PoliticsNovember 16, 2017

‘I want to change people’s awareness of what politics really is’: Chlöe Swarbrick’s maiden speech

Guest writer

In her first parliamentary address, the new Green MP reveals her personal history of anxiety and depression, and her overriding ambitions for NZ.

Chlöe Swarbrick was elected to parliament as a list member for the Green Party. She wrote a candidate’s diary for the Spinoff during the recent campaign. Read her entries, and those of fellow new MPs Kiri Allan and Erica Stanford, here – along with their maiden speeches.

E te Māngai, tēnā koe

Tuatahi, ki te mana whenua o tēnei rohe, Te Ātiawat

Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa

Mr Speaker,

Congratulations on your position. I’m immensely proud to enter this 52nd Parliament at such a time where you’ve actively sought to make the House more family friendly – to create a new normal. There’s been some critics of our having babies welcomed into this Chamber – it’s a place of work, they say. Children don’t belong in the midst of arguing. I think perhaps these critics may take for granted a nasty, adversarial culture – I personally hope the presence of babies helps remind us all of the gravity of our task and the lives our decisions impact.

I want to acknowledge my colleagues from Maungakiekie – new electorate MP Denise Lee, and my friend and new Labour MP, Priyanca Radhakrishnan. I also want to acknowledge my incredible new Green colleague who I’m honoured to enter this House with, Golriz Ghahraman.

Mr Speaker, four years ago, I started hosting a little current affairs show on Auckland’s number one alternative radio station. I spent a very long time interviewing politicians of all stripes on daily issues, but the underlying questions were always essentially the same:

How much do you understand this problem, and the lives of the people affected, outside of your briefing notes? And why should they trust you?

With all due respect, the answers were pretty much never satisfactory. There was an innocuous response mechanism seemingly bred into politicians, and with it, it’s like they’d become out of sync with the orbit of everyday people’s lives. I don’t think I would be alone in saying I couldn’t see myself, my friends, my whānau-in-politics.

Mr Speaker, young people don’t have a monopoly on political disillusionment – we just listen to better music while feeling it. It’s hard to engage in a system that doesn’t look or sound like you, that talks down to you, disparages your participation, and you can’t change.

The issue is, regardless of whether people choose to participate in this system, it governs their lives. Institutions didn’t have to look like they do – they’re the sum of the people engaged and involved. Democracy doesn’t have to feel broken – it’s a means, not an end.

Mr Speaker, the result of a few too many late night Google spirals and discussions with friends who’ve always entertained my left of field ideas saw me running for the Auckland Mayoralty. I tried to make it about the people of Auckland, to such an extent that I had a few people email me about the design of my posters, telling me that my name wasn’t big enough to read. But the slogan was, and it read: This is your city. I cut my teeth debating previous leader of the Labour Party, and my city’s new Mayor, Phil Goff.

A journalist asked me if my candidacy was a protest. I said yes, it kind of was, and they took that to mean it was a joke.

I don’t think protest is a joke. It’s a method of organisation, of bringing people together around common purpose. It’s a legitimate means to achieve tangible, meaningful outcomes; to make things better. To change.

We have a history of standing for things: peaceful resistance at Parihaka, women’s suffrage, nuclear free New Zealand, anti-apartheid. Our country’s political history is rich with protest.

So it shouldn’t really be any surprise to many in this House that a few weeks ago, freshly minted as an MP, I attended a protest.

My Dad texted me the next day telling me that he’d heard people on talkback radio saying mean things about me. I had to call him and remind him that I’m in the Green Party. Whilst we’ve been ahead of the policy curve – leading where all others eventually follow – change is almost always uncomfortable.

Change often come from the top. Change most frequently comes in the form of a groundswell – for the people, by the people. The very reason I stand in this chamber is because of the combined efforts of thousands of Green party volunteers and activists across Aotearoa. I’m here because of the staunch, tireless dedication to a kaupapa that recognises the wellbeing of our people and our planet as being inextricably linked. I’m here because of the tenacity, good humour, and support of my campaign team, who turned up, day in and day out, month after month after month. I’m here to supplement the mahi of our lean, mean, Green caucus. I’m here to try show people that politicians can look a little different, sound a little different, do things a little different. To drive home the message that politicians works for people – the mind boggling notion that politicians are people.

