Reprinted here is an abridged version of Pam Corkery's February 20 maiden speech to the New Zealand parliament. Corkery left her 19-year career in broadcasting to stand for the Alliance in the October general election. Her media career — in both New Zealand and Australia — included newspaper, television and radio journalism as well as work in theatre production and fiction writing. Corkery is best known for her role as a talkback radio host from 1987 to 1996.
Thank you Mr Speaker. Following the lead from other maiden speeches, I'm sure you'll take it as read that I believe you to be omnipotent and that no amount of praise is too high for the wisdom which I anticipate from beneath your wig.
This is of course a huge moment for me. Indeed it's one that former Prime Minister David Lange remarked on. I'm paraphrasing here. He said something along the lines of, If MMP [multi-member proportional voting] means that people like Pam Corkery get into parliament, then it was time he left.
I reciprocate the sentiment. In fact, I've been putting off this career change waiting for Mr Lange to depart. I know you're supposed to speak only good of MPs who have left. I will. Mr Lange's left. That's good.
I came here because — as part of my former job — I had to listen to a succession of lying, dodging, weaving and extremely non-public service government MPs . I also listened to the shattered lives of many New Zealanders who were being shut out of society simply because they couldn't pay.
It's not exactly Long Walk to Freedom stuff, but it was apartheid I listened to — economic apartheid — and I simply couldn't bear it any more. I don't want to be part of a "do nothing" generation. My forebears weren't. They planned ahead and gave me a good start in life. It's up to me to work for my grandchildren the same way.
I sit with Jim Anderton and my fellow Alliance MPs because they are the inevitable progressive step towards the end of the idiot and cruel cycle that has hurt so many of our citizens.
I've made the odd bad choice in my life, but when I compare the consistently principled being that is Jim Anderton with the appalling marriage of naked greed and cynicism that is [Prime Minister] Jim Bolger and [deputy PM] Winston Peters, I'm staggered.
Watching the prime minister and his new deputy battling over who's hogging the bed sheets and who's going to go on top — while the rest of the country drowns in the wet patch — I have to wonder if this country has been bashed about so badly that many have developed a deeply sad masochistic streak. Because according to the coalition government, this is a buoyant economy and this is as good as your life is going to get.
Mr Speaker, I make this first speech not to you — although I realise the rules mean I have to go through you (I'm sure we'll both respect ourselves in the morning). Nor am I speaking to the largely smirking, plotting sea of suits opposite me. I speak to the New Zealanders who pay my wage and expect me to turn my career change into something positive for them. At $72,500 a year plus day allowances, it's a fair ask.
I consider the job to be that of a public servant. And while I watch the so-called more experienced politicians swan around the debating chamber, joking and chatting with the speaker to prove some school dormitory point that they've been here longer, there's little that inspires me to follow their job interpretation.
If developing into an experienced politician means I master even snappier interview sound-bites to excuse myself from failing to deliver, then I'm not interested.
I can sense that the old lags, time-serving to get their full parliamentary pensions and cheap overseas air travel when they retire, may write off my "public service" approach to being an MP as naive and idealistic.
I've already learned only too well that the Alliance is disliked, indeed feared by those who have gained so much — and have so much to hide — because of the so-called economic reforms. Some of the winners even shift seats on planes not to be seen beside an Alliance MP. They know we pose a threat. Good. It's a fight, and I hope by the end of my first parliamentary term the claret's on the carpet.
It's an historic fight for true fairness. Despite all the hypocritical cant about level playing fields and fair competition, the New Right belief system has closed the doors to huge chunks of our people and then laughed in their faces, telling them it's their own damn fault for being poor. And it's not even that "new" a right ideology. It's the old right in smarter suits and carrying cellphones.
Power and wealth in New Zealand continue to be concentrated in the hands of a few — most of whom have never shown the slightest respect, gratitude or sympathy for the people whose time and labour has put them at the top of the commercial world.
Being poor is not a lifestyle choice. So-called free enterprise is a joke. It imprisons most people in lives of no work, or frustrating work with limited horizons, while freeing only a few to enjoy the profits.
And the next step in the "blame the victim" war is about to start with the work for the dole scheme. New Zealand will be the country of Clayton's unemployment. Despite armies of New Zealanders living in hardship, despair and poverty, we will have zero unemployment because the new coalition government will redefine the unemployed as "community wage earners".
It will be called "being responsible", "getting real", "living in the real world". How often do we hear that. It's not real at all. It's a cruel fantasy. It's the small part of the world inhabited by big business and their parliamentary glove puppets who still think that making a few people in New Zealand incredibly rich will somehow make the rest of our lives better — and if not, then "more real".
To argue that the law of the jungle is the natural way is a stupid distortion of Darwin's ideas and also ignores the fact that as a species we've spent the last hundred thousand years evolving away from the jungle. This hasn't been done by trampling all over each other but by cooperation and the sharing of wealth and knowledge. That's what I'm fighting for. Not hand-wringing, not pissant point scoring, but a full throat battle so that New Zealanders can stand once again at the centre of any economic plan.
Our young people need us especially. How can we expect children to develop some kind of socially aware and responsible ethic which involves concern for others when everything they see tells them that it's "all for one and one alone"? The ethical models offered by the world of commerce are those of fierce and mutually destructive competition. It masquerades as teaching self-reliance and independence.
With greed enthroned as one of the great social virtues, no wonder so many of our young people lose themselves in blind alleyways of drugs and crime.
This time we're not so unsubtle as to send them off to war. No, we simply treat them as irrelevant, until they become productive economic units who can pay twice for the basic rights of life such as health and education — or miss out.
And when these kids react in frustration that their lives aren't as glamorous as those on the screen, we blame them — the victims — for their incomprehensible behaviour. We throw up our hands in horror and cry out for more police and more places in which to lock young people up.
Home life comes in many forms these days. Those on the loony right who clamour for the return to the nuclear family are really missing the point. Single parent, double gay parent, extended whanau: there are all sorts of versions of home life available to children.
To say one is better than the other is arrogant as well as stupid. The point is that children need a nurturing and caring environment in which they can realise their potential and experience the richness that New Zealand life has to offer.
This has been made, if not impossible, much harder as more and more parents are forced into depression through no work, or into a number of casual, part-time and odd hour jobs, just to pay the rent. These parents are too stressed out and exhausted from the grind of surviving to be there to talk through the confusion that is growing up.
If young people perceived this society to be worth living in, then the self-inflicted slaughter of the innocents with knives, guns, drugs and cars, wouldn't happen in such huge numbers. That young people do this is an indictment on us, their elders, who have made their world this way.
It's a time of firsts for me these days. Yesterday I asked my first parliamentary question. I thought it was fair enough: who gets the Aotearoa Television assets now the pilot scheme is over? The taxpayer paid for them.
It may be a naive question. Mr Peters certainly caned me for not being an expert in company law. I never said I was. I'm not into false advertising, unlike some who stood at the last election. Then later on yesterday, one of Mr Peters' colleagues had a laugh at my lack of company law experience. But I still can't find anyone to answer this simple question. And I'll keep asking these questions. No amount of snorting, swaggering and arrogance will embarrass or stop me.
I did not turn my life upside down, leave my former job, to be intimidated away from my values by gum-chewing, sunglass-wearing members of parliament — many of whom think having a penis is like having a union card to life's closed shop.
Members of this government don't frighten me. The people who pay my wages are the ones I'm working for. If they get angry with me, if I disappoint them, then I'll be scared. And I'll deserve to be so.