A transcription of the valedictory statement of Hon PETE HODGSON (Labour—Dunedin North) : I arrived here in 1990, but before then I worked for the Labour Party. Jim Anderton, who is speaking next, hired me in 1980, when I was almost a 30-year-old. I am now 61; I have got to get out of here. Politics has been my life all of that time—nearly all of that time, actually; for 2 or 3 years in the early mid-1980s we lived in Britain. Anne wanted British midwifery training, the kids went to school there, and I went out to fund-raise as the local veterinarian. We lived on top of the Durham coalfield. The veterinary practice included pit villages, and when Margaret Thatcher and Arthur Scargill engaged in mortal combat, it was the little people and, of course, their pets who got it in the neck. I saw grinding poverty amongst plenty. I tried to join the British Labour Party—curiously, it said it was full.
Back home, David Lange had become the Prime Minister, and in 1985 I was appointed as the party’s marginal seats organiser. At the 1987 election Labour’s vote went down, but the number of Labour MPs went up. We had perfected the art of putting almost all of the party’s resources into just 15 percent of the seats. Voters in the other 85 percent were of no interest to us. It was a great tactical victory. But it meant that I voted against first past the post in 1992 and 1993, and I will do so again next month. First past the post and its lookalike, the supplementary-member representation system, reduce the value of most people’s votes. Under MMP all votes are equal.
The irony was that the 1987 victory exposed our deep divide. It cast the Labour Party into the role of opposition to the Labour Government. I was assigned to David Lange’s office to do the numbers, again and again. Then the party itself split asunder—do you remember this, Jim? You caused it! I had to ask every member in Sydenham to choose one path or the other.
I read my 1990 maiden speech recently; it had two clear threads: an abhorrence of poverty, and a commitment to sustainability. Those two threads persist. I cannot bear the unfairness of poverty and its sheer wastefulness. I am gripped still by the maxim I used back then: we do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.
Some people who were in the gallery then are back today, supporting me still, but now also coming to claim me. Anne is here. She is a good part of my decision to leave politics. Anne has lived many adventures of her own meantime, but she is ready for the next phase of her life and I have been invited along. I asked Phil and Annette to take me off the front bench 3 years ago, so I guess it has been pretty well signalled. Remarkably, my mum and dad are here too. They are down from Whangarei, where I was born and raised, still supporting me. Sister Vicki and Trevor are here; cousin Grant and Liz and all of their family are here. One of our sons, Tristan, is here; the other is in Australia, running his adventure tourism business. Tristan’s wife, Amanda, is at home looking after Cooper, their first child, our first grandchild, and mum and dad’s first great-grandchild. The wee fella turns 2 weeks old tomorrow.
About 15 years ago two young black men from a francophone nation in West Africa washed up on our shores at Port Chalmers as stowaways. After 2 days of negotiation, I dug them off the ship. They had run for their lives. It was a pretty high-profile event at the time—national telly and all that. John Banks, the noisiest shock jock of the lot, more or less declared an invasion. They lived with us for several years. Anne mothered them. They learnt English, they studied, they became friends, they became Kiwis, and then they became family. Each has produced a daughter since, and each daughter is a delight. One of them, Gloria, is in the gallery. She is nearly 3½ and she brought her mum, Marie-Paule, with her.
I am not sure whether I am the first veterinarian in this House or whether I am just the first veterinarian for a while, but while in Opposition I was materially involved in the passage of new and badly needed animal welfare legislation. The details of how that happened no longer matter really, except that I had good advice and good luck, and I am grateful to all who helped. It is coming up for review now, as it should. I have just one insight to humbly offer. It is that the architecture of the legislation and the development of codes are its strength. Issues keep changing. Today it is the egg industry; this time last year it was sow crates; tomorrow, mark my words, it will be heli-hunting. But through the continuous development of codes, the legislation will keep up.
The 9 years in Cabinet were rippers. We racked up huge hours. I thought I was privileged. I am sure that today’s Ministers feel the same way. We were incredibly well led. We knew what we wanted to do; our years in Opposition had not been wasted. And we had regained unity. Helen forged it, and it persists today as part of her enduring legacy. Something else is an enduring legacy of that Government: each year we paid down the Government’s debt until there was not any left, and each year unemployment fell until it was the lowest in the Western World, except for some months when South Korea’s was lower. So when the global economic crisis came, we had no public debt and we had the shortest dole queue in the world. That was not a bad starting point for a new Government—even more so when one recalls the endless pressure to cut taxes that we were under during that time. For 9 years this Chamber rang with the baying of the tax-cutters. When we finally did cut taxes in late 2008, it was the beginning of a vital economic stimulus that, had we listened in earlier years, we would not have been as able to afford.
