My decision to run for political office was driven by the need to protect the values that I hold so dear, the values that colour my first memories of Aotearoa. Because from the moment we fled Iran we had a sense that we were going toward a set of values — freedom, equality, democracy, which our own revolution had hoped to achieve — rather than just a different place. From first landing at the base of that escalator in Auckland Airport, holding my parents’ trembling hands, to the drive into town, what I remember is the feeling that here we had rights and dignity. Now, I wanted to bring what I had learned around the world — about holding governments and power to account — home.
I felt an urgency to protect democracy itself, as someone who has seen the world without it. To me, it seemed like a global brand of mob-rules politics was getting too close to us for comfort. My platforms from the start were human rights, representative democracy, and the battle against prejudice. It felt like these were becoming part of the global zeitgeist, as other women from marginalised backgrounds — migrants, indigenous women, women of colour — also rose to power, forming a counterpart to populist politics. In the United States, the antidotes to Trump were the elections of the first-ever indigenous American women to Congress, Deb Haaland and Sharice Davids; Muslim women; 29-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a woman of colour from a working-class migrant background; and Ilhan Omar, the first-ever refugee elected to Congress, around a year after me. What is extraordinary is seeing the rise of the most marginalised of people, not only being elected but behaving as if election is our right.
For the first time, there are politicians speaking from real, lived experiences to issues never before given a national, let alone global, platform. Our issues aren’t only race and gender — we also speak about poverty, healthcare, education, housing, and the climate crisis from perspectives that were, until now, perilously ignored. If revolution is a taking of power by the powerless to change government, then ours is a revolution. To have a voice in leadership has never been a reality for our communities. Our rise comes at a time when once again our very humanity is openly questioned and our lives are threatened by extremism and hate. This time, we’re fighting back from positions of power.
It felt important, and thrilling, to lend my voice to this fight. Yet for every joyous interaction, there was a hateful tirade. For every person who supported me in my candidacy, who proudly took a stake in helping bring about my win, there was a troll behind a computer screen. I found out almost immediately on becoming visible in politics that, to some, my presence was a source of fear and outrage. For me, that hate is a strand woven through the narrative of my life in politics as New Zealand’s ‘first refugee MP’. Writing about the hate and analysing its roots is in itself critical — that’s why I have set aside an entire chapter (see chapter ten) for it. But to allow the abuse to eclipse my work and my story is to surrender. If racism’s aim is in part to distract us from our work, then I can’t allow that. Instead, the people I have come to represent — my Green whānau and every community whose issues my work addresses — deserve better. I wanted to write about my politics, my works, my drive, as separate from the experience of prejudice, because I refuse to let the hate define me or my story as a parliamentarian.
The decision to enter politics was never a choice between political parties for me. The Green Party had been my natural home and whānau in politics for more than a decade. Ever since I got to stand side by side with Keith Locke at those Zaoui protests, I was grateful for a movement that saw the world as an interconnected whole. We have always been ‘outsider politicians’, so to speak, and it was an infinite relief to find that community when I first moved back from Cambodia. I joined the Green Party again, and began going to meetings. Immediately, as it is Green custom, I was asked to stand for roles, and I did. I became the co-convenor of Auckland Province. The Green Party is a giant internal democracy, so decisions are made at local branch level, then fed up to the province, and in turn to the party’s executive, where I also served for two years after the 2014 election. So policy and governance decisions are made, not by the members of parliament, but members all around the country, by consensus. That connectedness was a big deal to me, to be part of a movement of engaged, energised equals.
James Shaw, now co-leader of the Party, was the first person to tell me I should stand for parliament. This was in 2013, at the party AGM in Christchurch, before James was an MP himself. It was the meeting where Russel Norman delivered an angst-ridden speech about ‘crony capitalism’ and John Key selling our democracy to ‘his corporate mates’. He said, ‘This matters because democracy and human rights matter. But it also matters because democracy is at the heart of every other economic, environmental and social debate we face as a nation.’ We were all abuzz.
That night, a bunch of us out-of-towners stayed up drinking Waiheke wines or feijoa home brew or whatever typically Green lubricant was generously supplied by the old-timers. I remember James and I both excitedly argued for the need for a written constitution. By then I was practising public law, and doing a bit of judicial review, which is as close as New Zealand practice gets to constitutional law proper. I was happy and probably loud, jumping between chatter about different models of human rights, obscure points of constitutional democracy, and the courts. James was hotly engaged in conversations with other international lawyers about the concept of ecocide and constitutional protections for the environment. We talked about holding the biggest corporate polluters to account and what that might look like in law. Would personhood of nature be enshrined in the same way that corporate personhood is? (Personally, I’ve always felt like corporate accountability is the answer. In giving personhood to imaginary business entities, we mostly pretend there are no real people making harmful decisions for profit behind it all. We need the law to hold corporations accountable far more readily, whether it is nature or humans who suffer.)
