Lubeck MarjaMARJA LUBECK (Labour): Mr Speaker tēnā koe. E ngā mana e ngā reo e rau rangatira mā tēnā koutou tēnā koutou tēnā tātou katoa. As the first Dutch-born woman from Indonesian descent I stand in this House. Mr Speaker I too congratulate you and your fellow presiding officers on your new roles. I look forward to getting to know the rules of engagement and serving under your direction for the duration of the 52nd Parliament and hopefully beyond. The Dutch have a saying. It goes: Doe maar gewoon dan doe je al gek genoeg." Translated it means: just act normal; that's crazy enough. But nothing about standing here feels like normal and it's a rather surreal experience.Surreal as it may be I'm honoured to stand here today as one of the "class of 2017". I'm humbled to be in a place so full of tradition history and politics in front of my whānau friends and my parliamentary colleagues. But I'm only here because the majority of New Zealanders voted for a change of Government so I would like to begin by thanking the people who supported me in getting to this place.To my husband Shane and our son Max—Max it was fun having you on the campaign trail. I'm also really glad you've now got your black belt in kempo. It might come in handy in 2020. You probably never thought that for your 16th birthday party we would be watching the general election on a big TV screen in Ōrewa. Thank you Shane for keeping the strands of life together at home base. I'm so grateful for the job you do. I know it's tough on you. Thank you both for being there for me when so often I'm away and I'm not there for you. I'm very proud of you and you are my stars.I acknowledge the Labour Party for its confidence in me and in particular I extend my thanks to our president Nigel Haworth and our general secretary Andrew Kirton for their guidance and commitment. I would like to thank Young Labour for their contagious passion and energy and everyone in Fraser House for their incredible support.I am Labour's candidate for the beautiful Rodney electorate. The electorate has for many years been referred to as "blue on steroids" but I am proud to say that for the very first time ever Rodney now has its first Labour list MP. That means we now have four MPs in Rodney so I'm expecting that together we will be achieving great things for Rodney as well as the country.I would like to give my special thanks to my hard-working Rodney campaign team Labour Auckland North our passionate volunteers and my friends in the aviation business and the trade union movement especially my union E tū. Many more have shown their support and some of you are here today sharing this experience with me. There are simply too many of you to name but you know who you are and my aroha to all of you.Finally a happy 98th birthday for yesterday Nana. Your positive attitude despite a life that has been far from easy is inspiring. I know you will be tuned in to your beloved radio. I just hope it's on AM 882.I was born in Holland the Netherlands and I started my life as the eldest child of Valentin "Tijn" and Nel Lubeck.My father's maternal ancestors travelled from China to Indonesia where his grandmother Oei Hoat Nio married into a well-off family. But then during the Second World War the family was put into Japanese war camps and they lost everything. They experienced terrible hardship and my dad as a young boy lost his father. My grandmother would tell us stories about frying up banana peel when there was nothing else to eat. After the war the family moved to Holland and worked hard to make a new life for themselves.My mum was a very young child in Holland during the Hunger Winter of 1944 when fuel and food were blocked by the Nazis. Everyone was very cold and very hungry. I remember stories of my grandfather walking for days in search of food for his young family. I acknowledge both my parents for raising four kids under five filling our tummies with good food and our lives with unconditional love. Papa and Mama it's a 12-hour difference where you are but I know you are watching right now.In this very public way I want to thank you for giving me a start to life where I've felt loved safe and secure. You've made many personal sacrifices to give your children the best possible start in life and I will be forever grateful to you for giving me mine.Growing up in a small town in Holland I had a quote on my bedroom wall and it said: "I don't know what I'm looking for and I don't expect to find anything definite; the important thing for me is to keep moving." It was that kind of curiosity that took me to the other side of the world to a place first discovered by Europeans 375 years ago by Dutch explorer Abel Tasman in 1642. I didn't know much about New Zealand except that a Dutch map-maker named it after the Dutch province of Zeeland. I knew it was the first country to give women the vote and that it was clean green and nuclear-free—all seemed pretty good reasons to go check it out. I arrived in New Zealand in 1989. Unlike Abel Tasman who did not have a good first encounter with New Zealand I fell in love with the Kiwi way of life.For me the Kiwi Dream meant opportunities a good job fair wages and a safe affordable place to live. But things have changed. The truth is many of the opportunities I was granted 28 years ago no longer exist and the Kiwi Dream seems out of reach for many. Too many hard-working Kiwis are not getting ahead. They see their working conditions going backwards and they're finding it harder to make ends meet. Many people work longer hours sometimes multiple jobs for an income that's barely enough. Last year 45 percent of New Zealand working people didn't get a pay increase. So a big chunk of people are missing out. The top 10 percent of people now have 10 times the wealth of the bottom 10 percent. It is the biggest wealth gap for decades and it's low and middle income earners who are losing out. To make things worse for working people we've seen a systematic erosion of our protections and rights over the last nine years.During that time while working as a flight attendant I served four terms as president of the flight attendant union. I became determined to learn and understand the law; not to become a lawyer but to use that knowledge in my union role to better serve my members and working people. So in my spare time I studied and in 2014 graduated with a law degree. Now one might associate flight attendants with a glamorous lifestyle but I have dealt with members unable to make ends meet on their wages and relying on accommodation grants. I have witnessed the impact that work restructuring and redundancies have on people—on their livelihoods on their dignity and pride. I have seen the gap between rich and poor grow and the erosion of manaakitanga.Mr Speaker on your very first day in