 So your Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Pacific Night 2014. Now who here is warm? It's kind of warm in this place here, so I'm not going to be standing around for too long. So you've seen me and my friends, my colleagues of Hoa Tawhiti, I'll just share a few songs with you from up there where you've lived and we look forward to sharing some more stuff with you during the night. My name is Ata, I'm part of the degree Hoa Tawhiti and I'm also serving as the US Chancellor this evening. So this evening Pacific Night is hosted each year by the ambassadors and the representatives of the countries and states of the Pacific Island Forum, the US Pacific Territories and the National Areas. I'd now like to call upon the Dean of the Pacific Diplomatic called the Ambassador of Palau. He's an Excellency who will often feel welcome in your room. Thank you very much and good evening everyone. The Ambassador of New Zealand said, you don't want to have the men's stand, you don't want to stand between the men and the spoon, so I'm going to make this very brief. On behalf of the Ambassador of Washington, our primary good representative in New York and the other Territories representatives, welcome to this year's Pacific Day reception. All of you who are here earlier had an opportunity to hear the panel and so here the President of the very family of Palau and the foreign minister of the Marshall Islands, the foreign minister of the very state of my nation. This one runs represent here and take them for coming here this evening. As you all know, Pacific Night is happening here about this time of the year and really this is the Pacific way of taking our friends to Washington and New York who devote their time towards the Pacific issues. I really don't have time to go over their names but you know who you are. We thank you very much. It is also a way of giving back to this great city of Washington for graciously hosting us. It is also our way of bringing Pacific Islands to you. It's not every day that you get to live and visit 20 islands in the Pacific. So relax and enjoy the show and be and make the riches other and enjoy the Pacific ring. Thank you very much. I think we have a giant coming to give us some words. So at this time ladies and gentlemen it's my privilege to welcome to Pacific Night 2014 the United States Secretary of State Mr John Kerry. Well good evening everybody. How are you all? Everybody good? What a fantastic evening and it's a great, great pleasure for me to be able to come over here and share Pacific Day. Tonight we celebrate obviously or this evening I guess I can still say the critical relationship that unites all of the nations of the Pacific and believe me in the last few days at our conference we've seen the power of how united the Pacific region is. So we thank you because these partnerships were born out of a world that put us together geographically because we border on the Pacific but it has also put us together because we have weathered wars and we have developed together and built a shared prosperity. So I want to thank Palau's ambassador Hercie Keota who invited me to come and speak and I particularly want to thank New Zealand's ambassador Michael Moore for hosting us. I think we all want to join together and say thank you for joining us. I want to recognize New Zealand's Prime Minister who is here. He's hiding over here right here. John Keeney, thank you so much Mr Prime Minister. It's an honor to be here. I'm going to be meeting with him tomorrow where we can discuss some of the issues that we'll talk about here. I also am honored to be here with the President of Palau, Tommy Rengansaw. We also met, we had a wonderful opportunity to talk about the post-aditions but most importantly the way in which island nations are deeply threatened by climate change, rising sea levels, acidification over fishing and all of these were the topics of the conference that we just had in the last few days. I want to just emphasize to everybody America thinks of itself as a Pacific nation and is a Pacific nation probably. We don't just border it and have an extraordinary coastline framing the Pacific but we have been in the Pacific and in its far reaches for centuries. We also obviously went through an extraordinarily difficult period during World War II. We should have a lot of blood in the Pacific and for it hard for the ability of Pacific nations to be free to determine their own future and certainly to be able to associate, come together to protect the freedom of navigation, the freedom of commerce and our rights as human beings and one of those rights is the right to be free from pollution that literally threatens nations. That is why President Obama made the strategic decision in the first term to do what has become known as a rebalance or pivot but I prefer a rebalance because pivot implies you're somehow turning away from something else and we're not but we're rebalancing so that we make certain that people in the Pacific understand our commitment and can rely in the presence of the United States with respect to many of those issues that I just talked about. President Obama is absolutely committed to make certain that everybody understands this rebalance is not a passing fancy it's not a momentary thing and in fact it has grown we recently renegotiated a long term defense pact with Japan we have reaffirmed our relationship with South Korea we have obviously with ASEAN our presence in Southeast Asia as well as throughout the islands and the nations southwards to New Zealand and Australia we have strengthened our presence there and we are continuing and we will continue I can guarantee you to work to impress on people the values that bring us together don't belong to one country they don't belong to one nation I would tell you that I think they are genuinely universal values and they certainly don't belong to any ideology there are a huge number of issues that Pacific nations have to wrestle with as a community now and we all have a stake in regional stability and security the right to choose one's own government as I said we believe is a birthright economic growth is imperative for all of us but one thing above all looms as a threat literally to existence and that is the connective tissue that holds that connects all of us with respect to the environment and our responsibility to the ocean itself we just had two days of a conference in which speaker after speaker film after film expert after expert scientist after scientist documented the degree