Greens MP Golriz Ghahraman about the year, her battle with MS, and Iran, her mother country. Video / NZ Herald
Green MP Golriz Ghahraman doesn’t believe other political parties are doing enough to promote members of the disability community and is pushing for fundamental change in Parliament to boost representation.
The issue is a personal one for Ghahraman, who first became aware of her multiple sclerosis in 2018 when she lost sight in her left eye.
The autoimmune disease has thrown up various obstacles, but the Green MP remains convinced as ever to push through the challenges and act as a voice for the roughly one-quarter of New Zealanders who identify as disabled.
As part of that advocacy, Ghahraman is calling on other political parties to come good on their comments indicating their support for a larger number of disabled voices in Parliament, urging them to adapt their candidate selection criteria with the disability community in mind, as her party did last year.
“I think everybody has sympathy for the disabilities community but I don’t think everybody’s on that page of understanding that means actually you make space, you make resources available, you have to be as a party more accessible and bring those voices in,” she told the Herald.
Multiple Sclerosis New Zealand describes the condition as a “disorder of the central nervous system (CNS) which includes the brain, spinal cord and optic nerves”.
“It’s a chronic illness, it never goes away, it is your immune system attacking your nervous system so eventually it wears out certain nerves,” Ghahraman said.
“For me, it was my optic nerve first. That’s grown back, they do grow back, but then eventually they don’t.”
Green MP Golriz Ghahraman first went public with her MS in 2020 before NZ's Covid lockdown. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Ghahraman told the public she had MS in early 2020, just as Covid-19 was crashing onto New Zealand shores, which left her and others going through treatment very vulnerable.
“I had the treatment, which is shutting down your immune system so it stops attacking you, but then there’s a pandemic which meant that I couldn’t fight viruses like Covid, which is what everybody living with MS and other autoimmune illnesses were facing.
“We had to go to ground and the lockdowns felt really safe for us but then this past year has been the opposite of that, the winding up of the Covid response and letting go of the elimination strategy was what my disability and chronic illnesses community was really feeling.”
Like many of her Green Party colleagues, Ghahraman hadn’t been afraid of being vocal this year, particularly with respect to the atrocities being committed against women in her birthplace of Iran.
With such an intense workload, energy conservation was a priority for Ghahraman.
“I have to make sure I get sleep, I have to make sure I don’t get too stressed.
“We sit until 10pm [in the House] which means you don’t often sleep very well, so it’s not an accessible place but I just constantly have to be aware of it.
“Of course, the life of an MP [means] you have to be responsive to things that just come up out of nowhere - if your bill gets drawn from the ballot, if there’s a war, if the Government puts some important bill in the order paper ... so you can’t always control those things and that’s part of living with MS for me.”
Parliament's debating chamber was not so friendly to people with physical disabilities. Photo / NZME
Former Speaker of the House Trevor Mallard and his successor Adrian Rurawhe had been “really understanding” of the issue, Ghahraman said, but there were many aspects of Parliament life that posed obstacles.
