 Kia ora, Tato. I was introduced to one of the guests here. Well, apparently I'd been introduced before I got here by Matthew, and when I met her, she said, oh, you're the resident rabble rouser. So that's my preferred title today, the resident rabble rouser. And I'm here to talk about social change in New Zealand, and I'm going to use as a framework for that, something called Te Ratangata, which is a project we've been working on at Action Station over the past year, and it is a people's agenda for Aotearoa, New Zealand. A crowdsourced vision for the future of our country, the values that we need to commit to in order to achieve that vision and some of the policies and pathways that could get us there. Now, to be really clear, it is a people's agenda, it is not the people's agenda, and we'll talk a little bit more about who's agenda this is, and who's agenda it is not. But let's also first talk about why. Why did we do this? So for the past three years, this movement called Action Station has been growing. Three years ago, we launched not long before the last election. We were a very small community. I think our mailing list had less than 2,000 people on it of pretty committed people who had seen the growing power around the world of digitally connected movements of citizens who shared certain core values and who had decided to reclaim their political power outside of the parliamentary political party system as citizens and to take action together in collective ways to hold traditional sources of power to account and to ensure that they were acting in the interest of everyday people and the planet that we love. But over the course of the past three years, we've spent a lot of our time and energy resisting what appeared to us to be harmful change. And although that's important work and there will always need to be people willing to stand in the place of resistance, we felt a real uprising in our movement in our community of a desire to move from resisting into reimagining and rebuilding and saying what is the future we do want? What would it look like and how do we build that together? Secondly, we could see that it was time to re-shift the boundaries of what's possible. And in particular we mean the boundaries of what's politically possible in this country. There's something that we see in political discourse which is there's a kind of an acceptable window within which the policies that fall within that window you're allowed to talk about them in the political sphere and be taken seriously. And things that fall outside of that window it's very hard for politicians to take up those topics without being discredited. So that's the role of us as a people's movement is to find ways to shift that window and to create more space for conversations about what's possible. And finally we wanted to rewrite the rules. Politics in New Zealand has for too long been the domain of the few and we want to recreate a politics of the many. We have many many many people in this country feel politically powerful, politically motivated and connected in a way that they get engaged. So that's the why. The next question is the who. Whose people's agenda is this? So just to reiterate we have called it a people's agenda for Aotearoa New Zealand we are not claiming it to be the agenda. About 400,000 New Zealanders have participated in actions together with us over the past three years. So it's a fairly sizeable community of interests we've been learning from, talking to, listening to and drawing from. About 50,000 people participated in a series of surveys over the course of the past three years identifying priorities, what issues did they want to see the most progress on in New Zealand and how did they want to see that progress. We are a relatively broad tent. We know that we have members of the Action Station community who vote right across the political spectrum and people who choose not to vote. So there's a fairly broad tent but there are certain core values that as a movement we've kind of, that we've committed to. So we are committed for example to a future in which Te Tiriti o Waitangi is restored to a place of honour in New Zealand. We're committed to a future of decolonisation and indigenisation of culture in New Zealand. We're committed to a transparent and accountable democracy. That's a given within the Kawanatinga Sphere at least. We're committed to human rights so you can't come to us with a campaign proposal that would diminish somebody else's rights. We're committed to economic fairness and we're committed to a flourishing planet where life, all forms of life can live well. So that's what we're committed to. This is the agenda of that community of people in New Zealand. We don't claim to speak for everybody but there's a lot of really hopeful people who've had to say. How did we develop the agenda? So we took all of those like 50,000 responses to surveys. We came up with a structured conversation plan, sort of a map for how to talk about those issues that was completely driven by stories. So we worked to come up with stories on a range of issues and then people hosted dinners all around New Zealand and those dinners, some of them took place in beautiful, well-appointed family homes. Some of them took place in student flats. Some of them took place in McDonald's and Gisborne. They didn't send us a photo, which I was really sad about because I was like, I want a photo of that one. And they came together and they talked about the values that they shared, the vision that they held for the future of New Zealand and how they thought we might be able to get there. And they did that, as I say, in the context of grounded stories that represented real experiences that people in New Zealand were having today. So why did we concentrate first on values? Firstly, this is something that we have learnt from tikanga Māori, that if we don't start our conversation by grounding it in the values that we share, then even a really technically sound solution that isn't aligned with those values is taking us to a place that isn't the place we thought we wanted to go to. So we need to know what our values are and then we can go back and say, is this policy or pathway truly aligned with those values? But having a conversation about values also gives us a place to find common ground to start from and a place from which to act together. And so this was a quote that somebody found... I think they found it kind of really refreshing to start the conversation from values or from solutions. So we used a process that drew on research that has been done by researchers around the world, around global values, and we used a technique, a discussion-based technique to have people talk about which of those values they thought were most important to replace at the centre of government decision-making and public life. So this wasn't saying, what are the values we need to put at the heart of our family life? That's a really important conversation, but it wasn't the question we asked. So if you know that we asked people, what do you think are the values that need to be put at the absolute heart of government decision-making to get us to where you want our country to be by 2040? What are the values that you think people might have put emphasis on? Fiscal responsibility maybe? Or innovation? The first one was Aroha. People want decisions in our country by our government to be grounded in a principle of love and compassion for all people and without discrimination. So that opens up a really new way of acting as government in relation to people in our country. The second one on this is Kaitiakitanga, which one way of expressing that is custodianship, the care and responsibility that we take for taonga, the things that we treasure, that includes our culture, our language, our people and nature. And