All in all I held 14 portfolios and several associateships as well. I do not know of anyone else to have held as many, but then again I have not particularly looked. Of course, there is no time to dwell on them or even to list them. Statistics was tiny; health was not. Science was exciting; commerce was a little less so. Transport is full of characters, but fisheries has a whole lot more than that. I inherited a mess from Max Bradford in energy; and being the last to touch science, tertiary education, and economic development on this side, I earnestly hope that no one across the way thinks that they inherited a mess from me. In all of those portfolios a lot was done. I was an activist Minister. I am a restless person. The Government was a restless Government. We were criticised sometimes for having too many strategies to implement, and I just say to that, better too many than too few.
Valedictories are supposed to be about the past, but my head lives pretty well constantly in the future. So let me give one portfolio, climate change, a little bit more attention, because the world’s response to it has barely begun. There are three key problems. The first is that the global addiction to cheap oil persists. It is an astonishing fuel, but they are not making it any more. The second is that climate change is the only area of politics where, when the proof of the need to act finally arrives, the ability to act will have long since gone. The third is that we do not have governance structures that are equal to the task. Disturbingly, we may even have discovered the limits of nation-State democracies as an idea. In New Zealand we have an opportunity, and in my view an obligation, to contribute to agricultural greenhouse gas mitigation because we can, and because success increases agricultural productivity. I commend the current Government’s commitment to continuing and expanding that science, and I wish all involved in it success and patience in equal measure.
Of course, one way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions is to run out of cheap oil. Inevitably we will. That requires a public-policy response. Sure, the market will play its part: when a tank of gas costs $300, not $100, behaviour will change all right. But the market alone cannot deliver that transition. Governments need to help. Most Governments have started. We have just stopped, with fuel efficiency standards scrapped, the biofuels sales obligation scrapped, curtailed sustainability measures in general—indeed the very word has been scrubbed off documents in a frenzied cleansing of the lexicon. This is unfortunate, expensive behaviour. I spoke with a New Zealand biofuels company recently, just by way of example, that is pulling out of here and investing instead in Thailand and in the US. We need to be smarter than that.
That leads me to sustainable development in general. I view it as a uniting idea, capable of creating wealth, creating ecological room, creating economic diversification and, as important, resonating strongly with the Kiwi ethos. Certainly cows and tourism alone are not a future, precisely because those activities are not scalable. There are now three dairy cows for every one that existed when I was in rural practice. If three dairy cows are not a limit, four will be, or eight, or some such number. Tourism is similarly not scalable in New Zealand; the Galapagos effect will see to that at some point. I define sustainability very simply: if we cannot do it forever, then sooner or later we cannot do it at all. Mining national parks is a case in point; so is an energy strategy based on offshore oil and gas production; so is getting rid of public debt by selling public assets. These are all things that can be done but once. They are unsustainable by definition.
Sustainable development is very strongly associated with technology—all sorts of technologies—but also with design, with intellectual property, and in some cases with different and new business models. Whether it is applied to a further advance in some primary product or whether it is headed in the direction of clean energy, weightless exports, the creative sector, or whatever we want to call it, sustainable development demands high skills. It is a hi-tech, high-skills future.
Here is another observation. There is a strong association between private sector research and development investment and exporting. An association is not a cause, and not all exporters research. But nearly all research-intensive companies export. Look more closely and see those same companies are likely to be developing sustainably, and usually very quickly. So policies such as cancelling the research and development tax credit make no sense to me. The Government said it could not afford it, and that is fair enough. But the very next year it lowered the company tax rate from 30c to 28c, and that cost even more. We must, in New Zealand, pay more attention to those firms that owe their existence not to local domestic demand but to some technology or some clever entrepreneur, or to both. Their sandpit is global, not local. They usually export; they usually grow quickly; they usually pay high wages. They are the game-changers. Not all firms are equal.
