Norman Russel: Debate on Prime Minister’s StatementText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeNorman Russel: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement[Sitting date: 28 January 2014. Volume:696;Page:15533. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr RUSSEL NORMAN (Co-Leader—Green): The 2014 election offers New Zealanders the opportunity to make history by electing the first genuinely progressive Government in more than a generation. The 2014 election offers New Zealanders the opportunity to make history by voting for a strong Green Party at the heart of a progressive Government. There are few elections that can genuinely claim to be turning points in history few elections that can genuinely claim to be forks in the road of history but the 2014 election will be such an election. The result of this election will be either a forward-looking progressive Government—a reforming Government in the tradition of Seddon Savage and Kirk—or a right-wing throwback Government the likes of which we have not seen since Ruth Richardson.In the last 24 hours the contrasting values of these two alternatives have been very clear. The Green Party has proposed spending $100 million a year to ensure that poor kids at school have food in their stomachs and access to health care. The National Party has attacked this policy yet this is the same National Party that is spending $1000 million a year on tax cuts for the top 10 percent of income earners. Green Party values lead us to prioritise spending $100 million a year giving food and health care to hungry sick New Zealand schoolchildren. National Party values lead it to prioritise spending 10 times that amount—$1 billion a year—giving more money to the top 10 percent of income earners. The choice of values is stark. Is it any wonder that the Prime Minister’s statement did not mention children? In 2014 New Zealanders will get to choose which kinds of values they want in their Government.New Zealand has a strong history of world-leading progressive reforming Governments. The Liberal Government of the 1890s introduced the old-age pension and women’s suffrage. The Liberals worked with unions to protect working people while developing the New Zealand economy. They started our public health system. Forty years after the great reforms of the Liberals in the 1930s the Savage Government led the world in introducing a social welfare State that treated people with humanity in the midst of the Great Depression. The social and economic policies introduced by the Savage Government led the world and after the Second World War they were adopted and admired across the world. The New Zealand economy boomed under the settings established by Savage. Forty years after the reforms of the Savage Government the 1970s Kirk Government updated the welfare State by introducing such things as a domestic purposes benefit for single mums. It staked out an independent South Pacific foreign policy by protesting against French nuclear testing. It stood up to apartheid by blocking the tour of an apartheid rugby team because unlike our current Prime Minister “Big Norm” knew whether he was for or against apartheid. It established the Waitangi Tribunal and returned the minimum wage to 66 percent of the average wage.These three progressive reforming Governments—Seddon Savage and Kirk—were far from perfect and some of Seddon’s views on race were offensive but they changed the course of history and they made life better for ordinary New Zealanders. They set up New Zealand as a world leader. Forty years after the Kirk Government it is time again for a new wave of progressive Government reform in New Zealand. It is time to refreshthe progressive vision for Aotearoa New Zealand. It is time for a Green Government. It is time for a Green Government that reinvigorates our common progressive commitment to the values of egalitarianism sovereignty and democracy. More than that we need a Green Government that integrates these historically important progressive values with the new modern values of sustainability. We need a Green Government committed to fairness independence democracy and sustainability.The next wave of progressive change that is sweeping the world is green. The green revolution is transforming the way we live on planet Earth as we learn to live good lives on a finite planet with limited natural resources. We are learning to access the unlimited resources of human creativity ingenuity and generosity in order to live prosperous lives within limited natural resources. That is why smart and green go together. We need to learn how to live smarter so that we can have prosperity while recognising the natural limits of a finite planet. Unleashing human innovation creativity and generosity so that we can all live good lives while loving and protecting our natural environment is what the green movement is all about.History is of course littered with those who said that progressive change was not possible those who opposed women’s suffrage racial equality the welfare State homosexual law reform public health and public education. They opposed nuclear-free New Zealand and cannot remember whether they are for or against apartheid. They said that clean energy was impossible. How wrong they were. Renewable electricity generation is now the fastest-growing sector of electricity generation in the world set to overtake gas generation as the second-largest source of electricity in the world in the next couple of years according to the International Energy Agency. Green jobs are the fastest-growing sector of the economy. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics found that the greener the industry the higher the rate of job growth over the last decade. The clean energy future is here and those who railed against it are now seeing our new reality happening before their very eyes. So yes there are those who will rail against history and against the green movement but they have always been there and yet we have made history before and we will make it again.But as I said at the start of this speech this election is a turning point. Although on the one hand we have the choice of a genuinely progressive Government the alternative if the current Government is given a third term will be a very different Government from that elected in 2008. It will be a hard right Government economically environmentally and socially beholden to the damaged and discredited ACT Party United Future party and Conservative Party.John Key’s claim to be a moderate has evaporated over the last couple of years. He has overseen increasing water pollution blocked attempts to set strong rules to clean up our rivers and subsidised polluting irrigation schemes. The Government has destroyed a price on carbon and subsidised fossil fuels with the result that New Zealand’s greenhouse emissions are projected to increase 50 percent above 1990 levels by 2030 according to the Ministry for the Environment’s own projections.This Government has made it much harder for people just to get by. There are 50000 more people unemployed than when John Key first came to power. Median household income has fallen 4 percent after inflation under this National Government. Electricity prices were up 3 percent last year despite falling demand. Rising mortgage rates this year will wipe out any pay increases many families get. This Government has failed to manage the economy. Its irresponsible tax cuts to the top 10 percent costing $1.1 billion a year have contributed to National’s record borrowing. In just 6 years National has borrowed more than all prior Governments combined. National’s economic priority asset sales has failed and has cost taxpayers $440 million so far.But this will be nothing compared with what will happen if the National Party is re-elected. The first thing I bet is that John Key will not stay a full term as Prime Minister. He will be replaced by someone even further to the right like Steven Joyce or Judith Collins. The second thing is that National can be re-elected only if it has the support of the Conservative Party a party that wants to roll back all of the gains made in the last 30 years for the rights of women gay and lesbian New Zealanders and children. Such a hard right Government will further turn its back on science—climate science in particular as Tony Abbott is doing across the Ditch. Such a hard right Government will take away the ladder of opportunity that many of us here climbed to achieve our potential. It will embrace the politics of the conservative right which believes that a woman’s place is in the kitchen and a gay man’s place is in the closet and it will turn its back on New Zealand’s opportunity to be a world leader in green economics and green jobs. That is what we will get if we have a third term of a National Government. The choice is stark: a broad inclusive progressive reforming Government or a narrow ideological Government of the far right.Alongside the historic gains in economic social and environment policy that have been achieved over the years by progressive activists and Governments there is one other important achievement that is worth celebrating this year and that is the proportional voting system MMP. The year 2014 is the 18th anniversary of MMP. MMP has come of age. The new generation of voters who will get to vote for the first time this year has known New Zealand only under MMP. These young voters did not have to experience what it was like to vote in a first-past-the-post election with the winner-takes-all system that left the majority of voters without representation in the Government. First past the post produced Governments that had the support of a minority of voters but that had almost absolute power. It probably seems inconceivable to those young voters that we had elections where a party could have a majority of MPs and form a Government with only 35 percent of the vote as was the case with the National Government elected in 1993.Under MMP a party share of the popular vote is directly proportional to its share of seats in Parliament. Those who campaigned for MMP like Rod Donald were working to deepen and strengthen our democracy but under this Government democracy is being hollowed out. Under this Government New Zealand has been denied the best of MMP. In fact John Key is now telling us that he should automatically get to form the next Government and be Prime Minister even if he has the support of only a minority of voters. It is worth repeating this because it is quite outrageous: the Prime Minister is saying that he should get to lead the next Government even if he has the support of only a minority of voters. That is his take on democracy. I do not think that he really understands why New Zealanders voted for MMP.MMP was about bringing an end to the era where one person like Robert Muldoon or Roger Douglas or Ruth Richardson could force through their unpopular agenda. But John Key and Steven Joyce have returned us to that world MMP was meant to be about Governments respecting the opinions of others. Coalition Governments cross-party select committees—these were supposed to mean something to be a check on executive power rather than the