100 years of guiding in New Zealand

Rau rangatira mā, tēnei te mihi ki a koutou i runga i te kaupapa o te rā – mana wahine.

Tēna koutou, tēna koutou, tēna rā tātou katoa.

Thank you for the opportunity to host GirlGuiding New Zealand, and to help celebrate 100 years of guiding in New Zealand.

Reaching 100 is a challenge for anyone; doing it in such style, while staying young and relevant – as GirlGuiding has done – is a real achievement. So welcome, all of you, to parliament, which is the people’s place.

Women have come a long way in the past century, partially due to the work of organisations like Guides who have focused on helping young women to be the best that they can be.

In 1908 women – and young women in particular – had far fewer opportunities than today. Women over the age of 21 could vote, but they still could not stand for Parliament. It was to be another 11 years before women could put themselves up for election, and 25 years before Labour’s Elizabeth McCombs became the first woman MP in 1933. Eighteen-year-olds did not get the right to vote until 1974.

While women were technically not barred from professions such as law and medicine, only a handful of women got to qualify and even fewer got to practice. I have not yet had the opportunity to read the history of guiding in New Zealand that has just been launched tonight, but I think it is also a safe bet that the girls and young women who joined the forerunner of GirlGuiding nearly 100 years ago did not have available to them the huge range of activities that guiding provides today.

Today women enjoy equal rights and many more opportunities. Many professions that were once all-male preserves – including medicine and law – now have more women than men graduating. Women are also beginning to enter trades like building and plumbing in greater numbers, in part because of the can-do attitudes encouraged by organisations like GirlGuiding and partially because of government initiatives such as the Modern Apprenticeship Scheme.

So a lot has changed over the years, but a few things have remained constant. One of those constants is GirlGuiding’s commitment to enable girls and young women to reach their full potential and to make a difference in the world.

As GirlGuiding knows, reaching your full potential means developing skills, knowledge, values and a sense of adventure. It also means learning to get the best out of others around you, and preparing for and accepting leadership when the opportunities arise.

These are all things that GirlGuiding fosters, and they are all things that New Zealand needs for its future.

To fill skill shortages in areas like construction, we need young women who are prepared to look outside the range of occupations that females have traditionally considered.

We need more women in management and on boards of New Zealand companies, because business is being too slow to recognise women’s potential. For example, our universities may now be capping more women than men in disciplines like law, but fewer than one-in-five partners in top legal firms are women.

And we need to see more women in parliament – I hope we see some of you back here in future years. You may be interested to know that you would not be the first Guides to become MPs. I understand that two of my current colleagues learnt some of their leadership skills early on in what was then Girl Guides. They are the Minister of Commerce, Lianne Dalziel and the Minister of Police, Annette King.

Other well-known former Guides include sportswomen like former Black Sticks star Mandy Smith and Netballer Bernice Mene; actors Kate and Miranda Harcourt; and former Governor General Dame Cath Tizard. In fact you will find former Guides in prominent roles almost wherever you look.

So you have been warned – GirlGuiding can lead on to prominence and even politics! The most important thing, however, is that you make the most of your talents, whatever they are.

Thank you GirlGuiding for your contribution over the past hundred years. I wish you every success for the next century.