Nandor Tanczos MP - Valedictory speech

I give thanks and praise unto the Most High Jah Ras Tafari. I give greetings to all in the name of the Holy Trinity—the Almighty Father, the Divine Mother, and the Child that is love made life. I greet the members of this House for the last time as one of them. I greet those in the gallery, and I thank them for honouring me with their presence, especially my beloved Ngahuia Murphy. My greetings also to my Apu and my Anu, my friends, family, allies, and supporters watching from Africa, from Europe, from Asia, from the Americas, and from Australia. I say “Jah guide” to them all.

I was elected to this Parliament in 1999, and my life changed. I knew that it would. Unlike most members of the public, I had a pretty good idea of what being an MP was like. It was one of the reasons I hesitated to stand. “It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it.” It is an intense, 24/7 job. We digest enormous amounts of information, which is sometimes boring, and then we have to make decisions—decisions that affect real people. It means being constantly available to the media, to the public, and to the party. It means scrutiny of every detail of our lives—particularly for a dreadlocked Rastafarian. I stood, I guess, to demonstrate that we do not have to be of this world to be effective in it. Be true to oneself, whoever one may be, and take your seat as an equal, whether it is here in the House of Representatives or in the dust of the streets. So when a kid grabbed my arm on the dance floor and asked: “Hey, bro, what’s up in Parliament?”, I considered that to be an honour, because my purpose here has been to represent those who have had no voice here—those held in contempt by too many of us.

I came to Parliament thinking that the members were all a bunch of bastards, and I was wrong. There are many good people here. The very notion that all politicians are dishonest is misconceived, because if we think that politicians are all venal, then we expect nothing from them but venality. We should raise our expectations. We should expect more from question time than a bun fight. I have avoided question time for years if I do not have to be here because I have a supplementary question, because question time is the time when I am most ashamed of being a member of Parliament—question time and general debate—and members all know what I am talking about. We should grow up. This is our national legislature. We should treat it and the positions we hold here with more respect.

But I do not blame just the MPs. The buzzards who sit watching us from up in the press gallery, waiting for the next political corpse to pick over, are also to blame, because they will always report a fight, which is why the pugnacious Mr Peters always gets a headline. But if we stand to talk about anything real, most of them flap their wings and fly away—most of them. I thank the journalists who are here today for being here, too.

Maybe corporate media ownership is to blame for the lack of analysis prevalent in the New Zealand media, or maybe it is just contempt for the audience. One thing that I am proud of is the independent prison Ombudsman. Most people do not care much about what happens to people in prison, to the point that four police were acquitted yesterday after repeatedly batoning and pepper-spraying a man in police cells. What is next? Will they get away with murder? Oh, I forgot; they already did—in Waitara. But I care, because I know that any of us here could have been there, but for the grace of God. The media will report a death in custody but not an institution that will prevent such deaths. The day of the announcement that there would be an independent prison Ombudsman was the day that Trevor Mallard demonstrated his pugilistic skills with Tau Henare out in the lobby over there. There are no prizes for guessing what was covered and what was not. So to the media in the gallery, I offer my love to them all, but I would ask that they scrutinise themselves at night as fiercely as they scrutinise us during the day.

Some people say that Guy Fawkes was the only politician to enter Parliament with honest intentions. I do not think that is true. Many, perhaps most, MPs enter with honest intentions, but we are compromised by this institution. How many times have Green MPs spoken in this House only to have other MPs sidle over and tell us quietly: “We agree with you.”, but they are silenced by their hopes for advancement, for promotion, or sometimes just to stay where they are. My mum used to say that we have to get into the system to change it, and it is true that we need good people working within it, but the danger is that the system changes us as much as we change the system, if not more.

And that is why I am leaving after 9 years. For those members of the public who judge the behaviour of others by their own standards, I want people to know there are no perks coming to me. After 9 years it is time to cleanse my soul. So to all members of this House, from the most senior to the newest entrants, I pray for you that you remember the light that shines from within you so that you can light a path for yourselves and for others. The problem is not how many people enter this place with honest intentions, but how many people leave with them intact. It is easy to slip. We become bloated by self-importance. People open doors for us, they clean our offices at night, they provide us with advice and support, and they wait on our decisions. I say many thanks to all the people who do that—the friendly security, the select committee staff, advisers, and cleaners. And my thanks go to the fantastic Green Party staff up there in the public gallery who are so critical to the work we do as MPs. You guys rock!

My thanks go also to those outside this place who research and campaign, because Parliament relies on the free work done by non-governmental organisations and ordinary people who come to select committees to raise public awareness about issues of importance. Take climate change, for example. It took years of campaigning, advocacy, and accumulating evidence outside of Parliament before any party—except the Greens—took this issue seriously enough to take a position on it, if not to take any serious action on it. Unfortunately, despite evidence that urgent and drastic mitigation is needed right now to avoid catastrophic climate change, this country still has a lackadaisical mitigation strategy.

There is growing concern that oil production is reaching its peak at the same time as demand is increasing both from increased consumption in the West and economic expansion in Asia. The Government’s strategy is to build more roads. I am not sure whether that is the climate change strategy or the peak oil strategy—perhaps it is both. And National members should not laugh, because I have not seen their policy yet. I have not even begun to talk about metals depletion, or the food insecurity and political instability that will result from climate change and peak oil, or about the sustained economic recession that will result as the global economy crashes into the ecological limits of our planet.

If you think that the life we are living in privileged countries like Aotearoa New Zealand is sustainable in any way you are seriously deluded. In my view industrial civilisation is coming to an end. I believe we are in the last days of the oil age. We need a transition strategy away from a growth economy to a steady State economy, but it will not come from Government, because Governments are almost universally compromised by the corporate agenda of globalised trade, globalised capital transfers, and globalised investment. It does not matter whether it is the left hand or the right hand—it is the same brain that is in control.

Where it will come from, and where it is already coming from, is ordinary people working in their communities. It will come from transition towns, permaculture design, better transport campaigns, and community sustainability plans. I pay tribute to those far-sighted ones who are showing us the way, because as the saying goes: when the people lead, the leaders will follow.

We need to make a major redesign if we want to build resilient systems that provide genuine food security, genuine energy security, and allow us to live rich, abundant, and meaningful lives in a sustainable way. To do that I believe we need a technological reform so that the protection of the integrity of ecosystems is a primary design element rather than a clip-on. We need economic reform to build a steady State economy. In particular, I believe that we need land reform, where security of tenure is based on use rights rather than paper ownership, and to free up land for small holders. Growing evidence suggests that the most productive farming systems are small scale, diverse cropping organic systems. Under our current distorted economic framework they are not the most profitable, but they are the most productive. They will become even more important as the cost of running farm machinery and producing synthetic fertilisers and pesticides grows.

Lastly we need constitutional reform. We have a bizarre notion in this country that the Queen is a source of justice and power. I say ‘fiyah bun that raasclat.’ I hope to see the day when New Zealand becomes a republic, decentralises political power, and recognises the rights of tangata whenua to their tino rangatiratanga. People get confused by that. The version of the Treaty signed by Governor Hobson* and by 512 of the 559 chiefs—the version recognised in international law under the doctrine of contra proferentem was the Māori language version that did not cede sovereignty to the Crown, but it did affirm the tino rangatiratanga of hapū. In my opinion we Pākehā people make a mistake if we say we do not want that for Māori people. We should say “Of course we support that, and, what is more, we want some for ourselves.”

I do not believe that this parliamentary system works very well for anyone except MPs and corporate lobbyists. One of the first things I did on entering Parliament was buy a watch. Since then I have been shackled to the system. I have been cuffed to the prison bars of time, or at least the prison that we make of time. This arbitrary Roman calendar disconnects us from the natural rhythms of life and of the planet. So today I remove that shackle because when I look at the state of our rivers, our atmosphere, and our people I do not need a watch to tell me what time it is.