The work of an MP in a small party in government is such that on any given day you cover a head-spinning range of topics in an inexhaustible variety of contexts. From school halls, to ministerial meetings, to mass media — you have to be ‘on’ every minute. I hold thirteen portfolios. They are grouped in my mind as the ‘international stuff’: Foreign Affairs, Trade, Defence, Disarmament, Overseas Development Aid, and Customs; the ‘justice stuff’: Justice, Courts, Police, Corrections, and Electoral Reform; and the ‘minority issues’: Disabilities and Immigration/Refugees. Human Rights is the fourteenth portfolio, one that only Green Party recognises, but I believe should exist in and of itself in government. In reality it should underpin every other portfolio.
I chose to be on the Foreign Affairs, Trade, and Defence committee, because I knew those were issues where the big parties agreed. Without the Greens, there would be no one asking the hard questions. At first, it was a space where I was unwelcome. National Party member Gerry Brownlee told me I was in the wrong room on the first session. ‘This is a senior committee,’ he told me. Eventually we formed a committee friendship, in part because I laughed off every ‘loony Green’ joke. The committee came to accept the minority view among them. We have formed a collegial union, and I can get things over the line, like an inquiry into New Zealand’s development aid policy — a rewarding win.
My first daunting political hurdle, and the biggest disagreement between the Greens and the government’s coalition parties, came the very month I was elected. It was about trade, a portfolio that had just been handed to a brand-new backbench MP, still catching her breath.
The government suddenly announced its intention to sign the infamous Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA), a trade deal we had all protested en masse as opposition parties. It was promptly renamed by the addition of the words ‘Comprehensive and Progressive’, and, with that, the CPTPPA was heralded as a new deal. I had the job of reading the 6000-page agreement, acquiring enough information from the still top-secret trade talks, and ascertaining whether the key issues for our constituents had in fact been addressed. This is a deal that isn’t all that much about trade. It mostly outlines the special rights and privileges of the globally trading corporates, as against our elected governments and our non-internationally trading constituents. Everything from their special exemptions from our privacy laws to deregulating online technologies from which they profit is in there. I had an advantage, having been part of the protest movement from back in 2015 when the protests were constant and mounting in Auckland at least, and being relatively adept at deciphering international legal texts. It was clear to me that this may be an improved deal, but our core concerns still remained.
For one thing, the actual text of the new deal was never put to consultation. Our people, the people who had protested the deal and voted for any one of the three parties who opposed it before the election, were devastated. Once it was done, we found out — all too late — that the most egregious threat to democracy — the clauses that give foreign corporates and investors special rights to sue our government — remained. The threat of billion-dollar lawsuits will hang over the heads of us all, and over future governments, influencing policy decisions on health, education, and environmental protection. It was an archaic and frightening reminder of how the world was now ordered. It was something I had learned a lot about during my Master’s studies, because human rights compliance now rests more so with the power of multinational corporations rather than democratically elected governments. Our one-vote-per-person democracy is a feeble enforcement mechanism in the face of lawsuits that are designed to prioritise the interests of foreign trade above all else.
What was particularly chilling to me as a Green is that where corporate investors had accessed their new rights under similar agreements, in eighty-five per cent of cases it was to stop environmental protections. In 2002, when Indonesia tried to ban particularly damaging mining practices in its native forests, the mere threat by multinational mining companies to sue pursuant to clauses much like the ones we signed onto in the CPTPPA forced it to exclude foreign corporations from that ban. The Indonesian Environment State Minister Nabiel Makarim openly admitted, ‘If shut down, investors demand and Indonesia cannot pay.’
In a place like Iran, democracy is scant, so we know the oil trade trumps our rights and degrades our environment with impunity. But now, even in otherwise healthy democracies like New Zealand, international traders dictate all sorts of policy in a far more polite and insidious world order.
We, the Green Party, opposed the deal. That should have been uncontroversial since our position had long been on record. This was how mixed-member representation was supposed to work in government. Still, it was the first time that a government party was dissenting this term. The issue was huge and a marker of our core differences on both the economy and democracy. It was scary and uncomfortable for us all as government parties. That was the pressure to back down, or at least to do it quietly, silently. That wasn’t an option in my mind. Public discourse about dissent is as important as the votes in the House. Giving voice to that dissent was important to me.
Sitting in the select committee meeting that heard public submissions was particularly difficult for me. The overwhelming majority of submitters opposed the CPTPPA. But it had already been signed by the government. Every parliamentarian on the committee — government and opposition — had to support it.
