Jeanette Fitzsimons - Maiden Speech

On 19 February 1997, Jeanette Fitzsimons, leader of the Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand and Co-Deputy Leader of the Alliance, made her maiden speech in the New Zealand Parliament.

This chamber echoes with the voices of the men and women who have challenged our democratic perceptions and pushed the boundaries of representativeness. Only if Parliament contains people who have known poverty, injustice, discrimination and violence will it ever truly address the needs of those for whom these are daily realities.

It is a case for celebration and hope that this House contains more women than ever before, more Maori, a wider ethnic representation, and list members whose task is to represent nation wide constituencies who have never been concentrated geographically.

It is a great privilege to join my colleagues Sandra Lee and Jim Anderton, and to stand alongside ten other new Alliance Members.

We find ourselves, in the late twentieth century, struggling with global realities which threaten to overwhelm us. A generation ago it became apparent that there was a new crisis in the world economic system, and this had major impacts on NZ. It had many faces - loss of traditional markets, geopolitical control of oil, growing overseas debt, rapid technological change, a breakdown of the post-war Keynesian consensus. A growing social alienation was fuelled by the Vietnam war, and questioned the post-war ideals of progress and materialism. People are still searching for meaningful values beyond just economic growth.

In response, NZ embarked on a series of rash experiments to try to shore up the previous world order and to make the world safe for the continued growth of international capital. First there was Think Big, a failed attempt to grow the economy through large, debt financed and resource intensive engineering works. Much of my early political work was focussed on opposing, and finding alternatives to, those projects.

In the second experiment, NZ led the world in economic rationalism: the casinofication of financial markets; the dismantling of the state and the concept of the public good. It depended for its perceived success on a vicious game of winners and losers, where a huge gap was forced between the successful and the marginalised.

Neither experiment improved the lot of ordinary people beause neither addressed the real nature of the problems. Human numbers and human economic demands had reached the point where the free goods of the ecosystem - the air, water and soil we took for granted - were no longer freely available. It costs more and more to produce less and less. Economic growth can destroy more well-being through pollution, stress, ugliness and scarcity than it creates in new goods and services. Human beings are dwarfed and alienated by the scale of their technologies, which have left most of us no apparent place in the production process which we have been taught to see as the reason for our existence.

In 1993 the Union of Concerned Scientists issued a warning to the world's people, signed by 1670 leading scientists, including 104 Nobel laureates. They said:

Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. ....Many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and animal kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know.
No more than one or a few decades remain before the chance to avert the threats we now face will be lost and the prospects for humanity immeasurably diminished.

The warning catalogues loss of topsoil and forests, rising population and carbon emissions, falling per capita agricultural productivity, eroding genetic diversity, dying lakes, reefs and rivers. It links poverty and human misery closely with environmental degradation. That is borne out by the 25 million environmental refugees - a number that exceeds the number of all refugees from other causes, and is growing by 10,000 people each day.

Just because NZ is travelling first class on this planet does not mean that the ship is not sinking. As the scientists say, "no nation can escape from injury when global biological systems are damaged." Even as we speak, NZers are sitting in ancient rimu forests to prevent a state owned enterprise from felling them. Even as we speak, the lethal waste products of the global nuclear industry are steaming towards NZ waters. But they are not doing so unopposed.

Even during those two decades of failed experiments and social turmoil the seeds of a new way forward were being sown. Like many new movements whose time has come, they occurred in several countries at once, and spread rapidly to more than seventy.

The first Green Parties in the world, the United Tasmanian Group and the NZ Values Party, formed in 1972. They said the key question was not whether centralised industrial capitalism should be controlled by the state or by private interests, but rather the unsustainability of centralised industrial capitalism itself. Values proposed a common sense economic philosophy based on the principles of ecological sustainability and social responsibility. It sought production for real needs, the primacy of local communities rather than states, an internationalism of ideas, knowledge, art, hospitality and solidarity with the poor but the localising of economic relations so they are controlled democratically. Above all it spoke of the politics of enough. That humans should stop when they have enough so that other living things can survive. That affluent humans should stop when they have enough so that others may have enough too.

I was part of that party and helped shape its policies. I voted for it from Europe in 1972, on the strength of two press clippings. My father, who sent those clippings, is in the House tonight, and at 97 is probably the oldest member of the Greens in NZ. As I voted I was thinking of the future for my first child, then a lively toddler. He is here tonight too, and in 1990 was the youngest candidate in the general election, standing for the Greens. During that period Values had combined with local Green groups to form the Green Party, which is now a constituent member of the Alliance.

