[Maori]
Madam President, Mr. Secretary-General, friends in the global community, my opening remarks were in Maori the language of the indigenous people of our te reo New Zealand. As is tradition, I acknowledge those who are here, why we are here, and the importance of our work. It seems a fitting place to stand. I'm struck as a leader attending my first United Nations General Assembly by the power and the potential that resides here, but in New Zealand we have always been acutely aware of that.
We are a remote nation at the bottom of the South Pacific. Our nearest neighbors take three hours to reach by plane and anywhere that takes less than 12 hours is considered close. I have no doubt though that our geographic isolation has contributed to our values. We are a self-deprecating people. We're not ones for status. We'll celebrate the local person who volunteers at this Sports Club as much as we will celebrate the successful entrepreneur. Our empathy and strong sense of justice is matched only by our pragmatism. We are after all a country made up of two main islands, one simply named North and the other South.
For all of that our isolation has not made us insular. In fact, our engagement with the world has helped shape who we are. I am a child of the 80s, a period in New Zealand's history where we didn't just observe international events, we challenged them. Whether it was apartheid in South Africa or nuclear testing in the Pacific, I grew up learning about my country and who we were by the way that we reacted to international events. Whether it was taking to the streets or changing our laws, we have seen ourselves as members of a community and one that we have a duty to use our voice within.
I am an incredibly proud New Zealander, but much of that pride has come from being a strong and active member of our international community not in spite of it. In the heart of that international community has been this place, emerging from a catastrophic war we have collectively established through convention, charters, and rules, a set of international norms and human rights. All of these are an acknowledgment that we are not isolated, governments do have obligations to their people and each other, and that our actions have a global effect.
In 1945 New Zealand Prime Minister Peter Fraser said that the UN Charter offered perhaps a last opportunity to work in unison to realize the hope in the hearts of all of us, for a peace that would be real lasting and worthy of human dignity. But none of these founding principles should be consigned to the history books. In fact, given the challenges we face today and how truly global they are in their nature and impact, the need for collective action and multilateralism has never been clearer. And yet for all of that, the debate and dialogue we hear globally is not centered on the relevance and importance of our international institutions. Instead we find ourselves having to defend their very existence. That surely leaves us all with the question how did we get here and how do we get out?
Now if anything unites us politically in this place right now it is this: globalization has had a massive impact on our nations and the people we serve. Now while their impact has been positive for many, for others it has not. The transition our economies have made has also been jarring and the consequences harsh, and so amongst unprecedented global economic growth, we have still seen a growing sense of isolation, dislocation, and a sense of insecurity in the erosion of hope.
Now as politicians and governments we all have choices in how we respond to these challenges. We can use the environment to blame nameless, faceless other, to feed the sense of insecurity, to retreat into greater levels of isolationism, or we can acknowledge the problems we have and we can seek to fix them. In New Zealand, going it alone is not an option. Aside from our history as a trading nation and proudly so, but we even without those founding principles there are not just questions of nationhood to consider, there are generational demands upon us too. It should hardly come as a surprise that we have seen a global trend of young people showing dissatisfaction with our political systems and calling on us to do things differently. Why wouldn't they when they themselves have had to adapt so rapidly to a changing world.
Within a few short decades we now have a generation who will grow up more connected than ever before. Digital transformation will determine whether the jobs they are training for will even exist in two decades. In education or the job market, they won't just compete with their neighbor but their neighboring country. This generation is a borderless one, at least in a virtual sense, one that increasingly sees themselves as global citizens, and as their reality changes they expect that ours will too, that we'll see and understand our collective impact and that we will change the way that we use our power. And if we're looking for an example of where the next generation is calling on us to make that change, we need look no further than climate change.
Two weeks ago Pacific island leaders gathered together at the Pacific Islands Forum. It was at this meeting on the small island nation of Nauru that climate change was declared to be the single biggest threat to security in the Pacific. Please just think about that for a moment. Of all of the challenges we debate and discuss, rising sea levels present the single biggest threat to our region. For those who live in the South Pacific the impacts of climate change are not academic or even arguable. They are watching the sea levels rise, the extreme weather events increase, and the impact on their water supply and food crops. Now we can talk all we like about the science and what it means, what temperature rises we need to limit in order to survive, but there is a grinding reality in hearing someone from a Pacific Island talk about where the sea was when they were a child and the potential loss of their entire village as an adult.
Our action in the wake of this global challenge remains optional, but the impact of inaction does not. Nations like Tuvalu, the Marshall Islands, or Kiribas, small countries who have contributed the least to global climate change are and will suffer the full force of a warming planet. If my Pacific neighbors do not have the option of opting out of the effects of climate change, why should we be able to opt out of taking action to stop it? Any disintegration of multilateralism, any undermining of climate related targets and agreements, and interesting footnotes in geopolitical history. They are catastrophic.
In New Zealand we are determined to play our part. We will not issue any further offshore oil and gas exploration permits, we have set a goal of a hundred percent renewable energy generation by 2035, established a green infrastructure fund to encourage innovation and rolled out an initiative to plant 1 billion trees over the next 10 years. These plans are unashamedly ambitious. The threat climate change poses demands it, but we only represent less than 0.2% of global emissions. That's why as a global community, not since the inception of the United Nations, has there been a greater example of the importance of collective action and multilateralism than climate change.