Maybe it was the defence lawyer in me, but I felt strongly that a point of principle, based on truth, must be made loudly. It felt like a fork in the road, a defining moment in what kind of government we would be and what kind of Green Party. For me personally, as a politician, it was a moment to take a deep breath and find my voice. I studied and dissected the text, the criticism, the Minister of Trade’s explanations, spoke to everyone I could. It was clear what I had to do.
When I stood to speak in the House at the CPTPPA hearing as the lone voice of dissent, I didn’t hold back:
Instead of installing the transition to an innovative and sustainable economy that New Zealanders voted for, this deal will make it far harder and more expensive to implement the Zero Carbon Act, to combat child poverty, to be responsive to future challenges facing our little nation.
. . . Our hope and intention is that the TPP is the last of its kind. I have been working to introduce change that will require us to make trade fair. To require deals like this to be made democratically. Transparently. That they should be contingent on our ability to protect human rights, combat climate change and do right by tangata whenua.
We need to make trade fair. Fit to serve our twenty-first century concerns, with all the lessons of failed neoliberal ideology.
Instead on March 8, we are not signing on to a free-trade agreement, we are ceding sovereignty to foreign investors.
In that hearing, I tried to hold the despair of every submitter, to amplify it. I wanted to apologise to them. Many of them hugged me afterward. I hoped only that having a dissenting voice was some consolation in itself.
My work in that dense and unruly portfolio of Trade has since focused on how we might join together with other progressive nations to drive a new model of fair international trade. We are a small nation. We need trade. International trade, at its best, builds relationships that encourage a rules-based order, exchanges of ideas, even empathy between nations. But what I see from the inside, as a lawyer, is that even the term ‘trade deal’ is a misnomer. These agreements create obligations and restrictions on how governments regulate and make policy in every area of our lives. They are an important aspect of international law, but they are designed to wildly favour the interests of Big Money corporations — from Facebook and Google, to Big Oil, to pharmaceutical companies. We can turn that around, and use the binding nature of trading contracts to give teeth to our climate obligations and human rights law — to really honour Te Tiriti o Waitangi.
My work on the trade portfolio has given me the platform in government to help restore the balance of power. The meetings with trade negotiators and officials are hazed with secrecy and coded wordplay. It’s handy to have a handle on international law, to know the language and effect of those instruments. There is an expectation that I will know nothing, but being underestimated is a fun advantage. It’s sometimes hard to get an answer, but, calmly, I persist.
Around the same time as that first rumble over the CPTPPA, news came that Australia was shutting off amenities, including water, to its Manus Island offshore immigration detention centre in a bid to force the detainees to move out of the facility and settle in the local community. With nowhere for them to go, though, and after years of deliberate propaganda driving suspicion and hatred against them, the detainees rightly feared for their lives and refused to leave. The United Nations and Amnesty International had long called the conditions in Australia’s offshore detention centres — effectively prison camps — torture. Now, the trapped refugees and asylum-seekers were being exposed to far worse. The detainees included an award-winning journalist, environmentalists, political activists, and members of the rainbow community from Iran and places like Iran, where they had been forced to flee unthinkable persecution or war. Some had already reached out to me with their stories. But now they, their families, Australian activists, and refugee communities here began reaching out with urgency. Australian Green senator Nick McKim flew to Manus Island and kept me updated from the ground. I remember he first called me a couple of times while I was in a caucus meeting. I missed his calls. Then came this message:
I’m on Manus Island and hoping we can have a chat about what’s happening here and whether you can ask NZ PM to increase the numbers of refugees NZ is offering to take. People are going to start dying here soon. Thanks, hope to hear from you.
I had to stop and read those devastating words aloud between tears. People were at risk because sanitation and healthcare were cut off, and because those conditions pushed their mental health to breaking point. Indefinite detention is considered torture in human rights law. This was an atrocity.
I began saying that overtly. I interviewed with Australian media, with the BBC, and continuously with local media. I also said, because I felt it to be true, that New Zealand’s own silence till then had amounted to complicity. It was the first time I realised what this voice was that I had, not just as a politician, but as a refugee. It felt like it meant something. Sometimes after those interviews, I would collapse to the floor in floods of tears. A voice for ‘those people’ seemed very important then. The victims trapped in those prison camps were the ones whose voices were silenced. This was the most essential advocacy I had ever done.