James’s argument was that I should stop talking about what needs to be done and become an MP myself. I hadn’t considered it, and it would take another three years before I could muster the guts to stand. James had always been sure he wanted to be in parliament. Thinking about it now, it was exceptionally generous of someone vying for a place in the small Green Party caucus to actively, excitedly, encourage others to do the same. That’s good leadership.
Over the next few years, my work in human rights law helped crystallise in my mind the need for constitution reform and system transformation. I had been helping on the latest of the ‘Family Carers’ cases. We were fighting for fair pay for families caring for their profoundly disabled loved ones. This was a case about pay equity, but also the fundamental rights of disabled persons to remain in their homes, in their communities, with their families. The government wouldn’t pay family members full-time pay at around minimum wage, while it would pay corporate agencies about $70,000 per year per person in care. The families had brought two previous cases claiming discrimination based on family relationship, which is unlawful under our Human Rights Act. They had won. The government forked out millions to appeal these cases all the way to the Court of Appeal. The carers kept winning.
Faced with the choice to continue breaching the law or change, the government did the unthinkable: it passed law to cut them off from the Human Rights Act remedies regime altogether. With a bare majority in parliament, under urgency, they cut an entire class of persons off from their human rights. In a move I had never heard of, they named the two cases in the new section of the Health and Disabilities Act, saying they would have no precedent value in future cases.
The case I worked on came after the law change. Nothing drives home the necessity of protecting human rights in a superior law more clearly than sitting with elderly mum Diane, trying to help her care for her severely disabled adult son, Shane, without access to the Human Rights Act. In fact, Crown counsel stood in the High Court and said that the rights of disabled persons to care were not true human rights, like the right to free speech. Arguing the archaic line that only civil and political rights, rather than social, economic or cultural rights, count is to ignore the inequities that prevent marginalised persons from accessing their political rights to begin with. Shane and Diane sat in the back of the courtroom, along with many other tireless disabilities activists and families anxiously waiting for justice. I was incensed and ready to change that government. In September 2018 with the help of my friend Julie Anne Genter, as Green Associate Minister of Health, our government announced that the law cutting family carers off from the Human Rights Act would change, as would the unfair payment regime itself be reviewed. Such a relief.
Still, the decision to stand as a candidate, to really do it, was a tortured road. Jesse Chalmers, my flatmate and friend who had anchored me back home and in the Party for years, was another staunch advocate. She is a descendant of Greens so committed they were founding members of the Earth Song eco-community. She’s also a successful businesswoman, whose company manufactures organic soy products (obviously). Jesse has a no-nonsense manner and unshakable ethics. A tiny woman with long auburn waves streaming down her back, she knows a bit about interacting in a world where she is in her way a minority, and authority is hard won. She does not suffer fools or mince words or shy away from challenges. She believes in pushing through and staring down the doubters. Being told, over wines, for several years, to go fix the world from parliament by that impressive force helped give me another little push towards my candidacy.
Then there was Guy Williams. We met at a charity event to fund the work of Michelle Kidd in 2016. Enormously tall and loud, he was at that point a comedian on TV and commercial radio, and he was the event’s ‘celebrity host’.
Whaea Michelle is a woman who begins her day at dawn to check on Auckland’s homeless community, before heading to the District Court to help the hundreds of distressed and confused folk forced to navigate the dehumanising process. I had known Michelle from my first days in court. She made sure she knew every one of us barristers. She was one of the first people I came across in that system that spoke openly about mental health and addiction underpinning our imprisonment rates, and of the need for compassion as we herded people through these traumatising proceedings. I’ve seen her cry with devastated young mums as they are given prison sentences, hold up collapsing addicts in the dock. I’ve accepted the warmest of hugs on days that would have been otherwise crushing. So that day in 2016, I knew I had to drag myself to the ritzy Northern Club, where Michelle’s fundraiser was being held.
A little late and flustered, I checked in with the organisers in the otherwise empty back room. The rest of the guests — mostly lawyers and judges — were already seated. Guy was back there too, waiting to go on stage. He introduced himself and asked what he should know about the crowd. I told him he could make fun of this crowd for probably voting ACT or National, which is why practically every public service is defunded, but then holding fancy charity functions to make up for it. Of course, a lot of barristers are incredibly focused on social justice because of what we see in the courts — that’s probably what got most of us to the charity event to begin with. Still, it was true enough.
