Charles Chauvel - Maiden speech

CHARLES CHAUVEL (Labour): Madam Speaker, my first public acknowledgment of you came in 1994 at the University of Auckland, in the preface to my masters thesis. You helped me choose a topic and you encouraged me to persevere with it. Since then you have provided advice and encouragement to me at key times. It is an honour to acknowledge you again.

Earlier today you accepted my affirmation of allegiance in two languages: English and Tahitian. My choice to make the affirmation in Tahitian is a tribute to my father, his Pacific heritage, and to the generations of Pacific people who have contributed to the energy and diversity of our culture in these islands now. My father was born in France. Dad’s paternal heritage is Tahitian—or, more precisely, Rai’atean. His family returned to Tahiti after the war.

Dad was the eldest child, and the family wanted him to receive an English-speaking education. He came to New Zealand alone, on a boat, at the age of 12, in the late 1940s, with no English language skills. His family enrolled him at boarding school at Wesley College, south of Auckland. Having to pay for his schooling meant that they could not afford to bring him back and forth from Tahiti, so he stayed with family friends or attended YMCA camps during the school holidays. He was bright and he worked hard. As his classmate Jim Peters reminded me at a public meeting during last year’s election campaign, he was dux at Wesley. He enrolled at the Auckland University College part time and worked on the wharves to pay his way. He was one of the first Pacific Islanders in New Zealand to graduate with a law degree, and over time he became the senior partner in a respected law firm in Gisborne. He ensured that we stayed in touch with our Tahitian family and, as children, my sister and I visited them regularly. Before he retired Dad had the opportunity to attend his two children’s four university graduation ceremonies, to move the admission to the New Zealand Bar of both of us, and to witness my admission to the New South Wales legal profession.

Dad’s story is a classic, and timely, reminder of the way in which immigrants, and the children of immigrants, have come to New Zealand and made their contributions to our society. His arrival in New Zealand took place some 20 years before the first modern migration here from the Pacific. So it has taken longer for the pattern of achievement that he and his family followed to be replicated more widely. But the achievements of the present generation of New Zealand - born Pacific people, and their parents, are a catalogue of success in the arts, sport, in business, and the professions.

Our economy is now around a quarter larger than it was when Helen Clark was elected Prime Minister in 1999. As Jim Sutton remarked in his valedictory speech last Wednesday, unemployment has fallen by 75 percent since then. Those are extraordinary accomplishments. Many Pacific people—along with other New Zealanders who struggled through the difficult years of the 1990s and earlier—have done well in our new-found prosperity. People from the Pacific came here and worked as cleaners, caretakers, freezing workers, and wharfies. They did that so that they could enter the middle classes, or at least to give their children the chance to do so. In Cannons Creek, in Ōtara, in west Auckland, in the Hutt Valley, in the central North Island, and elsewhere, they do not forget that they first began to do so under a Labour-led Government. Nor do I. I am very proud to become the fourth member of the Labour caucus, and the fifth member ever directly elected to this Parliament, to be able to trace my origins within one generation back to the Pacific. I am equally proud, through my family’s connection with Rai’atea, or Rangiatea, or Hawaiki—as we now call it in New Zealand—of the genealogy I share with Māori members of Parliament.

I also made the affirmation in English. My pride in my Pacific origins takes nothing away from the appreciation I feel for my European heritage. I remember one of my last conversations with Sonja Davies. I asked her about the significance of the title of her first book, Bread and Roses. In reply, she sang the line from the song: “hearts starve, as well as bodies”. If my father was the principal provider of bread during my childhood, then it was my mother and her family who provided many of the roses.

Mum arrived here in New Zealand in 1946, aged 2. When her father returned to Scotland at the end of the war after years in a POW camp in Germany, there was no work. After inquiries here, he found a job in the freezing works in Gisborne. The opportunities open to Mum’s family in New Zealand in the 1940s and 1950s were more than literally a world away from the life they would otherwise have lived. I still remember how proud my grandmother was that my mother had opened her own business—a dance school—in her teens, and that she ran it successfully and with a good artistic reputation. Much like Sonja, my grandmother instinctively knew right from wrong. She taught me my values. If more strong, funny, caring, clever, passionate, ambitious women—like Flora McLaughlin Blair, Sonja Margaret Loveday Davies, and Regency Fiona Chauvel—were active in the upbringing of more New Zealand children, many fewer childhoods would be blighted by neglect.

New Zealand in 2006 is poised on the threshold of opportunity. We can achieve great things. By international standards, we are still a wealthy country. In recent years we have enjoyed a sustained level of prosperity that many of us in the 1980s and 1990s feared we would not see again. And, for once, we are not squandering that prosperity: there is substantial investment occurring in education, infrastructure, superannuation, and the eradication of poverty.