Thankfully, our new government did rise to the occasion with a renewed offer to take 150 people from the prison camp. When Jacinda was in Australia for her first visit as Prime Minister, I know she raised this offer immediately. Behind the scenes, apart from the frantic work of finding a solution to the crisis on Manus Island, I was finding out the number of families with children on Nauru. We could potentially rehome everyone with a child, but we didn’t have enough mental health resources to support them during resettlement. Australian charities communicated a confidential proposal to fly counsellors and healthcare workers over to help with this. But senseless cruelty prevailed as the Australian Government refused our offer. It was devastating to be powerless from a position of relative power.
I could barely comprehend how lucky my family had been to escape that fate. I know that some of the children in those prison camps stop speaking, just like the little shellshocked girls and boys I knew in Iran. These children had escaped oppression, war and persecution with less trauma than that inflicted upon them on Manus Island. For those of us who have been through the refugee experience, who know the anxiety and visceral fear of that flight for safety, the fate of the Nauru and Manus detainees is incomprehensible. We also know that the misconception that travelled down the line to justify their torture is the same prejudice that fuels racial slurs against us online, the one that justifies the bombs that fall on our nations, the one that leads to white nationalists shooting up our community gatherings. It is the lie that says some people are less deserving of security and dignity based on the colour of our skin and our displacement. The lie that we are less human, I turned my energies to advocating against the National Government’s ban on refugees in Africa and the Middle East, euphemistically called the ‘family link’ requirement. People in those regions were required to prove not only that they were escaping war or persecution but also that they had a close family link to a New Zealander before we would allow them in our refugee quota. It was a policy not unlike Trump’s brutish ‘Muslim ban’. This was couched in vague appeals to distance — that is to say, those places are so far away, and we should take closer refugees, though we continued to take refugees from central America, and refugee policy is by definition based on needs, not convenience. Worse, it included a blanket, unspecified reference to ‘security risks’. The policy was clearly borne of the War on Terror prejudice that marked entire, diverse and vibrant nations, including victim communities themselves.
Sitting in ministerial meetings, talking to media, and accepting petitions, it was hard to ignore the fact that, had circumstances been different, this policy would have excluded me and my family. It meant so much to stand for the only political party that allowed me to campaign against it at the election and to fight against it in government. In October 2019, after two years of sustained negotiation, of raising the issue countless times with the Minister for Immigration, of rehashing all the political issues, we overturned the policy. In a world after the Christchurch terror attacks, it was much-needed reassurance to refugee communities from the Middle East and Africa, whatever their faith — and I include myself in that group — that we are considered equals, at least in this formal way, again.
Defence, the portfolio about war, is the other to which I brought a lifetime of personal grief and dense professional knowledge. I began my work on Defence with the clear aim of challenging defence spending and ending our military deployments in the Middle East. It’s what Keith Locke would have done. In fact, I try to sit down with Keith as often as possible, usually over scones and home-brewed coffee, to share our experiences. He is still exceedingly well-informed about global politics and the details of military policy. Peace is core Green business — for one thing, there is no climate action while war wages on for profit and access to non-renewable fossil fuels. The wars and sanctions and power dynamics that destabilised the Middle East and displaced my family are intrinsically linked with the climate crisis — they are about oil.
My challenge was going to be Ron Mark, ex-military man and New Zealand First Minister of Defence. I knew that our positions on defence were diametrically opposed and he had all the power. I also knew that I would have to go into my work with Ron, as in my work in every realm before then, without prejudice about him, or preconceptions about his views or political affiliations. That is the only fair and effective basis for persuasion.
Parliament is the most adversarial context I’ve ever worked in. Rather than consensus-building or true debate, we are expected to hold our party lines and either ignore the opposing view or fight, almost with actual hatred, what our political opponents stand for. People heckle, tease, and jeer loudly as speeches are delivered. We rarely, if ever, sit together with anyone from the opposition to break bread or sip wine, even though we are all trapped in the complex together late into the night. But surely our job, our democratic duty, is to listen, actively find solutions, and persuade others of those solutions.
The one hope-filled example of this was the time, in May 2019, women parliamentarians from across the House, across the political divide, came together to stand with me, against what they saw as bullying and abuse: ‘We, as women MPs, consider your behaviour towards a colleague, who has been under attack with death threats and is already in a vulnerable position, unacceptable.’
