Parata Hekia: Maiden Statements 
Parata Hekia: Maiden Statements 
[Volume:651;Page:190] 
HEKIA PARATA (National) 
:  
E te Mana Whakawa tena koe. E nga whanaunga e nga hoa e te hunga kainga i haramai i tenei ra ki te tautoko i ahau tenei te mihi aroha ki a koutou katoa.  
[ 
Greetings to you Mr Speaker. Also to relatives friends and to those from home who travelled here today to support me this heartfelt acknowledgment to you collectively. 
] 
I acknowledge my family and friends who have travelled here today to share this occasion. 
Ko Hikurangi me Aorangi aku maunga ko Waiapu me Waitaki aku awa ko Ngati Porou me Ngai Tahu aku iwi. I identify through my cultural frame of reference my mountains Hikurangi and Aorangi; my rivers Waiapu and Waitaki; and my iwi Ngati Porou and Ngai Tahu. 
Tenei te mihi ki te mana whenua ki a Te Ati Awa me nga waka katoa i tau mai nei ki Te Whanga-nui-a-Tara. I acknowledge the guardians of this land Te Atiawa and all those waka that have come ashore here in Wellington. 
Tena koe e te Pirimia John Key. Ka tikina e ahau nga kupu o tetahi waiata na toku tipuna na Hanara Rire i tito mo Ta Apirana Ngata e pa ana ki a koe i tenei wa.  
[ 
My greetings to you Prime Minister John Key. I reach back in time for the words of a song that my grandfather Arnold Reedy composed for Sir Apirana Ngata—words that I consider apply aptly to you at this point in time: 
] 
I greet you Prime Minister and recall the words of a song originally composed by my grandfather Arnold Reedy for Sir Apirana Ngata: 
“Te wa-ka o Aotearoa he tini nga kaihautu ko koe ra e Hone kei te kei e koro kia u.” 
[ 
“The New Zealand canoe has many captains but you John are at the helm hold fast.” 
] 
“The waka of Aotearoa has many captains but you John are at the helm.” 
Kei te rangatira kei a Helen Clark mo to whakahaere i nga tau kua pahure ake nei tena koe. Tena koe e te whanaunga Parekura. Talofa e te mema mo te rohe o Mana a Luamanuvao Winnie Laban. Otira tena koutou katoa nga kaihoe o tena waka o tena waka o te Paremata. 
[ 
To you Helen Clark former leader I acknowledge your stewardship over these past years. Greetings to you my kinsman Parekura and to the member for Mana Luamanuvao Winnie Laban. Indeed my acknowledgments to all oarspersons of each parliamentary canoe. 
] 
To our former leader for her stewardship over these past years I salute you Helen Clark. To my kinsman Parekura Horomia I greet you. To the member for Mana I acknowledge you. To all the different waka that have berthed at Parliament I greet you. 
Mauriora! 
Mr Speaker I should like to congratulate you on your appointment. I also acknowledge the Governor-General who commissioned the opening of the forty-ninth Parliament; my colleagues Peseta Sam Lotu-Iiga and Melissa Lee—fakafetai and ahn nyung ha se yo—my colleague the Hon Steven Joyce who opened our paepae this afternoon; and those who will follow. Tena koutou katoa. 
As I stand before you today I am at once conscious of the weight of history and expectation that press upon me and the lightness of possibilities that beckon. I am familiar with this dichotomy; I have grown up in a culture that walks through the present with the constant companions of the past and the future. This practice prepares us particularly well for this parliamentary role I think as we weigh actions of today against those of the past and the implications of the future. 
In 1885 my great-great-grandfather Tame Parata entered Parliament as the member for Southern Maori. He served a distinguished career of 26 years dedicating his efforts to his people in their search for quality citizenship in their own lands. Later in 1905 another tipuna of mine—ours—Sir Apirana Ngata entered Parliament as the member for Eastern Maori and committed his public service of 38 years to seeking opportunities for and emphasising obligations to citizenship. 
They along with many others shared a profound appreciation of the birthright of this small young nation and its potential. They also held in common an attitude that characterised those generations of the reciprocal responsibility to return in equal or greater measure that which had been given. I enter Parliament and I begin this phase of my public service journey proud to follow in the footsteps of these ancestors in the pursuit of quality citizenship for all. They provide a model that I am glad to emulate: unambiguously Ngati Porou and Ngai Tahu unequivocally a New Zealander. 
I come to Parliament by way of an extensive Public Service career with detours into wealth-creating and whanau-employing business experiences and punctuated by recalls to my home of Ruatoria the capital of Ngati Porou. I grew up in the central business district of Ruatoria when our area was famous for land innovation dairy factories cultural foreign policy lawyers educators and public servants. It was a community where Ngati Porou was the spoken language except in schools and te reo Maori was for dealing with other distant tribes and their strange dialects and practices. 
I grew up at the centre of a strong and dynamic web of kinship relationships amongst orators thinkers debaters and composers where competence and whakapapa were the determinants of leadership—not gender. I grew up believing that everyone was Anglican all worshipped Sir Apirana Ngata Hikurangi was the highest mountain in the world and the Waiapu swept majestically to the sea. I saw no need for reality to intrude upon this set of beliefs because they performed the very useful function of securing identity. 
I came from a community at a time when it was peopled by hard hard workers who eked out livings on infertile and soft country that even as it was farmed slipped away into the river and out to sea. These people suffered the boom and bust of officialdom the capricious ideas of what next to invest in how now we might be saved—always by well-meaning yet very distant bureaucrats and politicians and all the time oblivious to the possibility that we might actually save ourselves. 
