Parliamentary Dinner

May I begin by greeting everyone in the languages of the realm of New Zealand - English, Maori, Cook Island Maori, Niuean, Tokelauan and New Zealand Sign Language. Greetings, Kia Ora, Kia Orana, Fakalofa Lahi Atu, Taloha Ni and as it is the evening (Sign). 

May I specifically greet you, Speaker of the House, Hon Margaret Wilson; Members of the Executive Council; Members of Parliament; Distinguished Guests otherwise; ladies and gentlemen.

It is with great pleasure that my wife Susan and I welcome you to Government House, and to the Parliamentary Dinner.  Being well aware of how hard Members of Parliament work on behalf of the people of New Zealand; it is pleasing to take an opportunity to acknowledge the contribution of members on all sides of the House of Representatives.

Tonight's event is of course enhanced by the presence of Parliamentary husbands, wives and partners - individuals who make their own sacrifices in the name of democracy, service, and the willingness of those they love, to enter into public life.  You too have our appreciation and empathy. 

As host, I represent our Sovereign, Queen Elizabeth, whose portrait as a young woman hangs on the wall at the front of this room (to my left).  So too does the portrait (in front of me) of Queen Victoria who was on the British throne at the time when the Treaty of Waitangi, the founding document of government in New Zealand, was signed.

Their constitutional relationships with the Prime Ministers and governments of the United Kingdom provide the model and the context for the part a Governor-General plays in relation to the government of New Zealand.  With an election due this year, it is probably appropriate to say something of my role in this process.

As people here will know, following a general election here, the Governor-General always appoints as Prime Minister, the individual who has been identified through the government formation process, as the person who will lead the party, or group of parties, that appears able to command the confidence of the House of Representatives. 

Appointments are made in the light of clear and public statements that a political agreement has been reached and that a government can be formed that will have the support of the new Parliament. 

I might add that the need to command a majority in the House is the same as it was in the period before 1996 when elections were held under first-past-the-post.  My predecessor in office, Sir Michael Hardie Boys, who was the first Governor-General to deal with government formation under MMP, made it clear that, while the electoral system had changed the respective roles of the Governor-General and the leaders of the political parties in Parliament have not. 

In appointing the Prime Minister, then, Governors-General always abide by the outcome of the political process.  In undertaking subsequent constitutional duties, we work with whomever the citizens of this country have identified as their preferred Government, acting on the advice of the Prime Minister and other Ministers of the Crown, signing on their recommendation those Orders in Council that are required to give effect to the Government's decisions.

As Queen Elizabeth does with Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom, I regularly discuss matters with my Prime Minister - though I have nothing like the advantage of experience available to the Queen.  She has reigned during the terms of eleven Prime Ministers, from the Rt Hon Sir Winston Churchill in the early 1950s, to the current incumbent, Rt Hon Gordon Brown.

With respect to her relationship with all of them she has been wise, responsible, and responsive - and she has been so, regardless of their political persuasion. 

Her great great grandmother, Queen Victoria, was somewhat less politically inscrutable.  Early in her reign which began in 1837 she had grown very close to her first Prime Minister, the Whig, Lord Melbourne.  The English historian Christopher Hibbert tells us that, 'at the beginning of 1839 she heard the alarming news that Melbourne's government, facing defeat on a colonial issue in the House of Commons, would have to resign.  The Duke of Wellington was shocked by her tearful distress at the prospect of having to deal with Tories, which were one of the things, she said, like insects and turtle soup, she hated most in all the world'.

Later, of course, she famously said of the Liberal, William Gladstone, that he addressed her as though she were a public meeting.  She was very much fonder of the Conservative Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli.  Christopher Hibbert says that, 'from the beginning Disraeli set out to flatter her with an infallible instinct for the phrase, the gesture, the compliment, the overture that would most delight her'.

Let me hasten to reassure everyone that, speaking for myself, I am quite sufficiently and amply delighted by the gestures and the compliments paid to me by our own Prime Minister and indeed by Members of Parliament from all parties represented in Parliament.

I am genuinely pleased, too, to be meeting everyone this evening, in convivial celebration of our Parliamentary system.  But none of us is unconscious of the fact that the next few months will see the robust exchanges of the election period.  Since the beginning of our electoral history, such exchanges have been part of the way we conduct our democracy. 

We are in fact just a few days beyond the 155^th anniversary of New Zealand's first Parliamentary election.  Let me more accurately say the anniversary of the beginning of the election. Though the process of voting began, in the Bay of Islands, on 14 July 1853, it did not end for two and half months.  Elections were organised locally at that time, and staggered, so that final votes were not cast in Otago until early October. 

I note as an aside, and without further commentary, that according to historian John Martin the first bill passed by the new Parliament in 1854 'was the 'Bellamy's Bill', the Licensing Amendment Act, that permitted the sale of alcohol within Parliament; MPs even suspended standing orders to do it.'

Notwithstanding that we might in our own time lack the pressing legislative imperatives of the 1850s, we do conduct elections, and arrive at outcomes, rather more quickly today.

But the period leading up to an election is of course a time for both voters and candidates to think long and carefully about what is sought and what is said; about what commitments are made or unmade, what accomplishments are held up, what gauntlets are laid down.

Decisions as to how the debates of the coming months are framed and conducted are very much yours to make.  My respectful suggestion is simply in doing so that you live up to the promise of the nation created by the signing of the Treaty thirteen years before that first election.  May you, Ladies and Gentlemen, honour the achievements and the potential of the vibrant and diverse country which you serve today.

On that note, I will close in New Zealand's first language, Maori, by offering greetings and wishing everyone good health and fortitude in your endeavours. No reira, tena koutou, tena koutou, kia ora, kia kaha, tena koutou katoa.