8 December 2020, New Zealand Parliament.
Hon Dr AYESHA VERRALL (Minister for Food Safety): Thank you, Mr Speaker. Ka tangi te tītī, ka tangi te kākā, ka tangi hoki ahau. Tihei mauri ora. E ngā mana, e ngā reo, e ngā maunga, e ngā awa, e ngā pātaka o ngā taonga tuku iho, tēnā koutou katoa. Tēnei te mihi atu ki te mana whenua o te Whanganui-ā-Tara, tēnā koutou. Huri noa i te Whare nei, e mihi atu ki a koutou katoa. [The mutton bird calls. The parrot calls. I too call to claim the right to speak. I take the call. To the leaders, the spokespeople, the ancestral mountains, the ancestral rivers and those who retain the ancient knowledge that has been passed down, greetings. I would like to acknowledge the tribes of this land in Wellington. Thank you. To those in this House, greetings.] Mr Speaker, congratulations on your election to the office of Speaker and I also thank you for this privilege you extend to new members of the House to present ourselves to the House. I enter Parliament at one of the most challenging times in our country's history. We continue to fight a pandemic and to accelerate our economic recovery. I know that the decisions we make in this House impact people's lives. I feel the responsibility to keep our country safe acutely, let me tell you why. My mother grew up in a poor family in a tropical island nation, the Maldives. She was orphaned when she was just two, when her mother died of typhoid. Now, I was born in Invercargill, and growing up in New Zealand I always knew I was lucky and protected from the catastrophic effects of illness. I can't ever forget that lesson, because I'm named Ayesha after my grandmother, the woman that my mother never got to know. Mum was educated in New Zealand under the Colombo Plan, and met my father at teachers' training college. I grew up in Te Ānau, where my parents were teachers—or rather, as is typical of small towns, dad was my high school principal and running coach, and mum was my English teacher and debating coach. Mum and dad were always on duty for the school and for their students. Years later, as a doctor, their professionalism guided me whenever the phone rang in the middle of the night because a patient was in danger. Dad was also determined to instil in me and my sister his love of the outdoors. My sister and I played spotlight in moonlit valleys and dared each other who was to jump first into snow-fed lakes. We crossed the Eglinton River, scrambled up to Dore Pass, and awoke in freezing Department of Conservation huts to see the sun touch the mountaintops. We grew strong, resourceful, and independent. I am pleased to join a Government that will protect our rivers and our biodiversity and that will preserve our wild and isolated places for tomorrow's teenagers. I left Southland for medical school at Otago. Even then, I had many opinions about public health, and I was lucky to have them tested by some of New Zealand's best epidemiologists, Charlotte Paul, Nigel Dickson, David Skegg, and, later, Michael Baker and Philip Hill—yes, for us epidemiologists, the pandemic was a little like a family reunion. But seriously, over the last year, in particular, I've been grateful for the rigorous education I received. At university, I also became involved in progressive politics through students' associations. I look around the House and I see so many friends from that time. I remember the Hon Grant Robertson for the concern and tolerance he showed to those of us who came after him, and the Hon Chris Hipkins for his commitment to free education, even at that time. When I graduated from Otago, I worked as a junior doctor at Wellington Hospital. To my patients, I want you to know what a privilege it was to care for you. I diagnosed your stroke and spoke to you every day until you learnt to speak back to me. I pulled back the emergency department cubical curtains and said, "Hello, I'm Dr Ayesha, and I'm sorry you've waited so long.", and you embarrassed me when you said back, "I know there are others who needed your help more than me." I told you the lump was cancer. I shocked your heart rhythm back to normal. I sat with you and a translator for an hour and explained what each medicine was for and if you took them, your baby would have a life without HIV. And I stayed with you when you died, because you didn't have anyone else to call. I'm immensely proud to have worked in the health sector alongside wonderful colleagues. Our health system is often stretched, but our healthcare workers' professionalism, compassion, and good humour always carries the day. As a student and young professional, I enjoyed the very best education here in New Zealand and internationally, and I had several opportunities to put my skills to work for my community. In the Maldives, my family's life was very different. When I was 11 years old, my older cousin, Mohamed Nasheed, was imprisoned for his journalism, drawing attention to the corruption in the Maldivian Government. Anni, as we called him, was detained for months and tortured. The question "Would he come home?" hung over my aunt's head like a guillotine. That year, Anni was named Amnesty International prisoner of conscience, and a global campaign eventually secured his release. Since then, I've lost count of the times that he was arrested, beaten, harassed, or exiled while campaigning peacefully for democracy. As a final-year medical student, I did my placement in the Maldives to get to know my family better. I worked in the hospital by day, and by night I learnt of my family's and others' aspirations for a democratic Maldives. In 2008, Anni became the Maldives first democratically elected president. In this role, he campaigned relentlessly to protect his low-lying islands from climate change. Speaking at the Oxford Union on climate change, he recalled his time as a political prisoner. I know it seems lonely to continue the battle when everything is against us, but the mark of true leadership is being prepared to stand alone for a cause in which you believe. I could spend my whole life wondering if I have the same courage as my cousin. For the sake of our democracy, I hope no one in this House ever needs to find out. What I do know is that I am lucky to be