Fitzsimons Jeanette: Obituaries — Rt Hon David Russell Lange ONZ CH John Finlay Luxton QSO Hon John Howard Falloon CNZM Rod David Donald 
Fitzsimons Jeanette: Obituaries — Rt Hon David Russell Lange ONZ CH John Finlay Luxton QSO Hon John Howard Falloon CNZM Rod David Donald 
[Volume:628;Page:49] 
JEANETTE FITZSIMONS (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 Last week the Green caucus met and decided that in the tributes to David Lange our speaker would be Rod Donald. We never thought he meant to go and do it personally. He would have been honoured to be remembered in the same sitting of Parliament as David Lange. 
I also want to pay tribute to a fine Prime Minister and I want to do it in the words that Rod used on the day David Lange died which was also the day of the Green Party campaign launch before the last election. He said that David Lange was a commanding figure in the House throughout New Zealand and around the world. He said that David Lange’s breath would have been uranium-free until the last and that like Norman Kirk he made him proud to be a New Zealander. Keith Locke will talk more about David Lange later. 
This week our kauri has fallen and long before his time. I thank all the members who have sent tributes; those who have come and stood in his office with us wept for him and laughed with us; those who have sent emails cards and flowers; and those who have just given us hugs in the corridor. We feel surrounded by an aroha that is not usually part of this place and it is good to see that that is possible. 
It is fitting that we remember Rod here because he was a particularly committed parliamentarian. He believed so strongly in this place being representative of the people that he believed that all main streams of political opinion should be represented here. He believed that it was not right that 35 percent of the people could elect a Government that had absolute power so he fronted the MMP campaign. About half of us in the Chamber today would not be here without that. I thank him for that. He introduced a member’s bill to provide the option for local government to use the single transferable vote system—a more representative electoral system for local bodies—and some local authorities have taken up that option. He believed in such representation as a matter of principle but also as a matter of pragmatism because he knew that the ideas he particularly stood for were not going to be heard in this House unless there was an opportunity for minorities to be represented. It was a matter of some pride that when we entered Parliament together in 1996 he and I spoke about things that I think had never been spoken about here before. 
 I first met Rod around 30 years ago. We were both going to a conference in Auckland and he turned up at my house—I had not met him before—suggesting we work together. He either was still at school or had just left school. I was a young mother with two preschoolers and no political experience. We decided to take on one of the world’s biggest transnationals that was proposing to abolish the returnable Coca-Cola bottle and replace it with bottles that had to be smashed. It was not exactly the most planet-threatening environmental issue but it was about the connections between things. It was about the huge waste of energy the huge waste of resources and the huge waste of landfill space when there was a perfectly workable returnable bottle system in New Zealand. It is interesting that his latest campaign which he was only part-way through was to try to save the remaining returnable glass milk bottles in Christchurch that are now to be phased out. Of course at that conference in Auckland we lost. But we learnt some valuable lessons. 
His environmental work included cleaning up streams and the Heathcote River in his local area when he was just a boy. It included running a recycling scheme for the Christchurch City Council modelled on the one I had set up for Devonport. It included going over to the West Coast in the big battle for the West Coast forests trespassing to plant beech trees in the middle of the logging road that the loggers had bulldozed through the forest and being banned from that area. He was an on-the-ground activist not a theoretician. 
But his work ranged across the whole spectrum of Green issues. He was not corralled in a corner of policy; he saw the breadth and he saw the connections. He was an internationalist and he was an internationalist because he had fierce loyalty to this place to Aotearoa New Zealand—to its land its natural environment its people its culture its industries and its workers. And because he had that fierce loyalty to this place he could also reach out to the rest of the world and say that we have to be not a globalised community which is homogenised so that nobody cares about anywhere but an international community where nations work together to support both their own people and people of other countries. 
It was in that internationalist role that he took part in the protests against the Springbok tour—not because he wanted a confrontation with the police but because he believed in justice for black people in South Africa. It was in that role that he stood on his own on the steps of this Parliament with the Tibetan flag when the Chinese delegation came and that was an act of political courage. It was in that role that he publicised the plight of workers in Thai sweatshops and Chinese labour camps who make goods that are sold here with all the profits going to the middleman. It was in that role that he tried to get New Zealand to make a gesture of principle against playing sport with Zimbabwe because of what was happening to the people there. 
