New Green Party list MP from Waiheke, Denise Roche, made a stinging attack on the political establishment in her maiden speech to Parliament in Wellington on Wednesday afternoon. She outlined her working stock background and the crucible of island politics before attacking ‘backroom deals’ being done by the Government and our laws being ‘for sale’. 

There has been a massive betrayal of the values of our country, new Green Party list Member of Parliament from Waiheke Island, Denise Roche, said in her maiden speech to Parliament on Wednesday afternoon.

Her keenly awaited speech was watched by a group of enthusiastic islanders on the big screen at the RSA here. She was one of seven new Green Party members addressing Parliament for the first time.

“We used to be a nation which prided itself on giving everyone a fair go,” she said. “But the human value of fairness and equality has been subverted by greed.

“Its been subverted by a bankrupt financial ideology which has robbed the poor on behalf of the rich.”

Ms Roche said she came to the House without the benefit – or social handicap – of a silver spoon. She was not of the “one percent” who were “so grossly over represented” in every part of New Zealand political life. Instead she came from “working class stock” but had been blessed to be challenged and supported by one of New Zealand’s greatest educators, principal Charmaine Poutney at Auckland Girls Grammar School.

“Emboldened by education and enraged by the injustice that delivered – by an accident of birth – to one class the jewels and another the crumbs, I set out on a journey that began as a union organiser.

“I have protested and picketed with the best. I have scrapped my way through disputes, represented workers in courts and tribunals and had a solid education in the misery that is greed – the blight that grew inequality across our land.”

Ms Roche said as she took her place in the House she wanted to thank Green Party supporters who had entrusted her with their vision of a richer New Zealand where the rivers were clean, children safe, healthy and educated, and where a thriving green economy ensured those children could build satisfying careers in the same country as their families.

“The deregulation of the labour market since 1991 has not brought the wealth and security to working people that was promised in this House. We are not a better country for having dismantled generations of knowledge and experience in distributing fairly the profits of work and enterprise.

“The one mechanism available to working people to garner a fair share of their work, organised labour, has been systematically demolished, vilified and stripped of rights which took generations of active citizens to build.

“If we want working people to invest their lives in our future as a nation we need to assure them of decent wages, safe working conditions and economic security for their families or we are forever condemned to waving goodbye to our kids as they flee to societies that will respect them.”

Like her colleagues she had entered the House to help build a better New Zealand with better social outcomes and a more protected environment. The last election had seen a greater awareness that the Green vision was a sound one 

“More than ever people are waking up to the fact that promises delivered for a three year election cycle will not necessarily deliver the best outcome in the longer term.

“My children are already destined to inherit an environment much more degraded than the country I grew up in.

“We have a duty to their children to address climate change and to clean up the mess we’ve been creating.”

Waiheke, she said, where opinions were  “strongly held and yet freely given too – at all hours of the day, on the ferry, at the supermarket or library” had been a good place to learn the art of political representation.

“The Gulf Islands – it’s a little place but you seriously don’t want to mess with us,” she warned.

“We do political debates a bit differently. We do them like they matter. As if political decisions were the preserve of those affected by them. For this reason Waiheke and Great Barrier have a voter engagement that is the envy of the country.

“There is something in this that this House needs to learn from. How to make politics meaningful and relevant to our citizens. I am sorry to say, it is something this House has been failing at.

“The 2011 election marked an historic low in political engagement, the lowest rate of voter turnout since 1877 which was before women got the vote.

“The biggest threat to democracy in this country is not the Taliban or the Exclusive Brethren. 

“It is disengaged citizens. If our time in this House is to serve the interests of democracy then we need to urgently address and arrest this decline in voter participation.”

Ms Roche said she was proud to be of “Ngati Waiheke” and proud to represent the community and voluntary sector. Community organisations, she said, were the “crucible of democracy”, the place where citizens came together to share dreams and plan their common futures. They were the essential glue of society which shaped our norms and values and without which we would all be the poorer.

“I am,” she said, “carried into this House on the shoulders of activists and organisations who fought for my right to be here.”

She said she thought particularly of the National Council of Women, founded in 1896 whose inaugural president was Kate Sheppard who appeared on our $10 note – an organisation to whose tireless advocacy she, and every other woman in the House, owed her place. Yet New Zealand had done a great disservice to this and many other organisations like Greenpeace by denying them registration as charities.

“They are denied registration because the Charities Commission has an allergy to advocacy,” she said. 

“At Piritahi Marae a couple of weeks ago I said that no one stands on the paepae by themselves.

“You can’t be a leader if there is no-one with you; you cannot stand at the front if there is no one behind you. And, importantly, you are only a leader because others have supported you.” •