born with the freedoms New Zealanders have, and they're freedoms we secure each day in this House when we engage with each other peacefully, rationally, and with restraint. At university, I also met Alice. We've just celebrated our 21st anniversary. In 2013, we took our two-month-old baby to West Java's sprawling capital, Bandung, where I ran a study tracing contacts of tuberculosis cases through the traffic jams and shanty towns. Alice and I had no idea what it would be like to be two women raising a baby in a conservative Muslim community—as it turned out, people mostly focused on the baby. Parenting is humbling and a daily reminder that I might not be as interesting as I imagine. Alice, I remember the grace with which you dealt with a new baby, a new language, and, yes, the new experience of sharing our home with bats at one point. I am so grateful for your love and support in everything we've done. Now our beautiful daughter is seven. Laila, we have less time together now, but we've found new things to do. I love it when you leave your maths out for me to check when I get home late at night. New Zealand needs girls who are good at maths and science. They will be among our epidemiologists, our geneticists, and our disease experts when the next pandemic comes. Whatever you choose, I will work here for a science system that gives young women equal opportunities to develop their talents. At the beginning of this year, I was a hospital specialist, a medical school lecturer, a district health board member, and a mum, and I thought I knew what busy was. Then the COVID-19 outbreak started in Wuhan. Looking overseas, it was apparent that failing to contain the virus would lead to a catastrophic outbreak. Based on my experience with other infectious diseases, I knew our public health systems lacked the capacity to deal with the threat. I vividly remember when I realised how serious COVID was. I couldn't bear the thought of the deaths, I couldn't bear the thought of my friends in the hospital being overwhelmed, and I couldn't bear the thought of my daughter not seeing her grandparents again. I raised the alarm about the state of our contact tracing in early March, and kept up the pressure until I was asked to review the system. I argued for an outbreak plan that coordinated the efforts of our hard-working public health staff and information technology that joined up our fragmented system. In the last year, we've gone from underprepared to one of the world's most successful responses. While our response was based on science, science alone was not enough. Science can't answer the question "How important are the lives of our seniors?" That is a question of values. Science can't predict "Will people stay home if the Government asks them to?" That is a question of leadership. Prime Minister, I'm deeply privileged to serve in your Government and to bring my skills and experience to your mission to build a kinder, fairer, and more humane society. By Anzac Day this year, it was clear our sacrifices during lockdown were paying off. I remember standing at my gate on Anzac morning, and I thought of my grandad Norman Verrall. He was orphaned in 1918, when the Spanish flu killed both his parents. I know he had a tough childhood in foster care in Auckland. He joined the navy for World War II and served on HMS Leander in the Pacific and Indian oceans. I thought about how our country had asked him to risk so much when he had so little. Grandad returned from the war to work stoking the boiler at Christchurch's Firestone factory, a duty he shared with Norman Kirk. I often imagine Big Norm had Norm Verrall in mind when he said all people need is "to have somewhere to live, they have to have food to eat, they have to have [clothes] to wear, and they have to have something to hope for." Us grandkids called grandad "Plum", for the proud fruit tree he tended at the back of his mint green State house in Sydenham. Grandad died in 1992. I was a teenager, and, around me, the safety net that supported working-class families like his was fraying. Benefit cuts, market rentals, and an end to collective bargaining undermined the security of working New Zealanders. Today, the pandemic has shone a light on the importance of essential work, like stocking the supermarket shelves, staffing our border, and cleaning our hospitals. The first Labour Government enacted sweeping legislation to protect people from the hardship that followed a world war, a pandemic, and the Great Depression. It's often forgotten that preventative health was central to the 1938 social security reforms. Improvements in housing and sanitation led Māori life expectancy to increase more than 10 years in just two decades. I imagine a post-pandemic 21st century health system founded on the same sense of solidarity, science, and pragmatism, one in which we strive for truly equitable and accessible health care; where you find the help you need quickly in your community, from someone you trust; where the person caring for you can focus on you because modern technology has put your information at their fingertips; where you are seen for who you are—old, young, men, women, Pasifika, Asian, refugee, gay, straight, or trans—where our mobilisation to fight COVID leads a legacy of a strong immunisation system; where we apply well-established science to protect children's teeth with fluoride and children in the womb with folate; and in which a vibrant and proud Māori health workforce improves the care of their own people and, in doing so, humanises the system for all of us. We need to continue Labour's work on housing, transport, justice, and violence. We will need to do all of this, and we will also, simply, need to fund the health system more. I'm lucky to have a family that spans city and country, New Zealander, Maldives, gay, and straight, and I'm so grateful for the friends, campaigners, and colleagues here today. I'm proud to stand alongside my new Labour family here in Parliament, particularly my many brothers and sisters in the class of 2020. We can work together to give New Zealand families longer and happier years together. Nō reira, huri noa i te Whare nei, e mihi atu ki a koutou katoa. [Applause] Waiata