this was very, very important to almost everybody who took part in this discussion and it was one of the most commonly prioritised values in the survey. And they want that to be at the absolute heart of government decision-making. The next was Unsurprisingly Equality and Fairness. These are values that are held very dear to the culture, sort of dominant culture in New Zealand. And we expressed it in the survey as that equality together with fairness recognises different starting points and pathways to enjoying the same rights and freedoms. So this covered off not just ensuring that people have an equal right to live freely in our country, whatever their differences, but also that they have access to the core essential services they need to live a life of equal dignity and creativity. Manaki taonga, which was expressed in the survey as hospitality, kindness, respect, generosity and care for others without expecting anything in return. And this is one that we had really, really beautiful and exciting conversations about what would government policy look like if this was actually how we approached people through the Ministry of Social Development or if in our justice, in our criminal justice system. And we discovered that New Zealanders have a real appetite for more compassion, more care and more generosity. And finally, but certainly not least, and there were many more values that were prioritised by people, so these are not the only values that matter to people, these are the ones that were most commonly selected as being of importance. And this was community and belonging to given us with the purpose of mutual care, support and creative enhancement. And so this was one of the other major themes that emerged from these conversations is that people wanted to be dealt with less as individuals and more as collectives and communities. They wanted to think about life in New Zealand, less in an individualistic way and more in a connected community way. So those were the values that were prioritised and then from those values, people were asked to talk about how would New Zealand look different in 2040 if these values were really at the heart of how government was making its decisions. And from that process, we ended up with nine vision statements. And at the top of that was honouring to Te Tiriti o Waitangi, inclusive and diverse community and equality and fairness. So honouring to Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the vision statement that emerged from those conversations encompassed not just the transformation of our institutions in this country in a way that would fully honour Te Tiriti o Waitangi but also ensuring that every person in New Zealand actually understands what that means for them in this country in a way that they also understand our history and I think there's a growing appetite, particularly amongst young people to have a better understanding of both the pre-colonial and colonial history of New Zealand and that that would enable people to participate actively in the process of decolonisation in New Zealand. Inclusive communities, I won't say too much about that, it's important but in the equality and fairness there was a really strong emphasis on ensuring that people had access to housing as a kind of housing first model. And then the three of the other big values were shared power and it was kind of exciting to hear the talk about blockchain because there's sort of so many incredible opportunities to distribute and share power and this is something people have identified as a top priority if we're going to get to the place we want to be in this country by 2014 we can't have as much power being held by so few people over so many others. So more distributed power and the other one was justice for all and this is my personal passion so I'm throwing it in here that my vision for 2040 is that we don't have any prisons anymore we have a few, you know maybe secure wellness centres but no prisons decarcerisation decarceration has got to be a priority if we're going to honour the te te te te te waitangi in New Zealand but there was a lot of support for that and what we found is that when you gave people a story of a young person in our justice system their response to that story was compassion whereas their response to a news item about somebody committing a crime is often fear and so there's a real opportunity there for that to happen and then finally and certainly not least people want flourishing planet and what they want is for all forms of life and the future flourishing of all forms of life to be at the heart of Government decision making and that was the vision statement that people prioritised so what was interesting to us is that we sent these vision statements out to all the political parties there were nine of them in total and we asked them to signal how much they agreed or disagreed with each vision statement ACT didn't respond to the survey but every other political party that was running candidates in this election responded and all of them either agreed or strongly agreed with all of the vision statements so exactly so if that is true and I choose to take them at their word because it gives me a basis from which to hold them accountable if it is true that every political party in New Zealand either strongly or it agrees or strongly agrees with all those vision statements why for 30 years for the past 30 years at least because that's how long I've been really engaged in this work have governments of various colours and stripes failed so completely to reduce inequality and poverty in this country why have they failed to prevent the pollution and degradation of our natural taonga if they say that they are strongly in agreement that that should be a priority there's many different possible answers to that the most cynical one is that they actually don't agree with those visions and they just filled out the survey and said let's tell Action Station members we think that and see if they'll vote for us but the less cynical version is they do agree but they're stuck in an old story about how you manage a country for economic growth and so what we need the next step I believe is to reclaim the space that has been stolen from us that the emphasis for so many generations in this country on privatisation on individualisation on competition corporation even quite frankly on social enterprise over social community and on social investment over social connection and care we have to reclaim that space we have to say we are not going to allow you to define the limits of what government care is in this realm of fiscal responsibility we're going to say these are the values that we hold we want you to hold them and together we're calling on the government opening up the window to them and saying it's okay to say we're going to actually ground our social policies and love and generosity and manaki tanga and paka whanauunga tanga we're going to shut down prisons they need to know that people of New Zealand are ready for that and that we want it and that what we're asking for is more community more care more connection, more creativity and more compassion from our government and so that's where social change is going to be coming from in the next 10, 20, 30 years will be in refusing to let those ideas of competition privatisation and market driven notions of who we are as humans take precedence over what we actually all know and what we discover when we sit together around a dinner table which is that that's not what we care about most and that's not really how we believe change happens so that's where action stations going for the next 3 years if you want to be with us come along and I just absolutely have to thank and acknowledge the photographers who provide us with the beautiful images there so thanks for your time