We possess many other advantages. We speak the world’s only lingua franca. We are well-educated and healthy, and getting increasingly better-educated and healthier. We operate a stable democracy, in which the rule of law is generally understood and respected. There are sufficient renewable resources in our ground, air, and water to sustain our energy and nutrition needs indefinitely, provided we are wise about their use. We are generally regarded as a good international citizen. Our culture is unique and vibrant, and we live in one of the most beautiful countries on Earth.

To back ourselves by restating these advantages is not to be blind to the challenges that face us. We are a small country, and remote from large markets. We are still working through our colonial legacy. We were complacent for too long about economic diversification and infrastructure investment. Too much of our wealth is owned offshore now. We need to meet these challenges head on, in innovative ways to the best of our collective ability, without abandoning all the good things that make us unique and our society worth living in. We must focus on growing the country’s wealth. In the application of intellectual property to the productive natural environment, we are the world’s best farm. But the suspension of the latest World Trade Organization round and the recent US retreat from multilateralism both suggest the emergence of a far less benign international environment. We have to redouble our efforts to open international markets to our exporters. In the process, we should take care that the interests of poorer countries— including those of the Pacific, where great power interests are beginning to compete for influence again in a way not seen since colonial times—are not damaged.

But subject only to that reservation, we should be ruthlessly pragmatic about our own interests. India and China are obvious markets for high-end, added-value primary production that is created in an environmentally sustainable way. And we must maintain the hope that the US will open its markets to an old friend like us, instead of allowing a host of other nations—with no history of shared values—to join the queue for free-trade agreements with it.

We must also resolve our relationship with the other established great liberal social democracy in our region, Australia. I personally believe that it is time to explore a Pacific union that would have as its core New Zealand and Australia, in an evolving and ever-closer relationship. We need to be clearer about our long-term goals in respect of the nation that will always be our most important international partner. We also need to continue to welcome people to this country as part of the international brain exchange. There is a pragmatic reason for doing this, but it is not the only one. Our economy is now running at capacity in terms of available skills and labour. To achieve future prosperity, we need more and talented people. Our country was built on immigration, and we should not fear it. Diversity makes our culture much less homogenous and our lives less dull. Immigration enriches us all, literally and figuratively.

As we pursue wealth, we must never compromise our labour standards, our environment, or our commitment to social justice. People choose to reside here—and stay here—largely because it is a great place to live and work and to raise a family. We can have it all, actually—high living standards, good international citizenship, a renewable energy future, and a continued commitment to egalitarianism. We just have to be smart—a little more farsighted, and a little less petty and partisan—about how we achieve it. These are some of the big issues facing us. If members of Parliament fail to address them, then there is no other group of people with a democratic mandate to do so. And if too many parliamentarians ignore the big issues because it is easier in the short term to grab headlines by focusing on slogans, or by playing personality politics, the long-term cost to faith in our democratic institutions will be very high indeed.

I wish to conclude my remarks by acknowledging with deep gratitude the presence in the gallery of my family, supporters, and friends. Many of my former business partners from Minter Ellison Rudd Watts, including David Patterson, the chairman, and other colleagues from the firm’s board are present. I will always be grateful for the friendship and camaraderie of those most excellent of lawyers, who showed their confidence in me by electing me to their partnership at the age of 30. Colleagues from the Meridian Energy board on which I served, which laid the foundations for returning $650 million of value from our Australian operations to New Zealand and showed that a sustainable energy future is essential and possible for this country, are also present. Colleagues from the Lotteries Commission board are also here. During my service on that board we reversed a legacy of falling profits by some $68 million, while preserving a safe gaming environment. I acknowledge in particular the presence and support of the chair of the board’s audit and finance committee. There are many other colleagues from past endeavours here. People I worked with in the Public Health Commission, the Crown Law Office, the AIDS Foundation, the Institute of Directors, and on Law Society committees have all come to show their support, as have volunteers from the 2005 Ohariu-Belmont campaign, colleagues in the trade union movement, and a host of other friends.

My sister, Fleur, is here with her partner. So is my own partner, David, who has always encouraged me to advance my own chosen career but has never himself sought public office. Despite this, he has had to put up with an intrusive level of media interest in his personal life. When in 50 years’ time sociologists examine the newspapers of the last 3 weeks to monitor our understanding of the cost of the final collapse of the Doha round, they will compare with surprise the column inches devoted to that issue against those reporting that Dave owns a nice car that I sometimes get to drive. I sincerely thank all of those who have shown me their support, and I hope that they will find my service in this place worth of it. Ia Orana.