He put that in his stand-up routine and the room fell mostly silent. He bombed. My table, though, found it hilarious, both to hear the joke and to see the tense reaction of the room.
Guy and I talked briefly afterward, but I was mostly focused on talking shop with old colleagues. In the end, he saw me drop my name badge somewhere, picked it up, found me online, and asked me out on a date.
We later realised we had met three years before, when he helped campaign for the Green Party and I was the Auckland party co-convener. He has a political science degree and had helped the ‘Double the Refugee Quota’ campaign. I had seen his stand-up, which is very different from his work on radio or TV at that time (which frankly I had never seen before we met). His stand-up is far more political, and tends to focus on race and privilege, which can be a bit confronting to those audience members who wander in expecting to see gags from TV. He jokes about having the confidence of a mediocre white man, though there’s truth to having the abandon of someone with status quo privilege. Guy became a firm advocate for my candidacy whenever I wavered. He, as my sounding board, became the well-spring of my confidence some days.
One of the moments that cemented my resolve was a conversation when I was lamenting the loss of some of my favourite Green MPs, like Catherine Delahunty, Jeanette Fitzsimons and Keith Locke. I said something like, ‘Who will be the next Keith Locke?’ and Guy said, ‘You. You’ll have to be.’
That stayed with me, not as confirmation that I could ever be as good, or frankly as iconic, as my heroes, but as a call to arms. What are convictions without the courage to act, or to at least try?
We went through that tumultuous 2017 election together. Guy has a passion for the mechanics of and the people in New Zealand politics, so I never have to explain things from the ground up. My work has been sustained by having the space at home to vent and strategise with a partner equally invested in its outcomes.
Being a Middle Eastern woman has proven an overburdened birth right in politics, but my identity was not a driving force for my candidacy. No, my decision to engage more and more actively with politics was first driven by the state of New Zealand politics from the moment I moved home. After three terms of a fiscally conservative National Party government, inequality was at record highs, there were constant threats of coal mining in our national reserves, and human rights were, increasingly, blatantly trampled. Theirs was not the Aotearoa I knew and loved.
It is also undeniable that my political roots began with my parents’ generation of Iranian revolutionaries. They were not afraid to demand transformation. Instead of incremental reform of a broken system, they asked for nothing less than participatory democracy and a redistribution of their nation’s natural resource. What is profoundly inspiring about that revolution to me is that Iranians had never experienced politics free from repression, nor public control of their oil. But they knew their nation, at her best, deserved that reality. Iranians were fighting for a world they had never seen before, but knew was possible.
That will always be the source of my political impulse.
The sometimes-harrowing experience in human rights and justice was another driver for my shift in focus from working on a case-by-case basis to instilling systemic change via parliament. My drive was to set goals that the human rights framework — the human rights dream — was built on. That means we aim to eliminate poverty, not just reduce it or push it from sight. We decolonise our systems by restoring self-determination to indigenous peoples, not just ‘settle’ some land claims. We divest from an economic system that is destroying our planet.
Like a good activist law-nerd, my vision was rooted in constitutional reform. I wanted Aotearoa to begin that constitutional conversation. What would be the values we would enshrine in law? Are we comfortable in a system where our Bill of Rights Act can be explicitly breached by any bare-majority government? Can we be a post-colonial society while our founding constitutional document is continuously ignored, and treated as impotent against modern lawmaking? Are we all that ‘green’ as a nation while our climate commitments are not even binding on the government that signed them, let alone corporate polluters?
I went into politics with that burning desire to champion rights-based constitutional reform, with all my experience in justice and in child rights advocacy, and ideas about how my expertise could help shape democracy. I thought hard about what I might bring to the table, what made me worthy as a legislator. But it was my identity, my face and my story that shaped my first experiences in politics.
I announced my candidacy in January 2017, which by dark coincidence was right around the time that Donald Trump signed his so-called ‘Muslim ban’. People emanating from my part of the world were being refused entry into the United States by the ‘Leader of the Free World’, based on our actual and perceived religion. Six months earlier, Brexit had won a catastrophic victory after a hate-filled campaign that villainised migrants and saw one lawmaker, a mother of young children, shot and stabbed to death for standing with us. I think about that lawmaker, Jo Cox, almost every day in my life as a politician.
