Swarbrick ChlöeCHLÖE SWARBRICK (Green—Auckland Central): E te Māngai tēnā koe. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. Mr Speaker just want to welcome you to the big Chair as the first Green to sit in that place. Welcome welcome—ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Teaunau Tuiono): Kia ora. Ngā mihi.CHLÖE SWARBRICK: —and hope to not give you any cause to pull me up. I'm just reflecting on some of those comments as just made by the speaker who's just resumed her seat the Hon Penny Simmonds particularly with regard to her now being the Minister for the Environment. It was really really interesting to hear her thinking or speculating about the notion of division or the rural-urban divide and also talking about how we're all as Aotearoa New Zealand responsible for our emissions profile. I was thinking about how that is exactly what is laid out in the emissions reduction plan as enabled by the zero carbon Act the independent Climate Change Commission and many of the other blueprints and frameworks that were laid out by the Greens in our last six years of Government.I found it really really interesting to hear her say that we needed to not point the finger at certain industries when in fact we know—again from the emissions reduction plan and from our own emissions profile as determined by the science not by politicians—that we know full well which industries are disproportionately responsible for our emissions profile. We know that the top-polluting sector is the agricultural sector.Mark Cameron: IPCC 2016—read the paper. CHLÖE SWARBRICK: And you can yell all you like about it but those are the facts. That is science. You then know that following on from that it is transport. Yet what we have from this incoming Government is a dedication against all of the evidence to pull back on the measures and the metrics that we have put in place to actually start to pull down those emissions within those certain sectors through an industry-wide approach known as the emissions reduction plan. So I just think that it's really important for the incoming Government to be fully honest with themselves and with New Zealanders about what it is that that they are trying to achieve here.In my first speech here in the House subsequent to the election I just wanted to start—obviously firstly—by acknowledging those comments from the Hon Penny Simmonds but in my opening remarks by thanking the people of Auckland Central. It is genuinely the honour and privilege of my life to serve my home and community of Auckland Central from the central city the 45000-odd New Zealanders who live within the motorway boundaries Eden Terrace Newton Saint Marys Bay Ponsonby Freemans Bay; out across the mighty Hauraki Gulf; Rakino Island and the dozen-odd people who live there permanently; Aotea Great Barrier Island and the 1100 folks who are out there—where we first discovered Caulerpa brachypus and I'll be on at our Minister of Conservation about that—and also obviously my 11000 constituents on Waiheke Island.I am so honoured to have received that mandate as the local MP not by virtue of the work that I solely have done—and I think that that's an important thing for all members of Parliament to recognise: that we are here by virtue of the communities who put us here and the hundreds of volunteers who worked overtime in order to organise to put us in this place. We built that community in Auckland Central conversation by conversation on values of compassion and of empathy and God forbid an earnest belief in the importance of evidence-based policy.It would be remiss of me not to mention one of the metrics that my campaign manager Leroy—shout-out to one Leroy Beckett—constantly cites subsequent to our election retaining that seat obviously firstly historically in 2020 against the red wave and then against the blue wave in 2023 where we received the largest-ever votes of any Auckland Central candidate ever in the country in that seat of Auckland Central. What we said there is that this was not a moment this was a movement; and I said in our rallying cry on the night of the election that that work must continue. We did not do that organising solely for the sake of getting into this place but by continuing to work on the mission that I was elected upon. That's pretty abundantly clear to anybody who was following the Green Party's progressive proposals throughout this election to emphasise and to prioritise the place of people and planet—not to have the economy that we currently have in place that exploits both of them.I also just wanted to acknowledge and thank the New Zealanders across this country who voted for the strongest ever Green Party result this election in 2023 to give us 15 MPs to hold this Government to account because we are just warming up.Hon Paul Goldsmith: Oh!CHLÖE SWARBRICK: We also have three Green electorates Mr Paul Goldsmith. Those Green electorates two of which you would have come through on your way here to the House Rongotai and of course Wellington Central—and you're welcome to visit Auckland Central anytime in your arts and cultural capacity.We may have a reactionary right-wing Government hanging on by a thread but I'd like to remind New Zealanders that we also have the most left-wing Parliament that we have ever seen in my entire lifetime. So to unpack that just for a second we have 21 seats—21 seats—explicitly to the left of the Labour Party. Also for the first time in the history of an MMP environment we have a good—I'd say actually even a great—relationship that is not gatekept by one of the two legacy parties between two ostensible-minded parties. That is of course the relationship between the Greens and Te Pāti Māori.Now while this Government may be blu-tacked together by hot takes from your uncle at Christmas you know led not by the Three Stooges but in fact by the three Scrooges who are coming for you this Christmas trying to ram through legislation—anti the workers anti the renters and we'll just wait and see when it comes to being anti the planet.But what we know out there and what many of us have felt—even most recently at the rally on Parliament's lawn at noon today—is that there has never been a sentiment of political awareness that I have ever felt in this country in my lifetime. New Zealanders are waking up and understanding that this place this Parliament—politics is the manifestation of their will. And we get the politics that we think that we deserve.Our call to action for all New Zealanders if they are feeling disenfranchised or disempowered by what they are seeing from the agenda of this incoming Government—which is far less of a vision than it is a shredder—is for them to get engaged. Because things will only get worse if regular people—normal good decent people—stand by on the margins and let it happen.To that effect I just want to remind people that the most important thing here is not just to get mad not just to get sad but to get organised and to get mobilised. Because as we've just said and as we've just seen we are just warming up.Everything is impossible until it's not. We have a fascinating economic history in this country of Aotearoa New Zealand where every 40 to 50 years or so we see a form of economic transformation. In the 1930s and 1940s of course we had the advent of the welfare State in the wake of world wars and austerity proposals—an opportunity for us to come together and create the social contract which of course gave us social housing social welfare and with it some of the greatest periods of prosperity that this country has ever seen.Then we saw the shredding of that in the 1980s and 1990s with trickle-down economics which this Government seems intent on bringing us back to.Actually on that point I thought it salient to reflect on what was just put forward before in an earlier debate point by the Hon Shane Jones a member of this incoming Government who was talking about the importance of bringing back oil and gas for sake of certainty within the sector. That is quite the opposite of the point that New Zealand First was making when they were supporting the moves of the incoming Government in 2017 when of course we were repealing—or rather banning—new offshore oil and gas exploration when New Zealand First reflected on what occurred in the 1980s particularly to regional and rural communities and what occurred to those communities who were whacked with massive change overnight and saw massive job losses that disproportionately impacted those communities.New Zealand First said then in 2017-2018 that the most important thing that they could do in supporting this oil and gas ban was give those communities an opportunity to prepare because they knew that the writing was on the wall. And the science tells us funnily enough as the Hon Shane Jones himself was reflecting that we cannot burn all of the fossil fuels that we have already discovered. Because if we burn anywhere from one fifth to one third of what we've already discovered—we know because the science tells us; if the Government was interested in listening to it—we are going to burst past 1.5 degrees of warming which is critical for retention of life as we know it.To that effect again I just really really really want New Zealanders to reflect on the fact that all of these things are choices. We do not have to have an economy that exploits people and the planet; we can have an economy that supports them. We can have free dental care; we can have free tertiary education; we can have a guaranteed minimum-income; we can have rent controls—if we decide as a Parliament to move ahead with an evidence base and values of compassion to implement policies that support both people and the planet.Just on the final point around climate in particular I want to make it really really clear to the Government that you can negotiate with and you can change the rules of the economy but you cannot negotiate with the laws of science of physics and of chemistry—of planetary boundaries. We will be organising and we will not be letting this Government get away with anything quietly. What they have seen and heard so far from the thousands of New Zealanders who have mobilised against their agenda is that we're just getting started.