The title of this document is "Chlöe Swarbrick maiden statement". It is described as: The maiden statement of MP Chlöe Swarbrick in Parliament, 15 November 2017. The proceedings occurred in Parliament on 15th November 2017. The main text body is sourced from Hansard, the official written record of the New Zealand Parliament. The main text body begins:  15 November 2017, New Zealand Parliament. CHLÖE SWARBRICK (Green): E Te Māngai, tēnā koe, tuatahi ki Te Mana Whenua o tēnei rohe, Te Ā ti Awa, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa! Thank you, Mr Speaker. Firstly, to Te Ā ti Awa, the mandated authority of this region, salutations, acknowledgments, and accolades to you all! Mr Speaker, congratulations on your new position. I am immensely proud to be entering this 52nd Parliament at such a time where you've actively sought to make the House more family friendly to create a new normal. There's been some critics of our having babies in this House. "It's a place of work.", they say. "Children do not belong in the midst of arguing." I think, perhaps, these critics take for granted a nasty, adversarial culture and I personally hope that the presence of babies helps remind us all of the gravity of our task and the lives our decisions impact. I want to acknowledge my colleagues from Maungakiekie, new electorate MP Denise Lee and my friend and new Labour MP Priyanca Radhakrishnan. I also want to acknowledge my incredible new Green colleague, who I am honoured to be entering this House with, Golriz Ghahraman. Four years ago, I started hosting a little current affairs show on Auckland's number one alternative radio station. I spent a long time interviewing politicians of all stripes on daily issues, but the underlying questions were always essentially the same: firstly, how much do you understand this problem and the lives of the people affected, beyond your briefing notes, and, secondly, why should they trust you? With all due respect, the answers were never really all too satisfactory. There was an innocuous response mechanism that I think is kind of bred into politicians, and with it it's like we become out of sync with the orbit of people's daily lives. I don't think I would be alone in saying that I couldn't see myself, my friends, my whānau in politics. Young people don't have a monopoly on political disillusionment. It just happens that we listen to better music while feeling it. It's hard to engage in a system that doesn't look or sound like you, that talks down to you, that disparages your participation, and that you don't feel that you can change. The issue is that regardless of whether people choose to participate in the system, it governs their lives. Institutions don't have to look the way they do. They're the sum of the people engaged and involved. Democracy doesn't have to feel broken. It's just a means, not an end unto itself. The result of a few too many late night Google spirals and discussions with friends who have always entertained my very left of field ideas led to me running for the Auckland mayoralty in 2016. I tried to make it about the people of Auckland, to such an extent that I had a few people email me about the design of my posters, telling me that they couldn't read my name but that the slogan was, however, readable, and it read "This is your city". I cut my teeth debating former Labour Party leader and my city's new mayor, Phil Goff. A journalist asked me if my running and my candidacy were a protest. I said, "Yeah, it kind of is.", and they took that to mean that it was a joke. I don't think protest is a joke. It is a method of organisation, of bringing people together around common purpose. It is a legitimate means to achieve tangible, meaningful outcomes, to make things better, and to change. We have a history in Aotearoa of standing for things: peaceful resistance at Parihaka, women's suffrage, nuclear-free New Zealand, and anti-apartheid. Our country's political history is rich with protest. So it shouldn't really come as a surprise to many in this House that a few weeks ago, freshly minted as a new MP, I attended a protest. The next day my dad texted me and he told me that he'd heard people saying mean things about me on talkback radio. I had to call him and remind him that I'm in the Green Party. Whilst we've almost always been ahead of the policy curve, leading where others eventually follow, change is almost always uncomfortable. Change doesn't often come from the top. Change most frequently comes in the form of a groundswell by the people, for the people. The very reason that I stand in this Chamber is because of the combined efforts of thousands of Green Party volunteers and activists across Aotearoa. I am here because of the staunch, tireless dedication to a kaupapa that recognises that the well-being of our people and our planet are inextricably linked. I am here because of the tenacity, the good humour, and support of my campaign team, who turned up day in, day out, month after month after month. I am here to supplement the mahi of my lean, mean, Green caucus. I am here to show people that politicians can look a little different, can speak a little different, and can do things a little differently. I am here to drive home the message that politicians work for people and - the mind-boggling notion - that politicians are people too. Anybody paying attention saw that this was a rough and generally rather exhausting campaign and, a week before election day, at my final debate, I broke down in tears. We were asked to speak about New Zealand's shameful suicide rate, particularly with regard to our youth, our rangatahi. Another candidate took this as academic, speaking in numbers and fiscals, and they were abstracting the lives and the loss of my friends. As I cried, I couldn't help but realise that this mental health epidemic rippling through our communities is the logical end point of austerity, the consequence of decades of economic and social reform that has shredded communities, safety nets, and, most fundamentally, care. It turns out that lives are more complicated than what may be written on a CV. I spent a lot of my teenage years struggling with anxiety and depression. The reason that I talk about this is not because my mental health history makes me a stronger person or has necessarily given me any insights into the world. Rather than making me special, a history of mental health issues makes me quite normal, because, as I have said, these issues are pandemic in our society. We in this House have the power and the platform to help define normality. So I think that we have a responsibility to present ourselves as we really are: with our flaws intact. I understand that all of that is no small task when, in this universe, we are supposed to be poised