I received an outpouring of love from around the globe when the announcement was made. It was unexpected and overwhelming. It came from Trump’s America, Britain under Brexit, and every corner of Aotearoa. People I interacted with daily smiled a little more broadly, took a breath and said, ‘Kia kaha.’ They told me about their children, second- or third-generation migrants, and how they now knew that those children could one day be prime minister. It was heartbreaking to hear they hadn’t thought that possible before. I heard from young women of colour, who told me on the bus about their activism on university campuses. They saw me as part of a continuum of their movement that encompassed my place in national politics and their work arranging vigils, setting up feminist groups, reporting harassment.
All this attention was, to my mind, not one bit earned. I hadn’t actually done anything but stand. Something essential had been missing for so many of us in politics, and in public life, for so long. We had been trained all our lives not to think it possible, or to think ourselves deserving enough. But we were starved for representation.
I never for a minute expected to get in the first time I ran. Campaigning as a candidate was such a new and alien world that it barely felt real as a daily experience. It was a gauntlet of debates and media interviews, where every emotion from pride to fear, to my own deep, reoccurring imposter syndrome was exaggerated. It was a revelation to find I could speak, out loud, on a stage or under studio lights. Speech-making was more daunting than responding to questions, maybe because I was used being in court, which is such a think-on-your-feet affair. I began to improvise my speeches. It worked better to speak in the moment to each audience rather than prepare and perfect a static stump speech. It was a blessing to have very little time to think about any of this in the moment.
In that new world, I formed some of the most unexpected and enduring bonds with other first-time candidates. The Greens attracted a talented and diverse candidate pool in 2017. This was a gift to me, to each of us, in that we got to share the surreal and often hostile context of minority candidacy. I have to name them, because I miss them and their invaluable credentials in parliament every day. There was Rebekah Jaung, a medical doctor, researcher, and campaigner for victims of sexual slavery and for inter-Korean peace. Teanau Tuiono is an international environmental lawyer, indigenous rights advocate, and community organiser. There were Julie Zhu, award-winning theatre producer, filmmaker, and founding member of Asians Supporting Tino Rangatiratanga; Ricardo Menéndez March, now the outspoken advocacy coordinator at Auckland Action Against Poverty; and Leilani Tamu, ex-Pacific diplomat and author. None were elected save for me. All experienced pushback based on their race, and based on minority issues they raised. The issues themselves were ignored, or deemed too emotionally driven — or perhaps they were too emotionally delivered, since our tone was also perpetually policed.
We formed chat groups where we could post about the abuse we had received, both online and in public meetings, and the constant battle we faced for resources and platforms as we campaigned. These are people who bring far more than the essential representation that their communities lack. They bring substantive expertise, abilities, and analysis about the issues that matter to every community we serve. But the struggle to be seen and heard was very real. It was a struggle in different ways, in both conservative and progressive contexts.
Seeing the value in diversity does not mean progressive political institutions will amplify or resource minority politicians as true equals. Diversity in politics, as in any institution, can’t be fixed from the top down. A diverse bunch of candidates, the face of any political party, doesn’t solve the problem that politics itself is very mono-gendered and monocultural. We learned during the campaign, from event to event, from one media interview to the next, that unless the campaign team, media advisors, volunteers, and staff are as diverse as the people expected to front political issues, we can’t truly do our work as representatives. That is the level of support that majority groups get when they stand as candidates — their issues and perspectives are well understood, their communities have received years of attention from politicians, and they themselves don’t have to work to achieve acceptance from constituents or TV audiences. We had to make all that happen from the ground up.
Talking about these ordeals over dumplings on Dominion Road, or comforting home-baked treats, was a lesson in how much more minorities have to bring to the table. We all knew first-hand how much harder minorities have to try in job interviews. Being ranked on a party list is like a daunting, extended job interview. Being from a migrant background generally means you are the first in your family and probably your broader social circles to take the step. Our names, our faces, our lack of institutional connections mean we have to work extra hard to prove ourselves or be noticed.
That election, however, was a little turning point. We forged a little winding path for other minority politicians to follow, and we can see it being trodden more confidently already in local elections.
In 2017, the Green movement in Aotearoa had lived a devastating, heart-stopping election with a happy ending. It had been a rollercoaster — for each of us personally, as well as for the nation. It was hard to catch our breaths.
The Green Party almost halved the number of MPs we had in parliament. We lost a co-leader and two senior MPs just six weeks before the election. At around the same time, we dipped briefly below the five per cent threshold needed to enter parliament. We nearly disappeared.
By election night, we did make it comfortably back to parliament. The win was hard-won and extraordinary in many ways. We elected a government with a progressive promise, that spoke to inequality, that named climate action as a key focus, and was itself comprised of the most representative members our House of Representatives had ever seen. We got more women, more Māori, more rainbow community representatives. We got a young, first-time mum for Prime Minister. We got Chlöe Swarbrick, at twenty-three years old, our youngest member of parliament in almost forty years, since Marilyn Waring was also elected at twenty-three years old. I got to wear the label of ‘New Zealand’s first refugee MP’. This set us apart from the politics of hate and division rising in other Western democracies.