So I went into my meetings with Ron Mark with no expectations. I found that he was pleased to be working with someone who had experience of both war and war-crime prosecutions. The first interaction we had was when he walked over to say that he had acted as a defence lawyer in military tribunals and he was glad I understood that soldiers had a right to be presumed innocent. This was at a moment when I was being criticised in the media for my work as a defence lawyer at the international tribunals. I was heartened.
The Defence meetings were warm and almost jovial from the start. The minister was like a proud dad. He would invite senior members of the military to join us, especially high-ranking women, who he knew had not been celebrated sufficiently to date. We had difficult conversations. I was concerned about the processes of justice when gender-based crimes were reported within the military system. The independent report on this remains highly redacted. I am still deeply concerned about the NZDF’s alleged involvement in war crimes in Afghanistan and have raised this persistently. I am obstinately opposed to the billions of dollars we spend on war-making machines, feeding an immoral industry. But I’m proud that we have been able to agree, the minister and I, on two essential issues: ending our deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan, and making climate change a key priority for Defence.
This came about through dialogue. It also came about through human understanding. I realised Ron Mark’s history with the military is deeply personal. He was a foster child, one of countless Māori children removed by the state and placed in care. He joined the military as a teenager and that became his most enduring home, his family. He went on to be deployed in war zones, including the Middle East. His vision of war is not one that relates to profit or diplomacy in the sense of pleasing our Western allies. It comes from the frontlines. I firmly and openly disagreed with his position on almost everything from the start, but it was important to allow for the human experiences that had brought him there. In turn, he regularly told me that he was glad I understood war, and respected my opinions based on that. I believe that trust created a space for change. We’ve come to a place where we can even laugh at ourselves, to the discomfort of the officials and uniformed officers in those meetings.
In one meeting, we discussed the need for better access to mental health services for a particular veteran whose cause I had taken up. Ron told the officials to prioritise this, they duly took notes, and we were about to end the meeting when the Minister turned to me and said, ‘You know, Golriz, I think about what you and I have been through in our lives and I wonder how we’ve come out of it okay, we’ve ended up normal.’
I looked at him and said, ‘We’re not normal! You’re obsessed with war planes and I’ve been in therapy for three years.’
We laughed far too much given the dark humour, and stood up to shake hands, still chuckling. A room full of soldiers and parliamentary advisors stood horrified, unsure whether to laugh or shuffle papers awkwardly until they could usher the meeting to a close.
In early June 2019, we got there. We have an end date to the Iraq deployment, a transformed deployment of only three civilians in Afghanistan, and climate change acknowledged for the first time as the key focus of our defence force. Of course, I can’t take credit for all that, but I do think a constructive debate helped. I also think we have a ton more to do to transform our Defence policy into something truly green. But at least I know that is something I could actually contribute to in my position.
As time goes on, I see the undeniable value of setting the agenda, even from a place of a relative lack of formal power, which is what it is to be a backbench MP with no pre-agreed portfolio wins. Activists know this so well. My job has been to bring those voices into the meeting rooms with ministers, knowing that no matter our political background, we get to face each other as equals of a sort in those meeting rooms where the public has no access, and that can be a powerful thing. Now, two years in, as I see the change mounting a little, I know my job a lot better. I know it comes with real possibility to affect change, with real responsibility. Raising a voice for prisoner voting and for political funding reform have been as important to me as the big oppositional campaigns like the TPPA and for peace. I know that my expending political capital on issues our partners in government broadly agree with but would not prioritise, that were not popular per se, and bringing those conversations to the public arena has shifted the paradigms. This has seen us restore voting rights to thousands of prisoners, seen the ban on foreign donations, seen funding of youth courts so that seventeen-year-olds can escape the brutality of adult courts and prisons. Those are issues that needed concerted and coordinated work by movements of activists, academics, commissioners, and me as a backbench MP. The job of the Green Party as I have always seen it is to keep asking for what is right, not wavering, not assuming the firm ‘no’s’ in those first meetings were ever permanent or ever needed to define our relationships in government. It will be a basis to keep pushing until the change is Green enough.
In politics, as in any field, we bring the whole of ourselves to our work. My first term in politics will always be a little defined by my health. 2018 was the year I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS). That wasn’t something I had spoken about publicly before, because, to be honest, it was an experience I could barely process for myself for a long while. Telling people you have MS means being met with terrified silence, or a truckload of questions you don’t have the answers to, or an outpouring of grief and love, which in its own way is overwhelming at times. It means reassuring people that you’re still the same person.