Mr Speaker, anybody paying attention saw that this was a rough, and generally rather exhausting campaign. A week before election day, at my final debate, I broke down in tears.

We were asked to speak on New Zealand’s shameful suicide rate, particularly with regard to our youth. Our rangatahi. Another candidate took this as academic, speaking in numbers and fiscals. They were abstracting the lives and loss of my friends.

As I cried, I couldn’t help but realise that this mental health epidemic rippling through our communities was the logical end point of austerity; the consequence of decades of economic and social reform that have shredded communities, safety nets, care.

It turns out, Mr Speaker, lives are more complicated than what’s on a CV. I spent a lot of my teenage years struggling with anxiety and depression.

The reason I talk about this is not because my mental health history has necessarily made me a stronger person, or given me any insights into the world. Rather than making me special, a history of mental illness makes me very normal, because these conditions are pandemic in our society. We in this House have the power and the platform to help define normality, so I think we have a responsibility to present ourselves as we really are, with our flaws intact.

I understand that’s no small task when in this universe – we’re supposed to be poised to jump at each other’s jugular at the faintest sign of weakness. But things like kindness, as I’m so glad our new Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has put on the agenda, is not weakness. It’s human.

I ask that we remember and reflect the people we’re serving – it’s our job to empower them, not insulate ourselves to their scrutiny.

Too many of those we serve and represent are navigating insecure housing and insecure work. When you don’t know your neighbours or your co-workers to any depth, and you have a problem, you’re not inclined to talk about it. You internalise and individualise it. It’s your problem. It’s therefore a problem with you. Without strong communities, without mainstream recognition of the power of collective action, we don’t hear each other’s voices and we don’t put our finger on systemic issues that we need each other to help solve.

Mr Speaker, there’s this old joke. A fish is swimming up a river and it sees a dog standing on the bank and the dog says to it ‘How’s the water?’ and the fish replies, ‘What’s water?’

The most fundamental realities of our lives are often the hardest to see, and the hardest to talk about.

Kids from all over Aotearoa get brought here on a school trip, and they sit up in the gallery and they watch Parliament and their teachers tell them: ‘This is politics.’ When Question Time is on the news, everyone sees the yelling and screaming and and they’re told ‘This is politics. This is what politicians do.’

But what happens in this room is largely theatre. Politics is what happens when all the people in this room go back to their offices and close the doors and make decisions.

The consequences of those decisions saturate our lives. These decisions inform who is rich and who is poor, who gets sick, and who gets better. They decide what we eat and what we drink and the quality of the air that we breath. They decide who has a future and who does not. The consequences of political decisions are so pervasive in our lives we don’t even see them any more.

We in this room get to choose the rules. That means that those falling through the gaps are either there by systemic neglect, or, by design. It means that we the Green Party, as one moving part of the new Government, have an incredible opportunity, and duty, to fix things.

Mr Speaker, when I was eleven years old, Mrs Nabi, my form one teacher, made a point of telling off one of my friends. It was a decile 3 intermediate and I was one of a handful of pakeha kids. My Pasifika mate was looking down at his desk – she pointed out that this is what Pasifika kids are taught respect looks like. But to those suspended in the Pakeha world, where eye contact is respect, would see this as rude. Because of this, she said, brown kids were treated not only as naughty, but as disrespectful, particularly by those who may not understand cultural cues. That’s what systemic racism looks like, she taught us.

With that lesson, I started understanding that the system was designed for people with skin like mine. That’s what the echoes of colonisation look like. If we’re ever going to heal those wounds, we need to look at them in broad daylight. It’s the same with any and all history that we may try and bandage over – it is uncomfortable because it requires attention.