That is not to say for a moment that we didn’t bring far more than those labels, both in expertise and experience, to our work. But the process of standing for office has made me acutely aware of the significance of lived experience as integral to true representation. I know it because people tell me every day. To be reflected in leadership roles means something in and of itself; it’s proof of equality and inclusion. But lived experience is also invaluable expertise. It means so much to those underrepresented communities to have someone who knows a little of their particular challenges active in the decisions that shape our world. Chlöe’s current experience of youth counts as much as age, because navigating the mental health system, getting a job, or finding a home works differently for young people, differently even than it did for young people of another generation. Interacting with any of those systems and the people who run them is different, again, for Māori. We know women have needs and vulnerabilities that have been overlooked for centuries. Decision-making without diverse representation is not only hurtful, it is weak and ineffective.
The message of hope and change is never as powerfully expressed than by those who embody a group less represented in leadership. This was true of Barack Obama, and it was true — in different ways — for Jacinda Ardern. I had known Jacinda from her Auckland Central campaigns — I was in the Green Party’s Auckland Central branch alongside our candidate, Denise Roche, so we campaigned for the Green vote while cheering on Jacinda’s team for the electorate seat. We also crossed paths a bit after hours in local pasta joints on K Road. She is a social person by nature; that much has always been an obvious and maybe even defining aspect of her work as a politician. She was warm, and would lean slightly into every conversation in the bustle. She was always calling to other women in local politics in the room — it was like a little squad bound together by the passing nods and check-ins months apart in these safe spaces. As a woman far younger than the average politician, her leadership already came with the rightful fervour of a change of guard. To me, her election was met with so much joy, because she embodied and spoke to so much that we, as New Zealanders, hoped — at our best — to convey. From the start, her image as a leader evoked a recollection of our past as we wanted it remembered: caring, egalitarian, and, uniquely, empowering of women. Simultaneously, her message set us into the future. We got to be the nation open to transformation and to innovation, as we had imagined ourselves, but had not been for some time. In reality, we had drifted far from those values, with John Key hurling us into an American-style culture of everyman-for-himself individualism and aspirational wealth worship. It wasn’t working, as it never works. From archaic trickle-down economics, to the smiling face of a man making fun of ‘gay pink shirts’. The last government made it hard for us to recognise the nation that first gave women the vote and prided itself on providing universal healthcare.
Whether the government that resulted from that election delivers on enough of its progressive promise in all the other ways, the promise of representation was largely delivered, at least broadly for women, and that means a lot. We became a nation led by an unmarried woman having a child during her term in office, with her partner co-parenting. It was notable that the only other elected head of government to give birth in office was the leader of a Muslim nation, Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, in 1988. As feminists, we got to share in that tradition, and bring it into the twenty-first century. This point of representation has a tangible impact on our lives as women. For the first time in our nation’s history, we can point to a real-life example that proves we can do any job and have children at the same time, if parenting gender roles and the institutions of work adapt to accommodate us.
It is undeniable that her win also played into that global hunger for a change in the politics that guarded an old-world order, which many of us were ready to tear down. In the end, the change had to be embodied by its leader.
The Green Party has always been the party of transformation in Aotearoa. In 2017, we campaigned hard for systemic change. We said success in government must be measured differently than by narrow economic metrics that ignore record poverty and a climate crisis — in 2019, a year into government, we operate under the framework of a ‘wellbeing budget’, first championed by Greens years ago. We said the word ‘crisis’ a lot, because we knew that Aotearoa, human and whenua, could not afford another three years under the politics of regression.
Our government is still young, and whether it delivers change commensurate with the hope that delivered its win is unclear in many ways. We support the changing of guard as it stands because we know that many of our most vulnerable would not survive the alternative. But we know, too, that what we promised was not incremental reform. It was revolution. Making our society fair and combatting the environmental crisis we have inherited will take courage from us as politicians. It will mean redistributing power and resource, not just changing the front-facing image of government. That is the promise of our Green movement.
The night the election was announced, we partied, elated and exhausted. We still knew little of the election result other than that we were in, and we had a brand-new MP in Chlöe. It was bittersweet. I know that, like me, she has felt the weight of the loss of stellar Green stalwarts like Mojo Mathers and Denise Roche.
