 Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa. First guy, first acknowledge my colleague Celia and Ambassador. Welcome, welcome to New Zealand and welcome to Aparat. And importantly also to my good friend and Mohi friend. And can I thank the Matt and the boys and O.C. for having our, one of our comatas here as part of, they're an important part of our community and Mohi, thank you very much for being here and being part of it. I'm not going to say too much because Celia's the main speaker. I know my position. What I want to say is just welcome you, not only to Aparat but to the special part of Paradise. Probably many of you sitting here wouldn't have thought that you were here with a whole lot of colleagues, new friends, thinking about the new frontiers, new ways of doing things, agriculture, climate change, technology and probably one of the most remote parts of the planet and over here in Whitemans Valley. But for us, it's one of Wellington's best kept secrets. And so can I all just welcome you all here this morning and I know that you have a, looking at the program very intensive days ahead of you but in gatherings like this, great things happen. And I know that that will be what will happen here. So again, enjoy it. I, unfortunately, can't stay all day. I'm going to go away in a minute but I'm going to come back later on this afternoon. So enjoy the occasion here amongst friends. And again, thank you very much and ambassador. Welcome to New Zealand and you're part of us now that you're here and great to have you here. Thank you. Mayor Wayne, it's a bit of a, don't often have a mayor double act like this. I might point out that he's the chair of the Economic Development Committee and I'm merely the deputy. So, you know, I have to tow the line too sometimes. Ambassador Mark, lovely to have you here and we were sort of trying to work out which of us knew least about cricket yesterday, I think. And I thought it was meant to be a boring game and I just discovered that maybe it was rather a lot of fun too. I'd like to acknowledge actually James MP. Nice to have you here as well. Any other MPs, elected members, ambassadors, lurking? Well, I'd just like to also extend my welcome because you would have probably landed in Wellington City even if you got here some other way. I'd also like to acknowledge not only the Māori first people here but the first peoples of all of the places that we have come from. My Celtic ancestry, peoples' ancestors, whether it's, I was meeting one of you today who's got Mohawk ancestry. You wouldn't know it from the haircut though, so be careful. And also I'd like to acknowledge Yosef who I got the invitation through. After all, we're all from Africa originally. So thank you for bringing us together. I think this is going to be really interesting. I didn't have the opportunity as Wayne did to come last year. So I'm just really enjoying and my tiny contribution of picking blackberries for breakfast. I hope Wellington City Council will be able to do something a little bit more substantial in helping us. They're very nice blackberries though. I was reflecting, we call ourselves a smart capital but that's meant to be an aspiration that we are smart about what we do as well as how we do it. Just on the technology front back in the 90s it was council people stringing up dark fibre in the Wellington CBD that really got a lot of things buzzing along. You wouldn't have trade me and zero and companies like that if there hadn't been CityLink and City Council doing things that were somewhat surprising to the rule makers, shall I say. And that's what we need to do. We need to do surprising things and adapt the rules to suit the survival of the planet and ourselves so that there's more than just cockroaches that live here. That would be really, really good. I wasn't referring to anyone. Honest. Some of the smart things that happen these days WebStock, Dev Academy, Summer of Tech, AnimFX, there are some extraordinary things happening where in the UK you might gather the accent I have nothing to do with the English cricket team. I was born in London and I have nothing to do with the English cricket team. They have nothing to do with me now I got the captain's name wrong. In the UK, a city of 200,000 or even if you take the whole region's numbers, 480,000 it would be unlikely to have something as special as the high tech, innovative sort of ecosystem that we've got in Wellington and part of it is what we often consider our problem where we're quite isolated. But if you put a group of really interesting people together in a marvellous place some extraordinary things happen and I think this, I'd see this as new connections almost not new frontiers. And council can only do so much or the rate payers begin to squeak a little but we have supported a number of those initiatives we've supported Inspiral behind Dev Academy. We've got Lumio actually being used by some of the council groups and so on a little bit and we really, without technology there are so many things we couldn't do. One of my favourite organisations that started in Wellington went on to win National Community Awards is Kaibosh. They collect, their idea is zero hunger, zero food waste and they connect all of these great little cafes and supermarkets and food producers. At the end of the day this food that would be going to the landfill or at best compost and they make sure that it goes to food banks and people who are hungry and all sorts of things so it works out really, really well but they couldn't connect all that and the food would have got off a long time ago if they tried to write each other letters wouldn't it? So you know there's some really different stuff happening and I hope you'll make lots of new connections and I just wanted to reflect finally on the connections between the Wellington area and San Francisco and apart from Earthquakes, Resilience pretty socially liberal areas biking around the harbour there's a whole lot of things that connect us as well as perhaps sometimes the more obvious IT and film Wellington City is working quite hard towards the formal relationship with San Francisco there's certain criteria we have to satisfy before we become a sister city I met Ed Lee and I'm going over there again in July so hopefully if there's anyone from San Francisco or you've got great connections you can email me Mayor at WCC so I'd really like to hear from you and I'd love to hear, I'll say for a little bit today to hear what comes out of this all by the end of the six days that you're all together it sounds pretty inspiring from the people I've met so far so thank you for having me here and I look forward to listening Kia ora Mohe's kindly offered to join me in the wire to Ehara Iteme Ehara Iteme Reba Reba Tenakouto Not bad for POM