It should be a rallying cry to all of us, and yet there is a hesitancy that we can ill afford, a calculation of personal cost of self-interest, but this is not the only challenge where domestic self-interest is the first response and where an international or collective approach has been diluted at best or rejected at worse. But it would be both unfair and naive to argue that retreating to our own borders and interests has meant turning our backs on a perfect system. The international institutions we have committed ourselves to have not been perfect, but they can be fixed, and that is why the challenge I wish to issue today is this: together we must rebuild and recommit to multilateralism. We must redouble our efforts to work as a global community. We must rediscover our shared belief in the value rather than the harm of connectedness. We must demonstrate that collective international action not only works, but it is in the best interests of all of us. We must show the next generation that we are listening and that we have heard them.
But if we're truly going to take on a reform agenda, we need to acknowledge the failings that have led us to this crossroad. International trade for instance has helped bring millions of people out of poverty around the world, but some have felt their standard of living slide. In New Zealand, we ourselves have seen the hesitancy around trade agreements amongst our own population. The quick response is not to repeat the mistakes of the past and be seduced by the false promises or protectionism. Rather we must all work to ensure that the benefits of trade are distributed fairly across our societies. We can't rely on international institutions to do this. In the same way as we cannot blame them if they haven't delivered these benefits. It is incumbent on us to build productive, sustainable, inclusive economies and demonstrate to our peoples that when done right international economic integration can make all of us better off.
And if we want to ensure anyone is better off surely we should start with the most vulnerable. In New Zealand we have set ourselves an ambitious goal. We want to be the best place in the world to be a child. It's hardly the staff of hard and fast measures, after all how do you measure play, a feeling of security and happiness, but we can measure material deprivation and we can measure poverty and so we will. And not only that, we are making it law that we report on those numbers every single year alongside our budgets. What better way to hold ourselves to account and what better group to do that for than children?
But if we are focused on nurturing that next generation we equally have to worry about what it is that we are handing down to them including our environment. In the Maori language, there is a word that captures the importance of that role: … it means guardianship, the idea that we have been entrusted with our environment and that we have a duty of care. For us that has been taking action to address degradation like setting standards to make our rivers swimmable, reducing waste and phasing out single-use plastic bags right through to eradicating predators and protecting our biodiversity.
The race to grow our economies and increase wealth makes us all the poorer if it comes at the cost of our environment. In New Zealand we are determined to prove that it doesn't have to be this way. But these are all actions and initiatives that we can take domestically that ease the blame and pressure on our international institutions. That doesn't mean that they don't need fixing. At the heart of the multilateral system the United Nations must lead the way. We strongly support the Secretary General's reform efforts to make the UN more responsive and effective, modernized so that it is capable of dealing with today's challenges. We encourage him to be ambitious and we stand with him in that ambition, but ultimately it is up to us, the Member States to drive change here at the UN.
This includes reforming the Security Council. If we want the council to fulfill its purpose of maintaining international peace and security, its practices need to be updated so it is not hamstrung by the use of the veto. New thinking will also be needed if we are to achieve that vision encapsulated and the sustainable development goals. In New Zealand we have sought to embed the principles behind the SDGs and a new living standards framework. There's guiding policymaking and the management of our resources, and we remain absolutely committed to supporting the rollout of the SDGs alongside international partners through a significant increase in our official development assistance budget.
But revitalizing our international rules-based system isn't just about the mechanics of how we work together, it also means renewing our commitment to our values. The UN Charter recalls that the organization was formed to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war which through two world wars had brought untold sorrow to humanity. If we forget this history and the principles which drove the creation of the UN, we will be doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past. In an increasingly uncertain world that is more important than ever that we remember the core values on which the UN was built, that all people are equal, that everyone is entitled to have their dignity and human rights respected, that we must strive to promote social progress and better standards of life and larger freedom, and we must consistently hold ourselves to account on each.
Amongst renewing this commitment though we have to acknowledge where accountability must continue, and that is especially the case when it comes to equality. So many gains have been made each worthy of celebration. In New Zealand we have just mark the one hundred and twenty-fifth years since women were granted the right to vote. We were the first in the world to do so. As a girl, I never ever grew up believing that my gender would stand in the way of me achieving whatever I wanted in life. I am after all, not the first, but the third female prime minister of New Zealand. But for all of that, we still have a gender pay gap, an over-representation of women and low paid work and domestic violence and we are not alone.
It seems surprising that in this modern age we have to recommit ourselves to gender equality, but we do, and I for one will never celebrate the gains we have made for women domestically while internationally other woman and girls experience a lack of the most basic opportunities and dignity. Me too must become we too. We are all in this together.
Now, I accept that the list of demands on all of us is long, be it domestic or international, we are operating in challenging times. We face what we would call in New Zealand wicked problems, ones that are intertwined and interrelated. Perhaps then it is time to step back from the chaos and ask what we want. It is in that space that will find simplicity, the simplicity of peace, of prosperity, of fairness. If I could distill it down into one concept that we are pursuing a New Zealand it is simple and it is this: kindness. In the face of isolationism, protectionism, racism, the simple concept of looking outwardly and beyond ourselves of kindness and collectivism might just be as good a starting point as any.
So let's start here with the institutions that have served us well and times of need and will do so again. In the meantime I can assure all of you New Zealand remains committed to continue to do our part to building and sustaining international peace and security, to promoting and defending an open, inclusive, and rules-based international order based on universal values, to being pragmatic, empathetic, strong, and kind. The next generation after all deserves no less.
[Maori]