I had to wait another two weeks for the special votes to be counted to know my fate. With two weeks of advanced voting, a total of 446,287 people voted outside their electorates in 2017, including 61,524 people from overseas. It very much felt like it could go either way.
The day the results finally came in was also the day Guy and I moved into our little apartment together. All the boxes and furniture were still sprawled around us when the call came. Suddenly, I had to get dressed and go to a press conference. It was an exceptionally odd thing to process: a press conference, for me. It was a life-changing moment, but I honestly can’t say I knew what it all meant. I’m still not sure when I will ever say out loud, ‘I’m a Member of Parliament,’ without the jolt of disbelief and embarrassment.
I slapped together an outfit from the only clothes I could find that weren’t boxed and crumpled, failed to find stockings, and drove to two dairies trying to buy some before we made it to the Stamford Plaza, where the conference was being held. Why hadn’t I thought to do this frantic dance yesterday, or last week? All eight Green MPs had flown to Auckland for the announcement. These people, whom I had admired and campaigned for over the years, my role models and inspirations, were now somehow my peers. We were all giddy. I had a moment trying to imagine work next week and couldn’t. That was the other wild thing: I was to start work in two days.
In a few minutes, with no media training and no lines prepared, I was at the lectern. I don’t remember what else happened, but I do remember Lloyd Burr, of Newshub, asking me a question that sounded like a jab about our caucus of six women and two men: how did I explain it?
‘This is what meritocracy looks like,’ I said.
Being completely unprepared as I was for the win, I had no plans that night. I told any friends specifically asking that I might get a drink at a diner called Peach Pit on K Road. Karen, my first-ever Kiwi friend and my best friend from Chaucer School, came. Though we hadn’t seen each other for years, she found a babysitter on the fly so she could celebrate with me. It meant so much to me. I kept introducing her as my first-ever friend in New Zealand.
A young woman had booked half the diner for her birthday party, replete with cake and streamers. She recognised me late into the night and we joined parties. We ate birthday cake and drank prosecco from mismatched glasses. It was perfect.
Chlöe and I came into parliament a couple of weeks apart. Different as we are in our backgrounds and life experiences, we will always be shaped and united by our shared moment as the two new Greens of 2017. Coming through that chaotic, heartbreaking, exuberant, celebratory election that threw us in the deep end together isn’t something we’ll ever be able to communicate to anyone else. We were new, figuring out these unknown parts of ourselves that came about in the unknown world of politics. It would have been even more daunting alone, without another Green learning the art of being an ‘outsider politician’. What keeps you going in this place some days are the shared glances of confusion or alarm, the smirks between two people who still remember that things can be done differently outside of this archaic machine. Being trapped in the debating chamber late into the night without a hope of changing anyone’s mind on a vote because party battle lines have been drawn can be crushing. Sometimes you need to barge into the office next door with a glass of wine and vent with someone whose brow is as furrowed as yours.
It’s a difficult ask, distilling the operative parts of your past, together with the drivers of your future, into a fifteen-minute speech. It’s daunting to put all that on the record. But by the time I came to write my maiden speech to parliament, in October 2017, I knew what I wanted to say. I wanted to talk about the common values of democracy and equality that my parents had fought for as Iranians, a fight that had almost crushed their lives. I wanted it noted that these values are common values, uniting us across borders, though they are sometimes violently suppressed. I wanted to talk about my work before I entered politics and my aims for the future. But I knew also that the public gallery would be filled with former refugees. A number of organisations were in touch to help bring our people to Wellington and to parliament, most for the very first time, to see me deliver that speech. It was important to tell the story of Iran as it was, the oppression and torture, the war, and the profiteering Western collusion in the tyranny we suffered. That is a common refugee story.
For myself, as much as for all those across the nation, listening for their voice in that House, I also had to acknowledge the hate and abuse. I had to say that racism and threats of violence are part of the experience of the ‘refugee MP’. As uncomfortable as it would be, I had to say that those in the House with me had sometimes been responsible for fanning those flames. I would look across the debating chamber and give examples, because scapegoating migrants is a choice that politicians make and we do feel that out on the street.
I had to say these things in my speech, because my job is to bring those voices, those experiences into the House. To shy away from that would have been to abscond on the responsibility to represent. It would be a dishonour to the memory of a welcoming nation that first gave my family and me freedom. Aotearoa is a place where a nine-year-old refugee can grow up to sit in parliament, so it is worth holding our leaders to the high standard of equality that, at its best, our nation can represent.