But sustainable development does not address the rich-poor gap. It is growing inexorably all around the developed world, for many reasons. One is the tension between global salaries and local wages. More than one labour market is at play. I think our approach to poverty—I hope our approach to poverty, I should say, perhaps—has just started to change. It has always been a social justice issue: poverty is unfair on the poor. I think it is now being viewed also as an issue of social dysfunction: poverty is bad for everyone. There are strong links between the rich-poor gap and many social ills: teenage pregnancy, obesity, violence—you name it. Research, including New Zealand research, especially out of the Dunedin and Christchurch longitudinal studies, is beginning to unravel some of the detail. Addressing poverty matters. In my view, we underuse and have underused the minimum wage as a tool. We were the first nation in the world to regulate a minimum wage, back in 1894. Since then it has variously risen above two-thirds of the average wage—if I recall correctly, back in Norman Kirk’s time—and fallen below the depths of irrelevancy on many occasions. Currently it is a bit below half the average wage. If we are to reap the benefits of a relatively flexible labour market, which is what we have, we should also provide a bunch of civilised minima that endure.
In New Zealand the debate is usually framed around the idea that raising the minimum wage will throw the low paid out of work altogether, and many crocodile tears are shed at that altar. But research suggests the opposite: that raising the minimum wage can stimulate local economies and reduce unemployment, although usually only slightly. The current chair of the Council of Economic Advisers to the US President, Professor Alan Krueger, is one such researcher. He is a mainstream empirical researcher who deals in the practical, not in the theoretical. I appreciate that this House is some distance away from doing for the low paid what we have already done for superannuitants—establishing an agreed floor—but I will leave folk with the idea, anyway.
The time has come to say thank you to Alicia, Michael, Ellie, David, Karen, Pene, Eric, Margaret, Les, Fiona, Don, and Natalie. What a wonderful mix of talent and commitment. Looking back at me is the Hon Stan Rodger, my mentor then and now. I say thanks to Stan. Over there are Mike Williams and Mike Smith, who have been my friends for ever. They are not even written into the speech, but they are great thinkers and great comrades. When we left Government in 2008 Keith Mason, who was my senior private secretary for most of those years, drew up a list of over 80 people who had worked in my office, and many of those people are here. I cannot name them all, but I thank them. If I think of the very many chief executives and senior officials with whom I have worked, the numbers just get bigger—much bigger. So I shall say that amongst them are some of the finest New Zealanders I have met. For all that the Public Service has driven me to distraction and despair, the Public Service has also filled me with uncomplicated respect. Thanks to those who work in this complex or who arrive at midnight to clean it. They are people who do their job well, and then somehow manage to do a little bit more. They are a great bunch. Thanks to my colleagues from across the political divide for their comradeship, engagement, and wit in the non-adversarial parts of this job, be that around the select committee table or around the world.
Over recent months many people in Dunedin have stopped to thank me for my efforts on their behalf over the years. All of them have it the wrong way round. Representing Dunedin North has been a privilege, pure and simple. It is an astonishing electorate in more ways than can be described. The Dunedin North Labour Party is one of the best organisations in the land. It has hundreds of clever, argumentative, wonderful people. It has depth, it has breadth, and it has fun. It is also a magnet for talent. I hope members will see what I mean should David Clark take his seat in this Chamber in a few weeks.
Here is a story to finish with. Long ago I was attacking a piece of rough ground next door with a big, self-propelling rotary hoe. Instead of selecting reverse gear, I dropped it into top gear. It went over the bank and down about 3 or 4 metres to the stream bed below, and I went with it. I do not know how, but I got to the stream bed first. I know this to be the case, because I remember very clearly the rotary hoe arriving shortly afterwards. Remarkably, I was not badly hurt. I reached up, I turned the machine off, and I collected my wits. On the opposite bank a fine old bloke called Jimmy Hannah, who is no longer with us, appeared above me. He had a heart of gold, a face like a raisin, and a way with words. He was a retired wharfie. He shouted “Are you OK, Pete?”. I said “Yeah, I think so.” He replied “Good-oh, I was just saying to her indoors ‘By jeez, I hope that’s not a by-election.’ ” That event did not end my political career, but this event does. It has been a hell of a ride. Thanks everybody for having me. I will see you around. Ka kite anō.