Ghahraman GolrizGOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN (Green): Thank you Madam Speaker. Might I take this opportunity to congratulate you again but in terms of being in fact in the Chair now as I take my first call with you presiding. I look forward to your guidance in the House. I might just take the opportunity as well to congratulate the new members. There are a few of you in the House taking rowdy positions as the backbenchers are meant to do. Welcome.I'll just start with something else—accidentally and unexpectedly positive—that happened in the House today which is that a Government in Aotearoa New Zealand quite unexpectedly recognised Palestine's right to self-determination and Statehood. It wasn't quite in the motion by the Minister—and I'll acknowledge my friend the Hon Phil Twyford who's in the House moved an amendment. I don't think anyone listened too closely but it was accepted by the Minister and voted for by the Government. I hate to point this out but the Labour Government didn't do it for six years and they did vote down my motion on Statehood but it's nice to see us all by consensus recognise that Palestine exists.It's not so nice that it took a genocide for us to do it. It's not so nice that it took the deaths of 7000 children—that we know of—to do it. It's not so nice that it took—and I'll say it as I did in the week that it happened—a war crime by Hamas. It's not so nice that it has taken a couple of months now—a couple of months of silence—while aid including cancer drugs including water including food has not made it to the 2 million civilians in the Gaza strip. It's actually heart wrenching and I know that it's heart wrenching for every single one of us in this House.So what I want from this Government—because I know and I'll continue to hold for as long as I advocate for human rights which will be my whole life that we share those human values. I refuse to believe that we don't. Our solutions are different but that time is over now. It's over because every 10 minutes in Gaza a child is murdered. So our solutions have to be united. We have to stand together. We have to stand strong as Aotearoa New Zealand has done in the past on an independent principled platform calling for immediate permanent unconditional ceasefire—calling on our friends on our allies on our trading partners on our Five Eyes network on the family of nations in the Commonwealth and on our Pasifika neighbourhood to do the same.Because our voice actually does matter. We're not a wee little small insignificant nation. We do punch above our weight in international forums and on the global stage. We are looked to as a moral principled voice but right now we are absolutely failing at a moment in history that matters. It matters for the next 10 minutes. Whose child is that? What were they hoping to achieve? What were their little pet peeves and hobbies and likes and interests? Who were their brothers and sisters that don't get to grow up with them? Because actually those little kids in Gaza have more in common with the Israeli babies that got affected by the Hamas attack. And we have to hold that they have more in common with the kids that we know the little ones that we hold close in our lives than they have in common with the likes of Brian Tamaki with the likes of the Biden administration and little comms people writing up statements that fall short again and again—fall short to uphold our humanity.The time for stepping slowly with our allies—as the Prime Minister keeps telling us we're doing—is over. It's time for leadership. It's time to put our humanity front and centre as New Zealand has done in the past. It was a National Government that stood up for Palestine in the General Assembly of the United Nations and gave Palestine official status in that forum. It matters because Palestinian voices—the voices of any victim population; the voices that have been muffled and silenced—matter. It's only been with decades upon decades of dehumanisation that this current atrocity is able to happen with so much silence. It's come through decades upon decades of us looking away.I said it before in this House earlier today I'll say it again: I lived as a Middle Eastern child in a war up to the age of nine. I lived in Iran while we were engaged in a bloody 8-year war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. We for sure didn't think our lives mattered. We suffered the sanctions as we had to get coupons to buy butter and to buy fuel. We didn't have cancer drugs; and we had those sirens day after day. That war was nothing compared with what Gaza is seeing right now.You know what else? The war that we all stood up for in this House last term as we should have immediately was the one that was waged by Russia against Ukraine. That war has not been anywhere near as bloody as what we're seeing happen in Gaza. Nowhere near. In the first four weeks we surpassed the death toll of children that we'd seen in Ukraine in almost a year.So the time is now for this Government for this House of Representatives to stand up for New Zealand's values—the values that we see in protest after protest held by our people out there in the street. I've never seen it as strong and as loud as it is for our values. We have to say that we treat every war every victim population and every perpetrator of war crimes and genocide the same no matter if they are our trading partners whether they are our so-called allies or whether the war the genocide the war crimes or the atrocity happens in Europe or whether it happens in the Middle East because it matters when you're a wee child living with those sirens living under those bombs watching the absolute sea of amputees pour into your community—as I did—to feel like it matters to someone. We know that we have trading partners and we have allies who are profiting from the atrocities happening in Gaza. So it is time to say to Mr Biden to say to every one of our Five Eyes partners that enough is enough. Because we as a small South Pacific Island nation have a voice and that voice matters.