Dunne: Time to cut the cord
Former United Future leader Peter Dunne has challenged the millennial generation in Parliament to “seize the moment” and begin a process to turn New Zealand into a republic.
“I strongly believe that the time has well passed for us to have severed the umbilical cord to grandmother England,” he told a conference at Parliament yesterday.
“We should be an independent republic within the Commonwealth, like India or South Africa and the majority of other Commonwealth nations.
“It is not just my Irish heritage or my sense of pride and confidence in our country, in what it can do, that is why I am so staunchly in the belief that we can do so much better than continue to bend our knee to a hereditary monarch on the other side of the world.
“We have consistently shown over the last 30 years or so that we can produce many quality New Zea- landers to serve as our GovernorGeneral. There is no reason why we cannot do likewise with a nonexecutive president . . . and frankly the time for change is well overdue.”
He issued a challenge to the new Parliament: “You are in the main the millennials who will shape the future of the next generation and beyond. Seize the moment now and begin the process of wider constitutional reform by committing to our next head of state being the first president of the republic of New Zealand.”
Dunne served in Parliament from 1984 to 2017 in the Labour Party and in the United Future Party supporting both Labour and National governments.
He said that during his time in politics he was consumed by what New Zealand might be like in future.
“I am excited by how we can become more comparatively bicultural and at our developing multiculturalism. That is something to be embraced wholeheartedly, never feared or, worse, rejected.
“My children and grandchildren are likely to have the opportunity of living in the world’s best multi-ethnic, multicultural nation where they are as at home in the world of the Pacific as they are in Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas.”