I come from a community where whanau was the pivot round which life turned; where education was the magic bullet; where self-reliance and self-determination were practised not talked about; and where humour courage hope and gratitude were the hallmarks of citizenship—most nobly personified in the 28th Maori Battalion literally the most costly in lifeblood. 
In my lifetime I have seen the very kinds of communities of my upbringing succumb to the disease of dependency where State intervention is the norm not the exception; where caregivers providers facilitators and sector workers replace aunts uncles neighbours and friends; where State welfare rather than social welfare is the first resort and the basis of an intergenerational life sentence rather than a lifeline; where despair and alienation are masked by drugs alcohol and abuse; where displaced anger makes victims of children and their mothers; where low expectation in schools is predictably repaid with low achievement; and where fault and blame-laying have become the defence of failure. 
Ruatoria I now know was always economically challenged. But its cultural wealth and social richness its determined self-belief and hard work kept it viable. We must find ways to lay bare all the causes of these symptoms so that we might with purpose and compassion find durable solutions. I feel called to Parliament to do something about this. 
I have spent my professional career in the Public Service informing policy with these realities striving to create opportunities for communities to drive their own development advocating fiercely for meaningful resourcing and realistic time lines resisting the bureaucratising of the original flair and ingenuity that attracted funding in the first place promoting the value of different cultural approaches and exposing the presumptuous bias of majority culture presented as the norm. 
I was born and brought up in a family of eight by parents who instilled in us the importance of family education community service education hard work education high expectations and an attitude of success. Our parents worked; we worked—often several jobs at once. None of this was unusual or peculiar to our family. All the families we grew up with went to school with and continue to be in touch with lived lives like this. These are the whanau I know and recognise. This is the model that informs my vision for the building blocks of modern Aotearoa New Zealand. 
My parents’ very different backgrounds converged successfully in their children I think and gifted us with the very New Zealand legacy of mixed ancestry: Scottish Irish English Ngai Tahu and Ngati Porou. So I come to Parliament a fully committed bicultural citizen a descendant of both Maori and Pakeha and imbued with the spirit of Sir Apirana Ngata’s prescription for life: “Grow up and meet the needs of your generation master the technologies of the modern world for your material well-being cherish the treasures of your ancestors as a plume for your head your soul given to God author of all things.” 
I come to Parliament equipped with our experience of starting our own businesses and managing them through all the highs and lows that attend such initiatives. We have faced the risks that small businesses up and down the country face. We have slogged through the mire of compliance regimes and related costs. We have encountered the impervious official at the point of export indifferent to the effects of inexplicable bureaucracy and the costs incurred. We must liberate businesses to create employment and wealth and bend our minds to that rather than to ever more clever ways to redistribute it. 
I come to Parliament by way of my residence in the greater Porirua region—a microcosm of Aotearoa New Zealand. It is an area of great diversity with a high proportion of very old people and very young people; with extremes in socio-economic status with some of the highest average household incomes and some of the lowest; and balanced by a deep pool of potential and a crucible of cultural richness in the form of Maori Pacific Pakeha Asian and other ethnic minorities. It is a growing creative community well served by the internationally renowned Pataka Museum and Art Gallery which is to be complemented—when we can secure the resources—by a performing arts centre; and by the strong and innovative Whitireia Community Polytechnic which with sufficient investment can and will design programmes that arise out of the cultural wealth of the region creating new technologies we know to be essential to the productivity and growth and international competitiveness of our nation. And cradling it all there is an environment that is both beautiful and fragile and while it looks after us we in turn must care for it. 
Mr Speaker and honourable members I come to Parliament with high expectations of what is possible. I come shaped and moulded by the influences and experiences I have outlined. I come with an unshakeable belief in the potential of this country its people and this Parliament. My recipe has three simple ingredients from my own life story: family identity and education. We must restore whanau and families as the cornerstones of our communities invest in the cultural diversity of this country—not because it is fashionable but because it carries identity and the potential for innovation and new technologies—and join the crusade for literacy and numeracy and for a good-quality education for every New Zealand student. We must adopt an uncompromising attitude that failure is not an option. All our other aspirations for economic growth raised standards of living and national confidence and pride will flow from getting these basics right. 
I come to Parliament determined to add to the legacy of those who have gone before—the pursuit of quality citizenship. As I go to my office in this historic building I pass my own panel of scrutineers their faces challenging and supporting me. I am grateful to walk alongside them. 
In closing I should like to acknowledge all the people who have touched my life. A small number have been able to join us here today; others watch Parliament TV at home on the Coast down South and around the country. I know that my mother Hiria Te Kiekie Reedy will be watching and I pay tribute to her constant love and support as I do to that of my brothers and sisters and their partners and families who together form the kind of whanau that is so easy to have policy theories about but who everyday work hard at making it real. 
Finally I would like to especially acknowledge my husband Wira Gardiner whose pragmatic approach to what is possible encapsulated by Maggie Thatcher’s instruction to her generals “Go to war with what you’ve got.” has become part of the language of our home and keeps me grounded when in pursuit of perfection. And to our two wonderful gorgeous smart funny demanding fabulous daughters Rakaitemania and Mihimaraea I say that you deserve the very best. Since having their bright lights shine into my life there has been a heightened sense of urgency and a sharpened focus on the kind of society in which their aspirations and ambitions can be given loft and momentum and through which they can walk with confidence and poise as Ngati Porou citizens of the world blessed—as we all are—to call this magnificent country Aotearoa New Zealand home. 
Mr Speaker and honourable members I come to Parliament with high expectations of what is possible. Tena koutou tena koutou tena koutou katoa. 
Waiata; haka