to which we mankind are threatening ourselves as a consequence of the amount of carbon dioxide we are releasing into the atmosphere as a result of too much money chasing too few fish as a result of the devastating impact of pollution runoff from development that streams out of rivers and down into the oceans and we have over 500 dead zones and we can unfortunately boast the big one in the Gulf of Mexico where coming out of the Mississippi river from the various rivers that feed into it along the way all the way from the northern part of our country down into the south we have runoff from agriculture which overloads nitrates which kills the ecosystem this is happening unfortunately everywhere the numbers of birds and fish that are found in biting plastic which has a 450 year life therefore obviously a killer for many foul and fish we face extraordinary challenge to our fishing stocks almost everywhere some depleted, some stocks so low that they're almost extinct and in some places fisheries that are fished to the level that they're near the possibility of collapse so all of what I've just said is obviously an enormous challenge and probably some of you could walk away and say, boy, I hate to hear all those facts because I don't know what I can do about it well the problem is solvable what is shocking to me and I think to many of us who are engaged in this effort is the fact that it's not something we can't do something about the solutions are staring us in the face there's a solution to climate change which we have to embrace rapidly because of the rate and pace at which coal-fired power plants are still being built the solution is energy policy and we have brave innovators and entrepreneurs around the cutting edge of producing alternative and renewable capacity to produce the energy that we need whether it's solar or wind or biomass or other forms or even some people say God cares the thought because of what happened in Japan but if you don't build on an earthquake fault and right next to the ocean nuclear does have the ability as we've seen in so many places from France to the United States Navy where we haven't lost one sailor who are in 70 years of the use of nuclear power or have one accident on a ship it is because it is zero emissions one of the alternatives we're going to have to use and I'm confident that our scientists as we do will find the ways to create a fuel cycle that is unified and we can deal with the waste and clearly we have safer and greater capacity in fourth generation modular units so the solutions are there and I just want to leave you with just one thought big thought about this which is what excites me and why I'm dying away at this we've got to move rapidly if we're going to save some of those islands we have to be able to turn this around and that means we're going to have to embrace very forward leaning policies very quickly next year in Paris in December we will meet all of our nations in the world in order to try to set targets in order to be able to do what I just talked about but let me just tell you something we could produce we're not about to but we could produce three times the entire electricity needs in the United States of America well into the future from 100 square miles down in New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona region you could do it if you decided to we could do solar thermal we could do other things but we have to build the infrastructure between these 90 days and that is true all around the world where people have yet to embrace the simplest forms of energy efficiency where we could be making a different set of choices about how you price carbon and what you do the bottom line is this the marketplace that made America richer than it ever imagined in the 1990s was a one trillion dollar market with four with what one billion users one to one one trillion dollars market every single income earner in America every quintile of our percentage of tax payers from the bottom 20% to the top saw their incomes go up during the course of the 1990s we created more wealth in America because of one sector of our economy the technology sector that boomed and it provided goods to those one billion people and became a one trillion dollar market well guess what the energy market that I am talking about today as you look at it is a six trillion dollar market with four to five billion users and it's going to go up to nine billion users by 2050 it's the mother of all markets it's the greatest opportunity to build infrastructure build power plants that are clean build windmills, build alternatives to have a whole new restructuring of the goods and services that are provided to people that provide the energy of the world and given the fact that almost half of the world still lives on about two dollars a day a huge percentage on one dollar a day the capacity for this development to change lives save lives, reduce conflict have an impact on security change our ability to dream about a different kind of future is absolutely extraordinary so you know it's a beautiful evening you came here to have fun I don't want to go on and on tonight but I'm just telling you there is a solution staring us in the face and the Pacific region the Pacific Islands can help to underscore to people what is really at stake it's called life itself and the irony, the horrible fact is those nations most threatened are those nations least contributing to this problem so the developed world has an obligation to make this happen and I look forward to working with our Kiwri friends and others and all of the Pacific Islands we're going to get this job done thank you for Pacific Day thank you very much thank you very much Mr Secretary and from New Zealand we say Kia ora and talking about New Zealand please everybody can we also a big warm Kia ora and give us a round of applause to please welcome the Prime Minister of New Zealand the right Honourable John King All Pacific greetings to everyone here this evening can I say what a privilege it is to be here tonight in Washington to celebrate Pacific Day firstly can I begin by acknowledging Secretary Kerry can we thank you sir for your remarkable leadership around the world your global leadership in countries from Ukraine to Iraq from Afghanistan to the Middle East your leadership and President Obama's leadership and the leadership of the United States is working hard to make the world a safer place and we acknowledge all great things that you do and we look forward to our discussions over the next couple of