Mr Speaker, I am who I am because of my family. We don’t all share the same politics, but I was raised on a diet of robust and challenging discussion.

Dad – you gave me a toolkit of resilience. At seven years old, writing my first school speech on the double standards between kids and adults, as only a petulant seven year old could – you taught me the value of putting myself in other people’s shoes. You showed me how a perception gives someone their reality, and how nobody, not even a grumpy seven year old, was the centre of the universe.

Mum – I owe you my love of art, my love of reading, my love of theatre and film and creativity. You’ve shown me how one can take control of their narrative – our futures are not confined by our histories.

To my little sister Grace and my little brother Ollie – I’m stoked to be your big sister. Grace, I’ve appreciated how little you care about anything and everything politics; you’re my sounding board for why anybody should give a damn about the politics that plays out at the periphery of their lives. Ollie, I love learning with you – it’s so cool to be granted the ability to try and improve the education system just as you’re about to start intermediate school.

To my best friend and partner, Alex, who’d have imagined, when we met nearly six years ago outside Philosophy 101, that this is where we’d end up? Thank you for being my anchor amidst turbulence in life and self-discovery, for being my home when I didn’t have one. Thank you for pushing me to be myself. Thank you for putting up with me as I follow each and every new passion.

If I can accomplish one thing during my time here, if I can change one thing, I want to change people’s awareness of what politics really is, because if we can change that, everything else can change. I want to start that work here, today, by asking people to begin to look critically at the reality around you: look at our culture and our society and our economy and ask yourself if these systems are just and fair. If they’re not, who profits from unfairness, and who pays the price for injustice? Because politics is not me standing here giving this speech. Politics is all around you. Politics is water.

Politics lives in our relationships, in our conversations, in what we believe and what we’re willing to fight for. Mr Speaker, I stand here on the shoulders of giants – like Green pioneers Jeanette Fitzsimons and Rod Donald – and I’m here to fight, both from my privileged position inside these walls, and out protesting on the streets with the people I’m proud to represent, until nobody ever needs to fight again.

Keep going!

New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern (C) walks next to Philippine Air Force Major General Arnold Mancita upon arriving at Clark International airport in Pampanga province, north of Manila on November 12, 2017 to attend the 31st Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) Summit. World leaders arrive in the Philippines’ capital for two days of summits beginning on November 13. / AFP PHOTO / MANAN VATSYAYANA (Photo credit should read MANAN VATSYAYANA/AFP/Getty Images)

PoliticsNovember 15, 2017

On the world stage, Ardern is showing NZ just what kind of PM she is likely to be

Wayne Mapp

Contributing writer

Jacinda Ardern has described herself as a ‘pragmatic idealist’. In her early forays abroad, the new PM has started to indicate what form that might take – and those hoping to see a new radicalism in NZ politics are likely to be disappointed, argues former National minister Wayne Mapp.

After two international trips, New Zealand is starting to get a real sense of how the new prime minister will govern.

Jacinda Ardern has become our PM in part due to her compelling rhetoric and her positive disposition. This was, at least in part, enough to convince Winston Peters to choose her. He told New Zealand on the fateful night when he announced his choice of government that he had gone for a government of change.

So how much change?

Before the election Jacinda Ardern described herself as a “pragmatic idealist”. It was not clear which of these two words would dominate, though her time in prime minister Helen Clark’s office would surely have indicated the importance of pragmatism. However, in contrast to Helen Clark, there is much more idealism in Ardern’s speeches and interviews. Perhaps that is a product of being “youth adjacent”.

The visit to Australia where she agreed to give Australia time to sort out the situation of the Manus Island refugees showed her initial stance, being careful not to upset longstanding relationships. Though by this week at the East Asian Summit in Manila she had become somewhat more forthright on the issue, even if her actual offer had not changed. One had the sense she felt she needed to do more to burnish her credentials as the new leader in the progressive movement. That of course has its risks. It has looked like Malcolm Turnbull was trying to avoid further formal meetings in Manila with her. Most nations, especially close friends, do not welcome being told off.

