My family have lived peacefully on the East Coast for seven generations, and it's been about 130 years since any of us sought public office.

When the opportunity arose to stand as a candidate on the East Coast for United Future I knew it was time to stop watching from the sidelines and get involved with a centrist party that has been a trusted stable coalition partner for almost 15 years.

United Future have great common sense ideas to make New Zealand the best place in the world to live work and raise a family. They have a vision for the way New Zealand might look in 2020, and how we can achieve it, and I really loved the idea of embracing the future instead of being afraid of it.

For too long, provincial areas like the East Coast have been managed on puppet strings from Wellington with indifferent outcomes for the tax payer's hard-earned dollar. Instead of splitting the country and our communities into left and right, red and blue, or brown and white, we want to build agreement within communities about the future we want and how we might co-operate to get there.

We believe every child should have a good chance in life, regardless of their family circumstances. We also believe that our environment is something borrowed from people who are not yet born and we owe them a healthy environment, economy and society.

I'm really looking forward to building on the great work done by United Future party president Judy Turner, and getting out around the rohe and hearing ideas and concerns of our people.

Top 5 Issues

1. Flexible Superannuation
   The squabbling between other parties about what age New Zealanders should retire is an insight into a belief by many politicians that they can tell Kiwis how to live their lives. UnitedFuture believes it should be up to individuals to decide when they retire. As a member of Generation X, I am resigned to paying for the retirement of the Baby Boomers, and I know no-one’s going to pay for mine, but I want New Zealanders to be able to spend their retirement reflecting on life, not worrying about it.
   New Zealanders should be able to take superannuation at reduced rates down to 60 or increasingly enhanced rates if they hold off until between 66 and 70. This change should occur alongside compulsory KiwiSaver that operates in a reformed finance sector that keeps the sharks away from New Zealanders’ hard-earned savings.
2. Income Sharing
   UnitedFuture believes the tax system should work in the interests of those raising families, and should empower family and community self-sufficiency instead of dependency. Our income sharing policy recognises the valuable contribution a spouse or partner makes to our society when they chose part-time work or full-time parenting to focus on their children. In a socialist utopia children may be raised by the state, but until such a utopia appears, we will support Kiwi families who want to give their kids a great start in life.
3. Caring for Elderly
   You can tell a lot about a society by how it cares for its most vulnerable members.
   UnitedFuture has two key policies to keep older New Zealanders warmer and healthier. Both are about making New Zealand the kind of country it should be and they make economic sense – a stitch in time saves nine, right?
   • Subsidise the power bills of over-65s by $50 per month for the three coldest months of the year – June, July and August – so our seniors can afford to keep warm
   • A free ‘Warrant of Fitness’ annual health check for over-65s to identify health problems and illness early.
   • We also want to improve pay and training for those who care for our elderly
4. Limits on Asset Sales
   Kiwibank, Radio New Zealand and the water supply should be ruled out of any future asset sales programmes
   Kiwibank is a national institution, whether you bank with it or not. In our domestic market where Australian-owned banks ruled the roost and charged us higher fees than Aussies, and in a world where merchant banks are, (to quote Rolling Stone writer Matt Tiabbi) “a giant vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money” Kiwibank is a statement of our economic sovereignty. It is ours pure and simple. It must stay that way.
   Radio New Zealand exists in an increasingly commercial media marketplace. It is more important than ever to have a voice that does not bend to the dollar, to ratings, to external forces. Every nation needs its own voice and our voice needs our protection, especially now it is easier than ever to access the productions via download.
   Water. UnitedFuture does not intend to wait until it is on the asset sales agenda. New Zealanders would never – or should never – accept a sell-off of the supply of the water, or any of the aspects around it. We believe it is time to manage our water supplies better, and clean up our rivers together.
   In addition, with regard to Asset Sales, UnitedFuture will insist that:
   • The New Zealand Government retains majority control (51%)
   • Shareholding by private investors be capped at 15%
5. Outdoor Recreation
   UnitedFuture believes that all New Zealanders have a birthright to enjoy our unique, diverse landscape. Our strong outdoor heritage is central to what it means to be a Kiwi, and we like to think that environmentalism doesn’t need to be a three-legged race of feminism tied to communism in a sometimes ill-fitting green sack.
   Our key policies to achieve this are:
   • Enshrining in law public access to all public resources, including game, waterways and coastlines.
   • Establishing a robust National Environmental Standard for all freshwater waterways.
   • Curtailing the application of 1080 poison and replacing it with new and more environmentally and economically friendly forms of pest-control.
   • Imposing a moratorium on new hydro and irrigation schemes for rivers without existing dams and still regarded to be ‘wild’.
   • Prohibit heli-hunting, herding or hazing from helicopters except for legitimate animal management operations when numbers warrant it.
   • Make sure the Game Animal Council Bill, currently before Parliament is passed, and the Game Animal Council is established as a statutory body.
   • Work with the recreational fishing sector to establish a public consultation process regarding the future of inshore fisheries management. This will include whether a statutory management organisation 'run by fishers for fishers' should be established.

Personal Profile

Martin Gibson grew up in Gisborne, and returned home six years ago after travelling the world and understanding that there really is no place like home.

Like many Generation X Kiwis, Martin left it late to get married buy a house and start a family, but has been making up for lost time. He and his wife Anuya welcomed their first child Safia into the world in May this year, while both of them run businesses from home.

Anuya is a UK-trained doctor who is also qualified in appearance medicine, and runs a clinic out of their home, while Martin runs a small marketing consultancy.

After he finished school, Martin completed a BSc in geology and a Post-graduate diploma in Marketing.

His early career included four years with American chemical giant DuPont selling engineering polymers. After that he travelled through North America and Mexico for a year, then returned to Auckland and a role as a quarry engineer, establishing an urban quarry for Fulton Hogan in Auckland..

As a boy, Martin admired the life experience accumulated by men like Jack London, and took on a diverse range of jobs both in New Zealand and overseas.

He has worked in shearing gangs, forestry, retail, sales & marketing, beekeeping, building, security and cleaning contracting, accumulating a broad range of skills and stories on the way.

Upon his return to Gisborne, he managed the Waiohika venue for 20,000 people at Gisborne’s Rhythm & Vines festival, and for the past five years he worked as a journalist for The Gisborne Herald, where he developed a broad network of contacts within the community.

He got to see who was good at getting funding, and who was good at getting things done - sometimes they are the same people, sometimes not.

At 6’8” and 120kg, Martin Gibson would be one of New Zealand’s larger MPs, and he says the time is right for a different kind of person to get involved in politics.

“If you look at what the country needs from its leaders now, it is the exact opposite of what we have come to expect from politicians.

“We need people who can build unity and encourage co-operation rather than trying to polarise New Zealand into left and right or brown and white in order to gain power.

“We need vision for New Zealand’s unique provincial areas like the East Coast, instead of cookie cutter versions of the same party lines for everywhere. I really like United Future’s vision to make New Zealand the best place to live work and raise a family.

“As a lover of New Zealand’s unique wildlife, I was also drawn to United Future’s practical environmentalism that includes people in the environment, and is not automatically bound to radical socialism or feminism.

“Aside from the occasional fist fight my family have lived here in harmony with Maori for 170 years. It is time we started working together and playing to our strengths instead of being divided and ruled through dog whistle politics on both sides of the political spectrum."

With the poverty and debt New Zealand is facing it is time for fresh thinking, says Mr Gibson.

“People of my generation are getting a hospital pass from the Baby Boomers in some ways. We will have to live below our means in years to come to pay off the billions we are borrowing to live above our means, but there are other ways to help communities rise to the challenges we face. In particular it is time we focused less on the amount people earn, and more on the levers of poverty, that keep them living in poverty.

“With co-operation, vision, common sense, compassion and hard work we can put together tools to allow communities to solve their own problems, rather than trying to run places like the East Coast using puppet strings from Wellington pulled by faceless bureaucrats.”

On his father’s side Mr Gibson’s family have been in the East Coast region for seven generations – his mother’s family hail from Northland for six generations.

His great great great grandparents taught Te Kooti to read the Bible and gave him his first job. His great great grandmother was the first Pakeha woman born in Turanganui a Kiwa, which became Gisborne.

His great grandparents had a farm in the Waioweka Gorge near Gibson’s Bridge, and his family live in Matawai, Gisborne, and Te Kaha.