days I'd like to also pay tribute to our Ambassador Mike Moore and the team here in Washington who work very hard to represent New Zealand's interests here in the United States and thank them for all the things that they do the Secretary made of course absolutely the right point there are lots of challenges in the Pacific but also lots of opportunities it's a part of the world that the United States and New Zealand know well we have a shared history together and there are many initiatives that we work on together when I Prime Minister at the end of 2008 one of the core decisions that the Government made was that we reorientated its aid towards the Pacific and now half of all of New Zealand's aid goes to the Pacific Islands the reason for that was because the Pacific is family to New Zealand if you look at Auckland that is the largest Pacific city in the world last week I was in Samoa and Tonga and Nui so just to give you a little sense of what those numbers look like when we went to the rock in Nui there are roughly 1500 Nuians living on the rock there are 23,000 Nuians living in Auckland and around New Zealand when we went to Samoa there's about 180,000 Samoans in Samoa and around 1,000 New Zealanders of Samoa and ethnicity so New Zealand understands the Pacific well and it has a very deep history and a great affection of the people of the Pacific the Secretary made absolutely the right point that some of the issues in the Pacific are both easy to identify and present great opportunity last year New Zealand was very pleased to be able to lead a conference of renewable energy and as a result of that conference over $600 million was pledged to initiatives of renewable energy many of which will be rolled out in the Pacific to give you one example we are instrumental in helping fund the UN conference for SIDS in Samoa and the facilities that are being used are the facilities that the old Pacific games were held and so as part of that the roof of the stadium and the various gyms there have been covered in solar panels to ensure that the conference is fully renewable and in fact there's a renewable source of energy in Tonga a number of initiatives that we've undertaken will see that country go from having 0% of its energy coming from renewable sources to 30% and that is of great economic advantage to the people of the Pacific but also is a great way of them demonstrating themselves that even for some of the smallest countries in the world they are making sure that they are doing everything they can to reduce their carbon footprint so there's a lot to be done around economic development we know the areas of fishing and others are critically important and again we'll continue to work with the United States on those areas and areas of aid development you've come to see the entertainment and to enjoy the warmth of the Pacific so I'm not going to speak too long but I just want to make two final points if I can the first of them is that New Zealand's had a long history of sending people to the United States for education at some of the Ivy League universities here in the US we've been doing that since 1922 and many of them have been funded under a program called Parkness so for some time now it's been a little dormant and we haven't been sending people to the US but under the leadership of the Chief Executive of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Andrew Kibblewhite who's with me on this trip we have gone away to the other departments to tell them we think it's a great idea for them to give us some seed capital and as a result of that they've found a few million dollars we're putting into a capital fund and starting next year we intend to ensure that the Parkness Foundation is alive and well and sending two people to the United States every year to attend the Ivy League universities that you have from Harvard through the MIT from Berkeley to Stamford and to Yale one of those will at least come from the public service and you're probably aware that very recently we announced an ambassador for economic development for the Pacific Wayne Jones who is a former member of Parliament shamed himself when he's part of the Parkness Foundation and studied at Harvard University at the Kennedy School of Government so at least one will come from the public service and another one will come from almost certainly the private sector so it's a great way of continuing out our links with the very impressive levels of higher education here in the United States and lastly can I just say that we've been in New York New Zealand's working very hard to get its base on the Security Council for 2015-16 for a vote that will take place obviously in October of this year we're up against very strong competition in the form of Turkey and Spain but in the course of the last 48 hours we've had some incredibly productive meetings met with a variety of different groups and I think New Zealand is a small country but a country with an independent foreign policy is a proud voice a consistent history and one that stands up for what is right is the right sort of country to elect to the Security Council we were last on the Council in 1993-1994 and I think it overstakes things to say that it was New Zealand that argued very strongly for the people of Rwanda and Somalia and it was New Zealand that helped ensure that action was taken for those people so this is an important trip for us we're looking forward to our time over the next 48 hours we've got a pretty busy schedule and finished obviously with an opportunity to see the President in the Oval Office on Friday afternoon so that's enough for me tonight make sure you enjoy the festivities and the evening we have been remarking as we've been in New York about the ability of teens in the World Cup of what you Mr Secretary have won and we're in New Zealand and not so at least that hasn't been a point of contention working against us as we've been looking for places on the Security Council we're not offending anyone with our performance in the World Cup because we're not there but come down and see us in 2015 for the theme for the Game of Cricket and we'll be doing that and of course we are the home of Rugby World Cup and come 2015 in London, England you can be sure those mighty Orblacks we'll be there reforming as indeed will the great nations of the Pacific from Samoa to Tonga the countries that set New Zealand a light with great fans and great atmosphere for the most of the World Cup in 2011 Ladies and gentlemen have a great evening Thanks for joining me