We, each of us, come here with the hopes and dreams of thousands of people on our shoulders, in my case, the hopes and dreams of the 98,300 people of Whangārei, and for all of us now comes the job of making dreams come true. New Zealanders don't ask for much, but in Whangārei, over the last 40 years, we got it less than most. I am not old enough to remember Kirk, but I remember the Whangārei I grew up in. It isn't the Whangārei in which my kids grow up. Like the rest of Te Tai Tokerau, Whangārei has never been wealthy, but over the past 40 years we have got progressively poorer until, in fact, we bump along the bottom of the bad end of just about every set of statistics going. Now, some of us do OK, but as a Family Court lawyer and as a criminal lawyer, I have seen what happens to the others. Violence, drug and alcohol abuse, suicide, and neglect handed down from generation to generation, over-crowded, run-down houses filled with hungry, sick kids and worn-out parents. After 40 years of neoliberalism and trickle-down economics, that's what trickles down in Whangārei. That kind of poverty causes more than material deprivation, it squeezes out that fourth Kirk necessity—room for hope, room to dream. It creates what my mum, after 30-plus years of running a crisis agency, calls poverty of hope, and nowhere more than for our young people.