Speech for Gandhi Jayanti

Namaste, Kia ora, Good morning

Today the sun shines on Gandhi Jayanti, Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday. He was born 141 years ago. Wellington is home to many people whose origins are in the Indian sub-continent. All our lives are enriched by the culture, religion and philosophy you have brought here.

Gandhi’s example of leading a simple life would reduce the burden on our beautiful planet and allow for more peace and harmony between countries rather than the growing race for resources. These days more emphasis is given to Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violence than to his support for civil disobedience. Sometimes you need both.

Due to our time zone, New Zealand is the first place in the world to celebrate Gandhi’s birthday. This also symbolises the connections between Gandhi’s philosophy and the earlier example of Parihaka’s peaceful resistance and civil disobedience, led by Te Whiti o Rongomai. Te Whiti’s followers ploughed up grasslands and offered British troops bread not war when their lands were seized and their crops trampled.

Further East and and even earlier, on Rekohu, the Chatham Islands, as a small and precarious population, Moriori embraced a pacifist culture that rigidly avoided warfare. When European ships brought Maori armed with muskets, Moriori kept to their non-violence. Two Moriori chiefs — Tapata and Torea — declared that "the law of Nunuku was not a strategy for survival, to be varied as conditions changed; it was a moral imperative."

It is a pleasure to see Gandhiji’s form in bronze here every day, walking lightly on the earth and showing the power of ideas over violence.