But it was not Jacinda that upset the TPP applecart. That role fell to the other neophyte leader, Justin Trudeau. Not that Canada has ever been at the forefront of trade liberalisation. On present indications Ardern would never do anything so rash as to sabotage a vital leaders’ meeting at such a late stage.

Jacinda Ardern and Justin Trudeau meet at the ASEAN summit in Manila. Photo: Trudeau’s Twitter

Many of Ardern’s supporters have construed both her youthfulness, and the idealism of her speeches, as the harbinger of a new radicalism in New Zealand politics, where New Zealand would not be afraid to upset the international order irrespective of the repercussions. So far that is not how our prime minister has operated, even if some members of the public would prefer it. Consensus building is more her style.

There are at least three reasons why that might be the case.

The first is that there is not nearly the hunger for revolutionary change as in earlier eras. There is not the palpable aura of generational exhaustion that existed in 1972 when Norman Kirk was elected. The 1960s had the promise of the sort that occurs only every 50 years or so. By 1972 there was a real prospect that youth were able to influence a change of direction in society to a much deeper degree than the present. In part this was tied to the protests against the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, the first wave of modern feminism, coupled with the flower power revolution that pushed back against the conformism that stretched back into the late 1940s. While there may be elements of that among millennials, it has nowhere near the power that revolutionised society 50 years ago, and continues to have deep echos.

The second is that the prime minister knows she is inheriting a healthy economy. This was all rather well put by Chris Bishop in his recent Spinoff column. I suspect the prime minister intuitively knows that if there is too much change, then the economic gains, not just of the last nine years, but also from the nine years of the Clark era, will be put at risk. Any significant economic setback is likely to result in her being a three-year prime minister.

The third and the most important appears to be the prime minister’s own political instincts. The choice of her senior staff, including Clark veteran Heather Simpson, would indicate a more conservative approach than her political rhetoric might indicate. Perhaps more than anything this may indicate how Ardern’s pragmatic idealism may in fact play out. In the words of Mario Cuomo, “You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.”

It is therefore not surprising that Jacinda Ardern does not intend to herald a revolution. The descriptions of her in the Australian press immediately after becoming prime minister as a socialist were overwrought.

The early commitment to TPP11 was perhaps the clearest signal that the basic economic settings will not be overturned. When coupled with Labour’s Budget Responsibility Rules, effectively limiting the size of government to around 30% of GDP, and the commitment to have no tax increases, then the scope for an economic revolution is just about non-existent.

These instincts do not mean that nothing changes. Jacinda Ardern will certainly want to leave an enduring mark on our political landscape.

Change is clearly on the horizon. Labour will spend around $2 billion more than National would have, largely due to the cancellation of National’s tax package. A government can do a fair bit with an extra $2 billion, particularly if they are also prepared to borrow more for capital expenditure. But society cannot be transformed with such a sum, though the worst problems can be significantly ameliorated.

Jacinda Ardern arrives in Manila for the ASEAN Summit. Photo: MANAN VATSYAYANA/AFP/Getty Images

So other things will happen. It will be a question of transferring her sense of optimism into a plan of action that captures the imagination, not just in a partisan manner, but in way that is calculated to gain widespread support.

We have yet to see what that means. The new prime minister’s continuing insistence that climate change is the challenge for this generation, most recently stated at APEC, may show the path of the change she intends. New Zealand being seen, not as the social laboratory that we have sometimes been referred to in the past, but as a country that uses innovation and imagination as the driver to adapt to the challenges of climate change. It will need to go beyond what is already announced in public transport and a reformulated Emissions Trading Scheme. The latter will excite no one.

There will need to be something tangible that people can latch on to. Perhaps budget incentives for solar power on all our houses, with a credible buy back scheme. It is the sort of challenge that could interest Elon Musk with his big battery storage systems. Or incentives for electric cars, not just for the wealthy, but for ordinary New Zealand families. Whatever it is, it will signify a prime minister ready to find the popular pathway to put substance to her rhetoric: her form of pragmatic idealism.