your role you quoted Helen Kelly and I too would like to repeat her message: "If people could just be kind to each other." When I repeat her words and think of her I reflect on how much the notion of collective responsibility has been eroded and the negative effects this has had on society especially the growth of inequality. I spoke earlier of the time that my grandparents could not feed their families a time when they were cold and hungry but that was in wartime. I would not expect that more than 70 years later I would be living in a country like New Zealand where people find themselves cold and hungry. Every corner of New Zealand is affected by poverty even Rodney. A food rescue service was set up last year by the Warkworth Rotary and Lions clubs. Organisations like Love Soup on the Whangaparāoa Peninsula are feeding over 1000 people in need every month. It is disgraceful that in a rich and bountiful country like New Zealand we have widespread homelessness and people struggling to feed their families. This is not the great Kiwi Dream and it certainly is not the Kiwi culture and way of life I fell in love with 28 years ago.So what has changed? We are seeing a race to the bottom profit before people and the erosion of longstanding protections from employment agreements. People's working conditions are being undermined their pay packets raided creating uncertainty for working people and their families. This has damaging consequences for our communities. It needs to change for if we don't change we will see more adversarial clashes like what we are seeing today with the Wellington rail network. Rail services were contracted out to foreign multinationals last year and as a result rail employees are the big losers. It is unfair that the rail operator's profits are boosted by undermining its staff's pay and working conditions. When there is industrial strife it would be easy to blame the unions but the unions I have experienced are made up of decent working New Zealanders—people who care and want to make a difference to the lives of working people and their families. It is much more than just dealing with jobs; it is about protecting the basic human rights of workers: the right to be treated fairly and with dignity to feel respected and to be valued.Uncertainty of work translates to uncertainty of income and for many people this has meant the removal of choices in the way they live their lives. Jobs are critical but the quality of those jobs is even more important when it comes to the impact on people's lives. Low quality employment means less time with parents partners and kids; not being able to buy birthday or Christmas presents; pressures on rents mortgages and day-to-day finances. Working life for too many ordinary working people is tough and making ends meet is a real struggle. In the drive to create flexibility and cut costs many New Zealand employers have been undermining job security wages and terms and conditions. They have also been undermining New Zealand. To stop this race to the bottom we need fair policies that allow hard-working people to get ahead. Because of years of successive weakening of our employment laws many good employers now face unfair competition. Weak employment laws mean that bad employers can drive down costs by slashing pay and working conditions.We currently have a very unbalanced system. Cost competition has done little for raising productivity. It has helped create the working poor. Forty percent of our children who live in poverty now live in working households. This needs to change. We need employment law that will bring balance back to the relationship between working people and their employers creating an employment relations system that lifts everyone up. Contrary to what some seem to believe the balance is not about strengthening adversarial systems between unions and employers; it is about parties working together collaboratively to find solutions to the issues they're facing.High Performance High Engagement is a workplace democracy model. It makes employees part of the decision-making process in their workplaces. At Air New Zealand for example for the last five years we have worked under a model where those closest to the problem in the workplace work together to find sustainable long-term solutions and as a result everyone wins. It's about companies their employees and unions working on shared interests building trust and relationships. People are treated respectfully treated decently; they're engaged; there's positive energy. It translates to higher discretionary effort productivity and efficiency. It is a balancing act to improve the working conditions of New Zealand's workers and their families while also ensuring that businesses can thrive. It requires hard work and an open-minded approach on the part of both unions and employers.I am proud to be part of a forward-looking Government and part of a modern union movement and I firmly believe we can have strong unions well-paid workers and a highly functioning economy. These things are not mutually exclusive; in fact we need all three to drive a fair inclusive and productive economy. We need all three to build a better quality of life for New Zealanders. I am proud to be part of a Government that is not afraid to care—to have empathy and well-being as measures to inform Government policy—a Government that values people over profit kindness over dollars and cents.I am proud to be part of a Government that has already shown it is serious about its commitment to support working people and their families. Only last week the first bill was introduced extending paid parental leave to 26 weeks. Parenting is the most important job we can do and I'm proud to be part of a Government that is committed to giving our children the best start in life.I'm so impressed to see you Mr Speaker demonstrate determination to create a more supportive environment to working people working parents. I also believe that at the same time the choice regarding whether and when to become a parent is one of the most private and important decisions a person can make. Our ability to control these decisions means control over our own bodies destinies and the path our life will take. Anything less is an attack on our freedom as a human being. We cannot say women have equal rights nor true freedom with offensive and outdated anti-choice legislation still in place. I hope I will be able to do my part in achieving true choice for women.I stand united with working people and their families. They stand with me in this House. To you all I pledge my energy and determination to be a loyal and hard-working member of Parliament. I pledge to do my part in creating a New Zealand where everyone shares in prosperity. Nō reira tēnā koutou tēnā koutou tēnā tātou katoa. [Applause]"