The other reason I was reluctant to talk about it was I didn’t feel all that entitled to speak about the MS experience until I had lived with it for a while. Do you get to talk about this illness after one attack, after two? Do you get to talk to it if your symptoms on the daily are mostly ‘just’ fatigue? Until recently, my approach was to silently push through.
In February 2018, as I was finding my feet, living between two cities and processing life as an MP, I started to lose sight in my left eye. I thought it was a fleeting annoyance and left it for a few days. By Waitangi weekend, I realised the eye ache and sight loss were becoming more acute. Guy and I were at a friend’s wedding in a remote beach town that weekend, and I didn’t think it was serious enough to leave. When the holiday was over, I saw my doctor, who told me to go immediately to hospital. I had optic neuritis — damage to my optic nerve — which the ophthalmologist gently told me was often the first symptom of MS. It was a fifty-fifty chance I had the disease.
‘Not me,’ I thought. ‘I’ll be okay.’
And so began a months-long process of tests, waiting lists, and trying hard not to google an illness I was not diagnosed with.
The diagnosis felt like a relief. The limbo had been torture. It took another six months to gain access to medication. I have learned over the year or so since then that chronic illness comes with constant battles for access to information, treatment, testing, and re-testing, as well as constant battles to be heard. There is a huge power imbalance. As a patient who knows nothing about your condition, something happening within your own body, you are reliant on professionals who are often immune to the stress you are experiencing. Another thing I learned is that nurses, unique among medics, are gods and goddesses who walk among us and should be paid their weight in gold.
For me, MS comes with fatigue, sight impairment (now fully recovered), and numbness and tingling of my feet and legs, a constant reminder that my spinal nerves bear scars — in turn a reminder that my brain does too. It means being less able to travel and sometimes less able to put in the late hours I would like to — stress and fatigue increase the risk of attacks, and hasten the permanent nerve damage.
I’ve been told from the moment of my diagnosis, by all the medical professionals involved, that this is not the illness it once was. ‘No one ends up in a wheelchair,’ they say ad nauseam. They mean to be reassuring, but it’s hard to have that much faith in medicine when it’s your brain and your spine that are affected. I wish they had told me instead, ‘It’s okay to end up in a wheelchair. You’ll still be you, and we’ll help you live better by making the world accessible, as it should be.’
I realise now that there was extraordinary stress in my life around the time of my first attack. My grandma had fallen ill in Mashhad and, over a few months, deteriorated to a point where we knew she would pass away imminently. I was closer with her than any of my other relatives in Iran, because we called her on the phone every time I was at my dad’s. She would tell me how much she loved that I travelled the world instead of having babies too young, throwing shade at my cousins. She would speak about her life with my grandad, a much older man who had died many years before. She would laugh at our family antics, at herself.
My dad was exceptionally close with his mum and deeply distressed by his separation from her at a time when she needed him. He began considering a trip home. Talking him out of this risky endeavour was difficult, especially from afar, while I was working in Wellington, but eventually I succeeded. When my grandma was finally gone, I flew home to find him in front of a small shrine made of photos, candles, and fresh flowers from his garden, trying to grieve alone. He and his sister, who was also in exile in Austria, talked through their guilt and sadness. That is a side of refugee life no one speaks much about. The fact that we can never go home has meant we have missed saying goodbye to both my grandmothers, and my mum’s older sister, who died a slow death from a brain tumour. I never knew how to fill that void for my parents, how to be for them the big close-knit families they missed.
So, we as people bring the whole of ourselves to parliament. Humanising that experience may be the key to making it effective and — for me — surviving. Having the warmth of Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson in the office next door through all this has often been my lifeline. We both have protesters for parents, and we are both from backgrounds that make us unlikely parliamentarians. Our regular MP/co-leader check-ins would often turn into late dinners at her little meeting desk, shoes kicked off, periodically bursting into laughter at the situation in which we’d found ourselves.
Leadership comes easily to Marama, because she has a genuine love for people. She connects with rooms full of people and massive crowds from behind a loudspeaker with the same unaffected warmth as she does with every baby she spots across a crowded room and runs to cradle. With that affinity for human connection comes a fierce intelligence that I think is commonly underestimated. She has an innate understanding of political issues and their broader contexts. There is little more I could ask for than to have another woman of colour sit me down and talk me through the decades of microaggressions we have both experienced and tell me straight that people like us have to work harder than anyone else in politics, be more prepared, be stronger. We have to, because we are unconsciously assumed less able, less qualified, irrational, angry, and easy to tear down. We can see the same patterns of attack and challenge experienced by our sort in politics around the world, and we learn from it.