to jump at each other's jugular at the faintest sign of weakness. But things like kindness - which I am so impossibly proud that our new Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has put back on the agenda - are not a weakness. It's human. I ask that we remember and reflect the people that we are serving. It is our job to empower them, not to insulate ourselves from their scrutiny. Too many of those that we serve and represent are navigating insecure housing and insecure work at the moment. When you don't know your neighbours or your co-workers to any depth, then when you have a problem, you're not quite inclined to talk about it. You internalise it, and you individualise it. It's your problem. It's therefore a problem with you. Without strong communities, without mainstream recognition of the power of collective action, we don't hear each other's voices and we don't put our finger on systemic issues that affect us all and we need each other's help to solve. There's this old joke: a fish is swimming up a river and it sees a dog standing on the bank, and the dog says to it, "How's the water?" and the fish replies, "What water?". It's funny; you can laugh. The most fundamental realities of our lives are often the hardest to see, you see, and the hardest, often, to talk about. Kids from all over Aotearoa are brought up here, they sit in this gallery, they watch us in Parliament, and the teachers tell them, "This is politics." When question time is on the news, everyone sees the yelling and the screaming, and they are told, "This is politics. This is what politicians do." But what happens in this room is largely theatre. Politics is what happens when all of us in here go back to our rooms and we close our doors and we shake hands and we make decisions. The consequences of those decisions saturate our lives. These decisions inform who is rich and who is poor, who gets sick and who gets better. They decide what we eat and what we drink and the quality of the air that we breathe. They decide who has, or may have, a future and who does not. The consequences of political decisions are so pervasive in our lives that we don't really even see them anymore. So we in this room get to choose the rules. That means that those falling through the gaps at the moment are either there by systemic neglect, or by design. It means that we, as the Green Party, as one moving part of this great new Government, have an opportunity, a duty, to try and fix things. When I was 11 years old, Mrs Nabi - an excellent teacher of mine in form one - made a point of telling off one of my friends. It was a decile 3 intermediate and I was one of a handful of Pākehā kids. My Pasifika mate was looking down at his desk. She pointed out that this is what Pasifika kids are taught respect looks like, but those suspended in the Pākehā world, where eye contact is respect, would see this as rude. Because of this, she said, brown kids are treated not just as naughty but as disrespectful by those who may not understand cultural cues. That is the tip of the iceberg of what systemic racism looks like, she taught us. With that lesson, I started understanding that this system - systems like this - are designed for people who look like me. That's what echoes of colonisation look like. If we are ever to heal those wounds, we need to look at them in broad daylight. They hurt, and they are uncomfortable when we bandage over them, because they require attention. I am who I am because of my family. We might not share all of the same politics, but I was raised on a diet of robust and challenging discussion. To my dad: you gave me a tool kit of resilience. At seven years old, writing my first speech on the double standards between kids and adults - as only a petulant seven-year-old could - you taught me the value of putting myself in other people's shoes, that it is our perception that informs our reality. You showed me that nobody - not even a grumpy seven-year-old - is the centre of the universe. To my mum: you gave me my love of art, my love of reading, and my love of theatre and film and creativity. You've shown me how our histories do not necessarily define our futures. To my little sister, Grace, and my little brother, Ollie: I'm stoked to be your big sister. Grace, I have appreciated how little you care about anything and everything to do with my job. I love using you as a sounding board for people for who politics plays out on the periphery of their lives as white noise. Ollie, I love learning with you. It is such a privilege to hold the position of working on this education system in our country just as you're about to start at intermediate school. To my best friend and partner, Alex: who could have imagined, when we met nearly six years ago outside Philosophy 101, that this is where we would end up? Thank you for being my anchor amidst turbulence in life and in self-discovery. Thank you for being my home when I didn't feel that I had one. Thank you for putting up with me as I follow each and every new passion. If I can accomplish just one thing in my time here - if I can change just one thing - I want to change people's awareness of what politics really is, because if we can change that, everything else can change. I want to start that work here, today, by asking people to look critically at the world around them. Look at our culture and our society and our economy and ask if it is fair and just. If it's not, who profits from that injustice? Who pays the price of that unfairness? Because politics is not me standing here giving this speech; politics is all around us. Like that old joke, politics is water. Politics lives in our relationships, in our conversations, in what we believe, and in what we're willing to fight for. I stand here on the shoulders of giants, like the Green pioneers Jeanette Fitzsimons and Rod Donald, and I am here to fight, both here from my privileged position inside these walls, and protesting out on the streets with the people I am proud to represent, until nobody ever needs to fight again. E ai ki te whakataukī, "He aha te mea nui o te ao, he tangata, he tangata, he tangata!" Nō reira, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa! According to the aphorism, "What is the most important thing of the world? It is people, it is people, it is people!" So therefore, salutations, acknowledgments, and accolades to you all! Applause The main text body ends. The original document can be accessed at this website address https://www.pridenz.com/hansard_chloe_swarbrick_maiden_statement_in_parliament.html. Please note that this document may contain errors or omissions - you should always refer back to the primary source material to confirm content. This text file was generated on Saturday, 22 November 2025 at 3:57pm.