I’m glad I did that, even as people shuffled in their seats and one opposition member tried for a heckle in the silence. After my speech, I looked up into the public gallery and saw my own feelings of relief, validation, pride, and gratitude reflected back at me. Later, we embraced and cried a little, and laughed at our common histories, our foods, and insecurities. The House of Representatives felt a little like a safe space for us, and that was an incredible thing.
Here is that speech:
E ngā mana, e ngā reo, e ngā karangatanga maha, tēnā koutou katoa.
Te mana whenua o tēnei wāhi, Te Āti awa, tēnā koutou.
Otirā ngā iwi whānui tēnā koutou katoa.
Mr Speaker, I congratulate you on your election and look forward to your guidance in this house.
I begin by acknowledging what a breathtaking honour it is to sit among this Green caucus.
I acknowledge also those who sat here before now, especially Catherine Delahunty and Keith Locke — you spoke to injustice wherever it happened. That meant a lot to someone like me. Mojo Mathers, for proving to me, and us all, that we all exist beyond our labels. And Metiria Turei for baring her scars bravely to highlight the pain of others.
But today, I want to acknowledge also, those who tell me every day that I don’t belong here. That I should go home where I came from. That I have no right to criticise governments here and I should just be grateful I wasn’t left to die. Hundreds of messages, comments. Mr Speaker, some call for rifles being loaded. I’m numb to it, because this is reality for those of us from minority backgrounds.
But I want it noted that this happens every time we scapegoat migrants in this House, every time a TV presenter asks a PM when the Governor-General is going to look like a Kiwi and sound like a Kiwi — and that PM laughs. Every time we call refugees ‘leftovers from terrorist nations’ for political gain.
We feel the effect of that out on the streets. We can’t shed our skin.
Patriotism that represses dissent — or creates second-class citizens — is archaic and dangerous. It’s antithetical to our culture.
So this day I stand, proud and determined. This day is about democracy and equality, values which New Zealand holds so dear, embodies and stands up for so boldly.
I love this country, but patriotism — a love of this country — means expecting the absolute best for her. Standing up for the country that we know is possible.
I protest, fight for equality, and fairness because justice is what love looks like in public (that’s Dr Cornel West).
Mr Speaker, I am the child of revolutionaries. My parents faced tanks for democracy. At gunpoint, fought for human rights. Risked torture to take back their country’s resource, back from dictators, corrupt corporate interests, and imperialists — to put it back in the hands of the people.
The Iranian Revolution was one of the biggest popular revolutions in modern history. Iranians poured onto the streets to fight inequality. But their revolution was hijacked, and my life was ultimately shaped by one of the most repressive regimes in the modern world.
Everyone knew someone who disappeared into a torture chamber; everyone knew women flogged for disregarding Islamic dress. Everyone worried about their phone being tapped.
This was just the backdrop to a bloody war we fought against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. I remember the bombs, the sirens, running to the basement. Waiting.
Mostly I remember the kids my age, who stopped speaking because of shellshock. Then scarcity set in as America backed Saddam. We had to use coupons for food. Later, we found out that the West had backed both sides in that war. For profit.
Mr Speaker — that is what refugees are made of.
So, I feel a kinship with First Nations peoples, with tangata whenua. Because we too have been alienated from our land and resources by war and imperialism. We face the same prejudice and degradation. That is why I want Te Tiriti o Waitangi to be a living constitutional document in this county, shaping policy, including on immigration. We need to work together — migrants, refugees, Pasifika peoples and tangata whenua — for we have far more that unites us than that which divides us.
Mr Speaker, my mum was a child psychologist. She never worked because she refused to sit Islamic religious exams — she didn’t believe religion should influence mental health services.
My father was an agricultural engineer who worked on developing plant-based renewable energies — green to the core.
So, let’s remember that our values exist in all cultures — the Middle East, just like the West, has fierce environmentalists, feminists, governments selling us off to multinationals, but also religious fundamentalism.
Let’s amplify the voices in all cultures who stand for tolerance and equality — above those who would silence them.
Mr Speaker, we fled that repression when it got too dangerous for us. We landed at Auckland Airport — the fear was palpable. I can still remember it. I was nine years old. I knew the unthinkable was awaiting us if we were returned. But we weren’t. We were welcomed here.
My two most vivid first impressions of this incredible country were the warmth of that welcome — I didn’t realise it then but that was our rights, our humanity being recognised.
And that it was so Green.
That is what New Zealand is to me.
My work in this House will be committed to upholding those incredible first impressions.
Mr Speaker, I became a lawyer because I wanted to enforce human rights. The criminal law is the purest form of human rights law in our system.