‘But,’ she said to me, ‘it is worth it. We have to give our people what they deserve. The ones who do want us here.’
It was something to have the hard truths laid out with love. It takes the edge off the self-doubt.
The other most sustaining part of the MP experience will always be connecting with communities at the grassroots. Those who reach out most often and bring me in as their own are women, from schools and universities to the Women’s Centre with its seasoned, unshakable feminists. I also work closely with refugees and ethnic communities: Asians, Africans, and of course all manner of Middle Easterners. Walking into a room where people know who you are, or relate to something you’ve said or done, is surreal. I will never ever not feel profoundly undeserving and grateful that I get to do and say things that affect even a single stranger to the point of them giving me thanks when I first meet them. I will never not get butterflies in my stomach when that happens. It feels simultaneously like a flight response, the one that makes us turn down compliments down and flee from praise, and a warm, deep sense of gratitude.
I learned a lot about the essence of minority representation and solidarity between marginalised groups from my fellow minority Green candidates and activists during the election. Once we knew our experiences were shared, we spoke openly about the hurt and alienation, and asked questions about the origins of these experiences. Why were we, who were so different from one another as individuals, dismissed in the same ways?
Korean New Zealander Rebekah and I talked about how difficult it was to watch our parents process the abuse, mocking and derision directed at us based on our race. It was painful to see the look of utter humiliation and heartbreak on their faces at candidate meetings and when they had seen online comments, as they gently asked questions about it. They were of course proud and supportive of their children, so they tried to hide their sadness. Eventually, we tried to shield them from the abuse.
I can only really imagine space for us and our political perspectives existing within the Green movement. Although there was no one else like me when I first became active, I remembered the first time I felt seen in New Zealand politics was when this party stood against popular prejudice with wrongfully detained refugee Ahmed Zaoui. I remembered Keith Locke.
Through all the calls for Greens to ‘stick to the environment’, it is also a constant relief to know that our Charter firmly recognises the connectedness of ecological sustainability with the ‘just distribution of social and natural resources, both locally and globally’, non-violence, and appropriate decision-making. This is a movement where I have thrived precisely because the emancipation of historically marginalised groups is essential to ecological and social justice. The Charter directs that decision-making take place ‘directly at the appropriate level by those affected’. Making space for Māori, women, gender minorities, and the disabilities community has always been a commitment within our movement. We know that governance at any level is only weakened by exclusion.
In July 2019, that meant we were the only party whose MPs joined the occupation of the sacred Māori whenua Ihumātao. We joined together with land protectors against the commercial development of the land, land that had been confiscated and continued to be colonised despite its special status. We knew that this was our job, that it was what we would always do with the strong and loud support of our party because our Charter specifically upholds Te Tiriti o Waitangi and Māori as tangata whenua of our nation. Walking into the peaceful, beautiful gathering of mana whenua and so many others from around Aotearoa at Ihumātao was not the first for any of us, nor for Green MPs past. I will never forget the aesthetic juxtaposition of protectors preparing food and singing on the whenua with the endless line of uniformed officers. It looked like a photograph from a time past. This was the moment that the movement needed us most. It meant something to me, as a refugee to this land, to stand with tangata whenua.
What brought me here, and to the Green movement, was the thought of what my parents fought for and lost. I want to protect the free, equal, democratic ideal I found in Aotearoa, my homeland. I want to get Big Money out of politics because I was raised on stories of how governments and people are bought and sold for oil money, how the news serves those sponsored interests, and how everything we hold dear as a people can be yanked away if the institutions of democracy are weak.
Then there is the constitution. I hold myself to my maiden speech and the belief that our rights, including our economic and social rights, must be entrenched to protect democracy, and to finally honour the promise of Te Tiriti.
I’m often screamed down as ‘unpatriotic’ or ‘hateful’ of the nation that took me in. But to me, talking about the faults in our system and trying to fix our safety nets is my way of paying this country back for its generosity, as well honouring what so many have fought for and lost in Iran. Justice, to slightly paraphrase Dr Cornel West, is what love looks like in politics.
These are conversations I hope we can have as a nation. They are conversations that we as a government owe our people.