rubber stamp they have become.But this Government has used its power to ignore the will of the people. It showed its arrogance and blatantly flouted democracy by publicly stating before voting had even begun that it would ignore the results of the citizens initiated referendum on asset sales. We saw exactly the same behaviour when this Government decided to ignore the results of the MMP review for purely partisan political reasons. New Zealanders voted to keep MMP at the 2011 referendum and then thousands of New Zealanders took part in the review to make MMP even fairer. The Government was given a very clear steer by thepublic and the independent umpire the Electoral Commission on what changes the public wanted—in particular abolishing the coat-tailing provision which has allowed this National Government to do its dirty deals and cobble together a Government. Acting in pure self-interest National ignored the will of the people and left MMP unchanged. It undermined our electoral system and now John Key is doing dirty coat-tailing deals all over the country just to keep his political options alive in this election.MMP is not supposed to be about one party struggling to maintain power by relying on a couple of dodgy hangers-on. MMP is not about the biggest minority party automatically having the right to govern. It is about forming Governments with majority support. But this Government with its single-vote majority and its unstable and unethical coalition reliant on disgraced MPs has forced things through against the will of the majority of New Zealanders. Entirely because of the support of Peter Dunne and John Banks this Government has been allowed to pass into law a series of obscene policies.Firstly it sold off the assets built up over generations transferring the wealth from the 99 percent to the 1 percent. It attacked our privacy our freedom and our liberty. It passed the Search and Surveillance Bill the Government Communications Security Bureau Amendment Bill and the Telecommunications (Interception Capability and Security) Bill. The role of the State is supposed to be to protect human rights and civil liberties but instead the National Party has passed laws that restrict our freedom of expression and our freedom to live free from State surveillance. It attacked local democracy as well as removing the vote from Cantabrians even before the earthquake. It also showed that it does not understand respect or trust local government or local communities by undermining the independence of local government.The National Government attacks the most vulnerable people in our society: the sick the young vulnerable women and the disabled and those caring for them. It introduced unacceptable discrimination into our law through youth rates telling young people they are not worthy of our respect and reinforced New Zealand as a low-wage economy. With the support of the Māori Party it removed the rights of family carers of disabled people to have their day in court. It rushed that law change through this Parliament in a single day. Muldoon would be proud.The National Government attacks the environment. It weakened the emissions trading scheme facilitated the exploitation of schedule 4 conservation land and polluted our rivers. It threatened to lock up the defenders of the environment if they went anywhere near an oil rig or an oil vessel. It facilitated a morally contemptible dirty dodgy deal swapping gambling laws for a convention centre. All of these disgraceful changes to our laws were possible only because of the support of Peter Dunne whom the Prime Minister tells us he does not trust and John Banks who is in front of the courts for electoral fraud. This is how this Government has undermined the promise of MMP and our democracy.But New Zealanders can take back the power this year. New Zealanders have a real chance to elect a truly modern MMP coalition. True MMP is about stable government where the majority of New Zealanders are represented in a strong coalition of strong partners. It is about principled parties coming together and working towards policies that meet the needs of New Zealanders. It is about a Government that is representative and has a range of smart new voices at the table. This is what MMP should be. This is what those who fought for MMP were fighting for.As MMP turns 18 it is time for New Zealand to have a true MMP Government—MMP as it should be. It is time for a strong progressive Government. It is time for a Green Government. The Green Party is ready to govern. We are ready to sit at the table and deliver real gains for real people. Yes we will compromise—MMP requires that ofall partners in a coalition—but we will not compromise on our principles or our values. We have the ideas the experience and the credentials. We have been a parliamentary voice for change since 1999 and we are more than ready to make a real green change in Government. We have stable leadership supported by our team of MPs who are smart progressive forward thinkers. We have an experienced party organisation and a strong grassroots membership. We have made real changes already in New Zealanders’ lives. We have warmer homes cleaner food and better transport options as a result of our work. We set the agenda and we follow through with solutions. In Government we will achieve even more. A strong Green Party in Government will focus on building a sustainable economy dismantling inequality and protecting our environment. We will build on our wins to make sure that we have a smarter cleaner more compassionate country for all New Zealanders. Bring on the election.