Unlike what many people think about the Greens Rod was a businessman. He ran several successful businesses. He started Piko Wholefoods in Christchurch. Again that was not just any business but a business that was doing something ethical he believed in. He believed in quality food he believed in organics and he started a shop to sell them and it did well. He became the manager of Trade Aid and turned it from a pretty small organisation into a nationally significant one because he believed that trade should be fair both to the poor of other countries and to the workers in this country. 
That commitment led him to put forward his latest project of a Buy Kiwi Made campaign; not to compel anybody to do anything but to raise awareness in New Zealand that every time we spend a dollar it is a political act that that dollar is supporting either processes and goods that are sustainable or ones that are not that it is supporting either workers here or workers somewhere else and that it is supporting either our economy or somebody else’s. He wanted people to have that choice by having those goods labelled—by having a campaign so that people could make their own decisions. That was recognised in the agreement between the Government and the Greens on the formation of the new Government and we are absolutely committed to carrying on that work. 
I want to tell members a little story that I was told by one of his friends who has known him at least as long as I have. When he and Nicola were quite young many years ago there was a little prefab shed on the bank of the Heathcote River in which they ran a children’s library every Saturday morning. It was place where children could come and experience books. It was probably never really noted by the mainstream but the kids used to come and they used to read and there was a place for them to come and do that. It was every week; they used to take turns—Rod did it one week and Nicola did it the next. 
Rod saw the big picture—that all these issues were interconnected. Some saw him as ambitious. Yes he was but he was ambitious for the issues he was ambitious for justice and he was ambitious for sustainability. He wanted some political power so that he could advance those causes and he did not want it for himself or his own ego. 
He lived in overdrive. He lived with a cellphone glued to his ear. I had to haul it off sometimes and say to him: “Rod I want to talk to you.” But he lived what he believed in. He was never too busy to stop riding his bicycle around Christchurch when he could have taken a taxi at no cost to himself. He was never too busy to grow a vege garden and his father used to help out with that and I feel particularly for him. He was never too busy to turn up at Green events and at public meetings with his spiced apple cake every ingredient of which had a political story behind it—and members will hear more of that later on. And he was never too busy even at Parliament if there was a significant occasion for one of his daughters to whip back to Christchurch in order to be there. He was absolutely devoted to Holly Emma and Zoe and they to him and our hearts and our love go out to them now and to Nicola his partner. Sometimes I think Nicola you shared so much of him with us that we saw more of him than you did and that must be very hard. 
He had an enormous generosity of spirit. He was always ringing up one of us saying: “Hey here’s an idea you could use in your portfolio on this thing you’re working on.” or “Have you thought about this way of communicating your message?”. If one of us had a success he was as delighted about it as he was about his own. There is a story which the green movement sometimes refers to about the way geese fly in formation. When the one in front gets really tired it slips back and another one takes its place until it has had a rest. Co-leadership was like that. During the campaign I got sick with a very bad cold and a badly infected wisdom tooth. I took things a little bit more slowly for a while and Rod redoubled his efforts. He just zoomed all over the country. He seemed to pick up all the slack from whoever needed him at the time. We are so proud of him. No one can ever fill his shoes but we will carry on the work that he was so passionate about. 
I want to finish with two quotes from our blog site where hundreds of people—and I mean hundreds of people—have joined in sending tributes to Rod: “Rod demonstrated by his life and work that it is possible to deliberately step aside from the selfishness and self-centredness that defines our current version of ‘civilisation’. He demonstrated that an honest man can by example show us a better way to live to care for the environment and to look after each other. He showed us that here is a better way to live.”; and more briefly: “There is an old saying that goes something like this … ‘politicians are like bananas they start off straight and green and end up bent and yellow.’ After 10 or more years in politics Rod Donald was an exception to this rule. He was straight and there was no question of his colour.” 
Finally in the words of Tom Scott who had this wonderful cartoon in the  
Dominion Post 
 yesterday: “Rod Donald: pragmatic idealist friend of the planet good man”. Go well Rod. 
Waiata