Last week Parliament was taken over by the new leaders Youth Parliament - an opportunity for rangatahi to speak and the rest of us to pay attention.
Despite one or two controversies, Youth Parliament 2022 will be best remembered by its participants for invaluable firsthand experience of parliamentary process and questioning government.
Sure, their several seconds of being maskless for a photo with Jacinda Ardern prompted outrage in certain quarters of the media, leaving some of them feeling burned, but the 120 Youth MPs and their press gallery counterparts got much out of their interactions in Parliament, including those with the prime minister.
Connecting with fellow young people from across the country and discussing the big issues of their generation is what Youth Parliament has always been about for Youth MPs. While some Youth MPs were clearly singing from the song sheet of the real MP who had selected them for the event, most of them spoke from the heart and helped inject a sense of urgency about issues such as mental health, racism, poverty, the voting age and the state of the country's democracy.
On the mic
It's always difficult going first. So you had to feel for Youth MP Simon Xiao, who got to ask the very first question in Question Time, one of the first things in the chamber for Youth Parliament 2022. His question was to Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, asking if she stood by all her decisions.
"For sure, I was nervous, but once I got the flow going I was fine," he said afterwards.
Xiao, whose corresponding MP in the national parliament is Chris Penk, went through drafts of the question in the weeks leading up to the sitting, also developing a road map of supplementary question options depending on how the prime minister answered the first question. His follow-up questions asked her what would be done to prevent foreign political interference ahead of the 2023 election, and about whether indirect interference had affected New Zealand's democratic system and integrity.
"There have been cases in the past where there have been large sums of political donations from people with close ties to foreign governments, and in turn there have been policy that, I feel, is a lot more lenient towards those parties," he told The House.
In response to his question, the prime minister said the government in 2019 had "made changes around electoral donations and placed a limit on the size or the quantum of electoral donations from those who may be residing offshore. We have also explicitly sought for additional work to be done in this area to ensure that we keep pace with any foreign influence we may see in the future"…