We are now in contact with 78 Green Parties around the world, on all continents: part of what Senator Bob Brown, leader of the Australian Greens, calls the "thin Green line around the planet". Hundreds of Greens have been elected to national and state parliaments and local councils. They are in the European Parliament and in most national parliaments in Europe. In Finland they are part of government and hold the foreign affairs portfolio. Many have visited NZ, and I remember with particular affection the inspiration of the late Petra Kelly, then leader of the German Greens.

Green parties are mushrooming in the tiger economies of east Asia, called into existence by human rights abuses, rampant nuclear power programmes, slave labour wage rates, lack of health and safety protection and non-existent environmental standards.

Their founding principles are remarkably similar to those of the NZ Greens - ecological wisdom, social justice, appropriate decision-making and non-violence.

I recently reread "Blueprint for NZ", the 1972 Values Manifesto. It sounds surprisingly modern. It speaks of the destruction of quality of life, and especially of the need for livable cities. Of the need to humanise and share work. It laments that economic growth, seen as necessary to stop unemployment, is producing much that is of questionable value and destroying much that is of great value. It attacks militarism as obsolete and deplores the application of the corporate model to areas of human life where it is not appropriate.

In some ways its predictions are uncanny. It forsees a parliament of 120 members, with the extra elected via a party list on a 2 vote system. It calls for the lowering of the voting age to 18, the passing of a Freedom of Information Act, increased use of referenda, Maori-focussed pre-school education for Maori, homosexual and abortion law reform.

So we have made some progress in 25 years, particularly in the field of human rights and the evolution of our parliamentary system. But in other ways we have gone terribly backwards.

Recognising that our society was on the brink of unheard-of levels of unemployment, the Blueprint calls for a four-day week; worker-owned co-operatives; and says "governments may have to create jobs directly and selectively." We in the Alliance would echo that today, as we would the later statement, "need should be the only criterion for receiving health care". The Blueprint deplores the lack of any social control over new technology. Since then the threat of nuclear engineering has been replaced with the threat of genetic engineering, but there is even less democratic control than there was in the 70s.

So we return to this Parliament, and its role in the 1990s.

In a world where 50 of the 100 largest economies are corporations rather than nations; where our ability to decide how and with whom we will trade is policed by an unelected group of nameless officials in the World Trade Organisation; and where most of the people's assets have been sold to private corporations, elected national parliaments have less power than ever before. Some of this power they have chosen to give away, without a mandate from the people. Some could be taken back by developing new ways of working with other nations.

Some power has been devolved to local communities and I welcome that, provided that local communities are empowered to strengthen their democracy and are resourced with the information they need.

But I believe goverment cannot shirk its role of defender of the common good. Governments have allowed - encouraged - the huge gap that has opened up between rich and poor and they can, and must, close that gap again. Governments have aided and abetted the commercialisation of every aspect of our lives; not just in business, but health, education, and our public attitudes to the natural world. Three years ago Sandra Lee said in this House "The needs and desires of ordinary people have been suppressed by a political philosophy which only recognises commercial imperatives and a corporate model." That is even more true today.

People in NZ, as everywhere, are crying out for a way of life that cherishes those values which corporatism denies. They are asking for protection from chemical tresspass. They want to be able to swim and gather shellfish where they can't now. They want better public transport and more human-scale cities. They want to buy food that is not contaminated with chemical residues or created by genetic manipulation. They want worthwhile work that contributes to human happiness rather than destroying it. They want their children to grow up knowing the rich diversity of living things that they have known.

Untrammelled markets will not deliver these things. To the extent that governments can enable people to achieve them, and to build a more human existence for themselves, they have no more important duty.

I have worked for these ideals as a community activist, as a teacher, writer and researcher. I see my work in Parliament as just another way of working for Green goals, neither more nor less important and I hope to continue to work with old friends who are still in those other fields.

To quote a slogan of the women's movement, the personal is political. It is a real challenge to come from the Coromandel hills and the Kauaeranga River, from my eco-house and organic farm, and to live in this over-privileged place in accordance with my personal beliefs of simplicity, walking lightly on the earth, and continuing to care for family and friends, but I intend to try. There is a different way of doing politics, where the processes and the human relationships are important as well as the ends - in fact they are ends. We become empowered when we have a sense of being part of the eco-system; when we start to make connections between our decisions and the cheap labour that furnishes our homes and tailors our wardrobes; between the fuels we use and rising sea levels and tropical storms; between the rubbish we throw away and the mountains of waste we expect our cities to absorb.

Change towards a better understanding is possible, and local action must be backed up with parliamentary action. In this task I seek the blessings of my forbears, women like Rachel Carson and Petra Kelly, and courage for those who will follow.

Jeanette's Jan.'97 article: "Running out" is not the problem

Talk to Jeanette.