The most frightening thing I’ve seen in almost a decade of acting as a criminal lawyer all over the world was the sight of a thirteen-year-old boy sitting behind a very large table awaiting his trial for murder at the Auckland High Court. I acted as part of the defence team fighting to keep him from life imprisonment. He was tried as an adult, because that is what our law requires. He had thrown a rock over an overbridge, which tragically took another young life.
He suffered from mental-health issues — as do most in our criminal justice system. He was brown. He was from South Auckland. His family couldn’t afford electricity, so they moved from house to house until it was cut off. He didn’t have a lot of schooling. His CYFS file was the stuff of nightmares. Our most vulnerable.
The frontlines of our criminal justice system is where I learned about unchecked prejudice. It turned me into a human rights lawyer — and my focus turned to child rights.
It was living in Africa working on genocide trials where I then learned how prejudice turns to atrocity. Politicians scapegoating groups, as a group, for any social ills; dehumanising language in the media used for political gain — every time I see that, I think, ‘That is how it starts.’
I saw that at the Rwanda Tribunal, at The Hague and when I prosecuted the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
Holding politicians and armies to account for breaching their powers. Giving voice to women and minorities who are most viciously targeted by abusers. These experiences have instilled in me a commitment to human rights and democracy that I first had for having seen the world without them.
Human rights are universal. We don’t have fewer rights based on our religion, where we were born, or who we love. We don’t have fewer rights for having children out of wedlock, or being charged with a crime.
There is no such thing as the ‘deserving poor’, or the ‘good refugee’ — we have rights not because we are good, but because we are human.
Human rights are indivisible — we have a bundle of rights. You can’t have one without the others — you can’t say we have democracy or free speech unless we also have the right to education. We don’t have the right to education if the kids we are educating are hungry or live in cars. No right is realised without all rights being realised. And over the past decade in New Zealand, our democracy has been undermined because too many of our economic, social and cultural rights were breached. I want to entrench them.
Finally, human rights create enforceable obligations of this and every government — this isn’t charity; the people don’t have to beg. We can’t privatise them away. We have a mandate to govern only if we can provide those rights to everyone. I want New Zealand to get back to a culture of expecting this.
None of that is separate from the environment — protection of human rights is intrinsically linked with protecting nature. Just ask the people of the Pacific, whose homelands are being drowned out because of unrestrained growth, waste, pollution, and consumption that they did not benefit from or participate in.
One of the greatest threats to both human and nature’s rights is the subjugation of democracy to corporate interest. A rampant market on a finite planet.
New Zealand must lead by example on these global issues. We’ve stood against status quo interests when it was the right thing to do. We will be that righteous little nation on the global stage again.
I never meant to run as the first-ever refugee MP. But I quickly realised that my face, my story, means so much to so many people. So my fear of tokenism is dissipated.
I remembered getting notes and emails from my female interns, especially of minority backgrounds, telling me over and over again how much it meant to see someone like them forge that path. Some of them are carrying that mantle today. I realised then that it was important for that process to have victims of governance by repression and mass murder stand up in those courtrooms, mostly dominated by Western men. Representation matters.
So this is a victory for a nine-year-old asylum seeker, but also for every person who’s ever felt excluded, out of place, been told she has limits on her dreams.
For getting me here, I want to thank the voters — you have humbled me forever. You voted for diversity, for fairness, and for nature when you voted Green this election.
To our Green activists and staff, especially in Auckland — you worked harder and harder as things got harder this election. You inspire me.
My campaign team, especially Ron and Daniel, and my second, political family, all of you Chalmerses — your support is life-affirming.
My parents, both strong, Iranian-Kiwi feminists — you gave up everything when you stood up for freedom. You gave up everything — your friends, your family, your professions, your language — because you weren’t willing to raise a little girl in oppression. I thank you.
And to maybe the most political person I know. Though a very large, loud white boy, my partner, who at some point (it feels like a lifetime ago) stopped me mid-rant, when I was lamenting the lack of activism in politics, losing some of my favourite MPs. I was saying: which candidate will stand up against the GCSB [Government Communications Security Bureau]? Who’ll be the new Keith Locke? You stopped me and said, ‘You will be that candidate’ — and I was. We’re both political, we are both adventurers. But you are also patient. I thank you for that. And for love. But mostly: courage. On that day. And every day.
Mr Speaker, I stand here today as the child of revolutionaries, as a child asylum seeker, an international human rights lawyer, an activist — as a Green.
My standing here proves New Zealand is a place where a nine-year-old refugee, a girl from the Middle East, can grow up to one day enter parliament. It proves the strength and goodness of New Zealand’s values.
He oranga whenua
He oranga tangata
Ka ora tātou katoa
Nō reira e te whare, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa.