct clean-up costs. Around the country it resulted in $31 million in insurance claims. That summer of the same year we had our worst drought in 70 years. It cost New Zealand $498 million in lost exports. Treasury estimates that this drought cost our economy over $1.5 billion. It was the worst drought in 70 years. It was the worst storm in 60 years. It was the warmest winter on record. There were billions of dollars in costs and damages all in the same 6 months.I am 41 years old. In just those 41 years fully half of all of the planet’s wildlife has been extinguished. Thousands of species have become extinct. This is ecocide—the destruction not just of species but of habitats and life support systems that they need to survive. We know that the cause of this carnage is economic and that the solution is political.Annie’s grandmother was a slave in a time in which slavery was seen by many as a vital component of the global economy. The abolition of slavery was posed as a threat to financial stability. Charles’ brother William was a colonial soldier during a time in which India was the jewel of the British Crown and empires were considered necessary for the expansion of wealth and trade. Annie herself was not allowed to vote and people opposed to the suffrage movement argued that giving women the vote would lead to the breakdown of civilisation. There would be a battle between the sexes. Society would crumble as women became militant and unruly which is just as well because the Green Party draws much of its strength from militant unruly women.People pollute the atmosphere. They destroy rivers ecosystems and species for the same reasons that they used slave labour or seized land belonging to a race of people whom they considered inferior—because they can. If people can maximise profits and reduce costs by polluting the environment they will do so because the market incentivises that behaviour. I am a huge fan of the market. When it comes to setting prices and allocating scarce resources it generally beats the alternatives hands down. But the market is not sentient. It is not magical. It does not know that habitats are being eradicated that species are being extinguished or that the climate is changing. We need to tell the market that this is happening. We can do it the same way that we told the market that we would not tolerate slavery colonialism or limits on suffrage.Through the political system we change the law. Just as we believe that we have an inherent fundamental and inalienable right to life liberty and security of person we can eradicate ecocide by extending to Earth’s other inhabitants the same legal protections that we enjoy. Corporations already have legal personhood. Why not actual living things? There are already precedents for this in Aotearoa. Both Te Urewera and the Whanganui River now have legal personhood. They have the right not to be polluted the right not to be degraded the right to exist—inherent fundamental and inalienable just like us.There is always controversy about the expansion of rights. Whenever the status quo is threatened there are always doomsayers warning that civilisation will collapse or vested interests warning that the economy will be destroyed. But the changes that seemed so threatening to so many people never are in hindsight and the warnings that seemed so serious always sound absurd to subsequent generations.In my 20s I left New Zealand. I joined AIESEC the Association internationale des étudiants en sciences économiques et commerciales. Founded in the aftermath of World War II to promote peaceful relations between nations AIESEC was and is the world’s largest student-run student exchange programme. I went to work with it in Brussels. Then I moved to London where I worked as a business consultant for 12 years first as a manager in the chairman’s office at PricewaterhouseCoopers then at Future Considerations an organisational development consultancy that I helped to establish. My specialty was in working with business teams to find solutions to seemingly intractable problems. In my time I have worked with groups of people in over 30 countries and I have travelled to more than 50. I have learnt that underneath all of our differences there are values that are common to all of us no matter how incomprehensible or alien we seem to each other—which should serve me well here.Last year we were working with a village near Lake Bhimtal in the foothills of the Himalayas in Uttarakhand India. The village was on the edge of a bamboo forest that theoretically enjoyed full protection and yet the people from the village relied on bamboo that they harvested illegally from the forest. The traditional sources of bamboo were going because of dramatic changes in rainfall patterns. The forest park rangers were in conflict with the villagers. The villagers were losing what little livelihood they had. Their children were leaving the mountains to work for factories and call centres in Delhi. When we sat down with these people we had no idea what the solution to their problem would be. As it turned out part of the answer was to get the forest park rangers to bend the rules and to allow the villagers to enter the forest and continue to harvest the bamboo. In return the villagers agreed to plant two bamboo seedlings for every one that they took. It was a simple solution; it just had not occurred to the forest park rangers or to the villagers because of the adversarial relationship between them.When we are presented with this conflict between the economy and the environment it is almost always a false choice. There is almost always a solution that delivers both. The solution is not always obvious when you start out. Problems and conflicts that seem unsolvable have solutions. The hard part is getting the different parties to work together to find them.I enter Parliament as a member of our country’s loyal Opposition. My role is in part to hold to account to challenge and to speak truth to power but I am not committed to partisanship for its own sake. Political tribalism is I believe the greatest barrier to creating enduring solutions to the great challenges of our time. I do not know what the answers are. I believe that the notion that anyone here thinks that they have the answer is itself a dangerous thing. It is a pretence that we feel forced to maintain for purposes of political theatre.I do know that we need to change the way that we see ourselves and our relationship with the world. I know that those changes will scare some people and that there will be warnings about the destruction of the economy and the end of civilisation but as always those changes will be seen as obvious and harmless in hindsight. I know that presently we are stuck. To get unstuck we will all need to let go of some things and to be more committed to finding the answers than to being right or to others being wrong.Time is too short for resignation. Things are too bad for pessimism. It is too big a task for petty politics. It is too important for partisanship. These things we must transcend and transform. If any other member of this House from any political party or any member of the public listening hears this challenge and wants to rise to it my door is open. Thank you.