Catherine Delahunty. Photo / Supplied
Patrick Gower completes our series on new MPs, based on maiden speeches
New Green MP Catherine Delahunty has spent much of her life campaigning against the sewage and pollution pumped into New Zealand's rivers.
Now she is calling on Parliament to "reduce the waste in the chamber" - cutting debates "perhaps to a daily chanting session by the two major
parties".
"They could take turns chanting, 'You are stupid and you are wrong because you are the wrong party, and we are clever and right because we are the good party,' and once that was over with we could all get on with the urgent work the citizens might have hoped we came to do."
Ms Delahunty gave her maiden speech yesterday, after it was delayed last year by the birth of her first grandchild.
The 55-year-old committed herself to embracing Parliament "with all the illusions of a maiden" and joked that the last time she was a maiden was 40 years ago.
She came in as number eight on the Green Party list.
Ms Delahunty criticised New Zealand's Pakeha settlers for seeking out a better life via "systemic violence, theft and denial" and described the Treaty of Waitangi as a "frayed and stretched rope" between Pakeha and Maori.
She thanked her mother for "the vital lesson that a background of privilege and racism need not distort the human heart".
Now a resident of Turanga, near Gisborne, she told of arriving there and being overwhelmed "by the blatant Pakeha racism and the obvious gap between the wealthy, drinking delightful wines, and the poor tangata whenua living in shacks and crowded flats."
She said Pakeha enjoyed an "ongoing colonial privilege" but needed to take responsibility for it and "work for a justice-based peace from Ruatoki to Gaza".
Ms Delahunty detailed her previous visits as a protester to Parliament - the first as a baby in a pushchair as part of a protest against nuclear weapons.
At age 10, she stood on Parliament's steps protesting against New Zealand troops going to Vietnam; at 15 she led the first union of school students.
A feminist, she said "gender equality is real when the refuges are empty and the mothers and babies are at the centre of the economy, not when post-feminist women claw their way into high status jobs".
She believed new grandson Leo and others starting life "deserve something much more precious than individualism", saying the world was in a struggle between "earth-based collective well-being versus a polluted globalised greed".
