National MP for Whangārei Shane Reti has given his valedictory speech in Parliament, closing 12 years in the House with a warning to the soft drink industry and a story about the six hours that he believes saved more lives than anything else he has done.
Reti spoke on Wednesday evening, following ACT list MP Mark Cameron, who gave his own farewell speech shortly before. Reti is retiring at the general election on 7 November and will not contest Whangārei again. RNZ reported the speech on Friday, and the full Hansard transcript has been published by Scoop.
He opened plainly. “I rise today to present my valedictory address by way of reflection and by way of thanks,” he told the House, before running through the party leaders he had served under. “I want to start by acknowledging all the party leaders I have worked under, John, Bill, Simon, Todd, Judith, myself for a week, and Chris Luxon.” The week refers to late 2021, when Reti was briefly acting leader of the National Party after Judith Collins lost the role and before Christopher Luxon took it.
A general practitioner for 17 years before entering Parliament in 2014, Reti spent two terms on the back benches and in opposition before becoming Minister of Health in the coalition formed after the 2023 election. He held that portfolio until the January 2025 reshuffle, when he moved to science, innovation and technology, statistics and universities.
Much of the speech was spent on smaller wins that never made national bulletins. His first was a campaign against Wicked Campers, the rental van company whose painted slogans drew years of complaints. “My first moment in that term was getting rid of Wicked Campers rental vans, with their disgusting, foul-mouthed, misogynistic slogans,” he said. He wrote to councils arguing that vehicle signage was signage, and therefore covered by their bylaws, then wrote to Visa and Mastercard. “By the time we had Z Energy banning them from filling up at their forecourts, they were done.”
He also claimed a hand in the Hundertwasser Art Centre in Whangārei, a project stalled for two decades. “I’ve always considered this project a relay race, and, for a brief period of time, I had the privilege of being the relay runner,” he said. He then told the House how he had asked a contact in Dubai to lobby the then regional development minister Simon Bridges during a Gulf trade visit. “The next caucus meeting, Simon makes a beeline for me. ‘Shane, unbelievable, I was lobbied for Hundertwasser while I was in Dubai.’”
The longest story concerned rural broadband. In 2016, with the Telecommunications Act being amended, then communications minister Amy Adams told him the fight to run fibre over existing power poles on private farmland was lost. Reti rang Federated Farmers and offered to obtain consent from every farmer in Northland in exchange for a carve-out. When he texted Adams to tell her what he had done, he said the reply was immediate. “Shane, unbelievable. I told you this was done and to leave it alone. You have the feds and Northpower in my office first thing on Monday morning.” The bill went back to select committee. “After further negotiations with the feds, we got unanimous party agreement for the nationwide roll-out of fibre over existing rural infrastructure,” he said.
As health minister he listed the Waikato medical school, a large increase in cancer drug funding and $30 million for emergency department security. The moment he singled out was the extension of free breast cancer screening from age 70 to 74. The night before the announcement he could not shake the feeling something was missing. On the 6am flight from Whangārei he found himself sitting beside the Health New Zealand lead on the programme and learned that women already aged between 70 and 74 would simply age out of the scheme rather than receive a screen. Modelling for a final screen at 74 existed and cost about $20 million. Reti made calls from Auckland and Wellington airports and by the time he landed in Nelson the money had been found within baseline.
He told the House the detection rate in the first year was about 11 cancers per 1,000 screened, against an international benchmark for a successful programme of around four per 1,000, and that the extra volume was concentrated in that final free scan. “I may well have saved more people across six hours and three flights than at any other time in my career, and that is truly a privilege,” he said.
The unfinished business was sugar. “To the fizzy drinks industry, I was coming for you, and you knew it,” he said. Reti told the House he met industry representatives at the end of 2024 and agreed to hold off until after the Christmas trading period. The evidence put to him, he said, was that a popular canned drink sold here carried more sugar than the identical product from the same company in Australia, and that the gap ran to “nearly 40 to 50 percent” across several brands. He named no products. His closing request was that the industry “please explain why you have been deliberately sugaring up New Zealanders, and then reformulate to at least the baseline in Australia”.
Reti told MPs he was the first Māori to win the Whangārei seat and the 15th to win a general electorate. He listed four-laning the highway north, a radiotherapy centre and the largest Kāinga Ora housing development in regional New Zealand among the local gains. “I came here to do something, not be something, and I gave it my all,” he said. He thanked his partner Ivonne and apologised to grandchildren for the birthdays and sports days missed, adding “I will do better”.
His last thought was about the shape of politics itself. “It is not clear to me that what we do here is still well described as the politics of the left and right, but maybe it is better described as the politics of top and bottom,” he said.
National has already selected Lloyd Budd, a Whangārei-raised former real estate executive, to contest the seat in November. Whangārei has swung between National and Labour in the past decade, and Reti himself lost it in 2020 before winning it back in 2023 with a majority of more than 11,000. If you are still working out where the parties stand ahead of the election, our voting tool compares their policies side by side.
What do you make of Reti’s challenge to the soft drink industry, and should a future government act on it? Leave a comment below and tell us what you think.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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