Hon GERRY BROWNLEE (National): I rise on behalf of the National Party to join the Government in passing this motion today. As time goes on, there'll be fewer and fewer in parliaments like this who will remember the uncertainty and the fear that the words and images of the Iron Curtain and the Cold War conveyed. In the stand-off environment between the Soviet Union and the US, that fear was fuelled by an arms race that saw the development and installation of some 63,000 nuclear warheads equally divided between those two countries. It had to end at some point, and although Mikhail Gorbachev rose to the leadership of the USSR committed to the Marxist-Leninist communist system, he was clearly a man of vision and peaceful intention. Post the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, Gorbachev saw the need for change and introduced the words "glasnost"—openness—and "perestroika"—reconstruction—to the international vocabulary.