Appropriation (2023/24 Estimates) Bill, Child Support (Pass On) Acts Amendment Bill

Second Reading

on behalf of the Minister for Social Development and Employment: I present a legislative statement on the Child Support (Pass On) Acts Amendment Bill.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

I move, That the Child Support (Pass On) Acts Amendment Bill be now read a second time.

This bill contains important amendments that will pass on child support to parents on a sole parent rate of benefit, removing the current inequity in how they are treated compared to other groups. As a result, approximately 41,550 sole parent families will have more in their pockets, and up to 14,000 children will be lifted out of poverty in 2023-24. I wish to start by thanking the Social Services and Community Committee for their hard work and careful consideration of this bill, and for the 13 submitters who took the time to give their views on this legislation.

This bill is a complex one and the work of the committee has ensured that the bill is as robust as possible. The submissions were overall supportive of the bill and the proposals within that will lift the income of many sole parent families from receiving child support. Key themes discussed by submitters included the need to ensure that the changes are clearly communicated, and that Ministry of Social Development staff are comprehensively trained to handle and explain the proposed changes. I want to assure submitters that the successful communication of this initiative is something that both agencies are committed to. Both agencies have a good deal of experience in implementing similar changes.

Submitters also focused on the need to ensure that no benefit debt arises as a result of implementation. The income-charging rules for child support payments have been designed to avoid creating benefit debt. If the liable parent does not pay despite the receiving carer having an entitlement to child support, it would not be considered income for the receiving carer. Rather, child support passed on will be considered as income on a forward-looking basis—only the amount of child support received in the hand, the cash amount, will be considered. Child support is a monthly payment, whereas benefits are paid on a weekly or fortnightly basis. This has required the introduction of forward-charging income rules, which would treat child support as income for the periods it is intended to support the child. This means that child support would be divided into four or five weekly amounts and added to the client’s total income. Their weekly total income must be above the income abatement threshold before it starts to affect their benefit. This is now $160 per week after this Government raised it in 2021. If debt arises from an error with an income-charging process, including automation, the bill proposes that the debt is non-recoverable and is written off. For these reasons, there was no need to make further changes to the bill in response to those concerns.

Some submitters also questioned why the bill does not propose to include recipients of the unsupported child’s benefit. This is because a separate review is currently being undertaken by Oranga Tamariki into the system of financial assistance and support for caregivers. The recommendations by the committee are minor and technical in nature. Broadly, these recommendations ensure that the rules operate as intended and that the policies apply consistently between the Social Security Act and the Public and Community Housing Management Act where appropriate.

Overall, this bill will remove the discriminatory policy which has withheld child support from some of our most vulnerable sole parents. Currently, child support payments that sole parent beneficiaries are entitled to are retained by the Government rather than being passed on to support their children. However, this is not the case for other beneficiaries, such as those on a couple’s rate of benefit, or those only receiving a supplementary assistance who have their child support passed on. This bill fixes this inequality by passing on child support administered by Inland Revenue directly to the sole parent beneficiaries, as is currently done for other parents receiving child support and benefits.

This child support will then be treated as income by the Ministry of Social Development for benefits and other assistance. Following the abatement of income-tested financial assistance, families will gain overall an average of $47 per week, with a median gain of $20 per week. These changes are an important part of our ongoing welfare overhaul work programme and build on our earlier work, including the 2019 change which removed the financial penalty for sole parents who did not name the other parent of their child when applying for assistance. Passing on child support was also recommended by the Welfare Expert Advisory Group in 2019. This is another example of how the Government is delivering on its commitment to put dignity back in the welfare system and make it fairer.

The bill also removes the requirement for sole parents on a benefit to apply for a formula assessment of child support through Inland Revenue. This means that these parents will be able to make arrangements that better suit their circumstances, such as a formula assessment, or voluntary or private agreement. Research suggests that passing on child support will increase the incentive for liable parents to meet their child support obligations. This is likely because liable parents are more willing to pay child support when they know that their child will receive their financial support. The bill will also allow liable parents paying child support who have a formula assessment to claim this liability as a cost for temporary additional support and for special benefit.

This bill will come into force on 1 July, which means parents will be able to receive the benefits of child support in the coming months. This further highlights how the Government is prioritising addressing cost of living pressures by putting more money in the pockets of low income families. Passing on child support to parents on a sole parent rate of benefit is the right thing to do. We want to ensure that sole parent families get the full benefit of their child support payments and that they have more in their pockets. This bill does that, and the committee’s recommendations improve upon this by ensuring that this can be done as efficiently as possible. I commend this bill to the House.

Second Reading

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Second Reading

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I stand to take a call on behalf of the National Party and just want to put back on record, for those who are just following this debate for the first time, that it was not even six weeks ago that this piece of legislation was read for the first time, and, unfortunately, is yet another piece of legislation by the Minister for Social Development and Employment, who has rushed another bill through the House.

I thought it was really interesting that their excuse for having it so delayed was that it was a really complex piece of legislation and it was really important that officials had time to do the work, which is really interesting. So, actually, I think it gave even more reason why the public equally should have had the time to submit on the bill, but the Government didn’t think that that was something that they should trifle with.

So, on this side of the House, before I go into the substantive comments, I do want to say that a shortened report-back on a piece of legislation like this that is incredibly complex, I think is irresponsible.

So in terms of the shortened process, I think it is really important to understand that, on the surface of it, it looks like a logical bill; it looks like a logical thing to support. When the Welfare Expert Advisory Group recommendations first came out about—what?—over four years ago, I thought this is one that the Government would have moved on quite quickly. So it is somewhat surprising that it’s taken this long for it to get to the House.

So, again, on the surface of it, it’s looking at resolving an inconsistency—those who are receiving other types of assistance or benefits are able to get their child support passed on, and sole parents weren’t. It sounds like a simple thing to fix. But if you think about it for a moment, the intent or the general purpose of welfare assistance is to use all available resources before seeking financial assistance through the Ministry of Social Development. So if you think about it, the reason there is a sole parent is there is a liable parent—in most cases, one that’s identified. And so the way it works at the moment is that the child support is offset against the cost to taxpayers of the sole parent benefit. Makes sense—liable parent pays the costs. We’re not talking about a small amount; we’re talking about $354 million. So this is a cost that is currently covered by liable parents and will no longer be, if this bill passes. So on the surface of the inconsistency, there is a bit more to it.

Then look at it, and the National Party supported the child poverty reduction legislation, just as—well, I think, all New Zealanders would want to see child poverty reduce in New Zealand. For those who are listening or speaking in this debate, who have been sole parents on that benefit, they know it’s not much of a life. So to provide assistance makes sense. The median gain for this is $20 per week. So then what it will mean is that for somebody receiving the sole parent benefit, the child support will be passed on and, basically, be treated as income. So it will mean, for many households, more cash at the end of the day, and it is a step towards reducing child poverty.

The question, though, is—and this is not something that I believe the Government have gone through in sufficient detail in this rushed process—is this the best use of taxpayer funds, and could the child poverty reduction targets have been achieved in a different way? As I say, $354 million isn’t a small amount that we should trifle with. So it does require scrutiny and scrutiny of this House, and, unfortunately, insufficient scrutiny was accorded in the select committee process, because, yet again, it was a piece of legislation that was rushed.

So one of the areas that definitely concerns the National Party also is the extension of the temporary additional support for liable parents. So the National Party believes that parents should support their own children in the first instance, and so by allowing this to be widened as a temporary additional support to pay for child support, that is putting the burden fairly and squarely back on taxpayers, which, actually, I think is an unfair burden. So we don’t agree with that component of the legislation proposed.

We also don’t agree with the fact that this is not being extended for the unsupported child benefit. If the intent was purely around child poverty reduction, it makes zero sense for the unsupported child benefit to be excluded from the pass-on provision. So that’s where—and, again, it’s being rushed; it’s being rushed so the Government can say they’ve done something when the payments take effect or the transfer takes effect on 1 July.

For all the complexity, I do actually worry about the ability of the agencies to implement it and implement it well. So it is good to see that there is an amount of funds allocated for evaluation. The sorts of questions that the National Party will be asking as this is implemented—which, unfortunately, we weren’t able to get answers for in the select committee process, where you would expect to be able to get these questions answered—are: will there be more liable parents paying child support as a result of this legislation? Will there be more parents paying child support? Will there be more child support collected or less? Will there be more sole parents claiming the sole parent benefit? Those are the sorts of parts of the evaluation we would expect. Actually, we would have expected answers to those questions ahead of the bill being introduced.

What we would be very concerned to see is that, as a result of this policy, we continue to see the number on sole parent benefit increase. We’ve seen that already with policy changes made by the Labour Government that we disagree with: the removal of the subsequent child policies and also the removal of the obligation to name a father—if a father is not named, of course you then can’t claim child support. So I do think that this may well be another piece of legislation that means the number claiming the sole parent benefit actually increases, and that would be a concern because what we do know is the number of children being raised in benefit-dependent homes.

So, again, if the objective of this is around child poverty reduction, it doesn’t make any sense, on the one hand, to say that and then to lock more children into benefit dependency, when we know the outcomes for children raised in benefit-dependent homes are worse in terms of health, worse in terms of education, worse in terms of their incomes, and also contact with the justice system. So it is a bit frustrating not to have some of those questions satisfied in the select committee process. Because we have seen the number of sole parents increasing, it would be deeply concerning to this side of the House if that number continued to lift and, more significantly, the time spent on the sole parent benefit increases, because we do know there is a direct connection with material hardship and poor outcomes for children that are raised in benefit-dependent homes.

So, on balance, we will support this legislation in the second reading. But, as I say, the $354 million, there may well have been more effective ways if the singular aim in this was to reduce child poverty. We do know that the Government is not on track with their 10-year targets; maybe that’s why they have rushed this through by 1 July. But I will definitely have more questions for the Minister in the committee of the whole House stage.

So it is with still some quite severe reservations that the National Party supports the Child Support (Pass On) Acts Amendment Bill in the second reading. As I say, I continue to be concerned that the Government rushes through legislation without sufficient scrutiny.

Second Reading

Talofa lava, Madam Speaker. Look, I’m really delighted to speak on the Child Support (Pass On) Acts Amendment Bill. It is a bill that has moved very quickly through the select committee process. Nevertheless, I want to acknowledge the 13 submitters who submitted and the six who gave oral submissions. They added to the bill remarkably, and I thank them for that. I also want to thank the officials who very diligently worked incredibly hard to get this bill to the state that it is in, including the changes that we had suggested.

One of the things that I have to say about this piece of legislation is that I love it—I love the fact that it’s a piece of equity in action. I’ve heard the speech from Louise Upston, the previous speaker, in which she talked about “How is it that we do this and it creates these things, and people might suddenly want to come jump on the benefit because, actually, they’re getting some payments which they’re entitled to.”—which every other beneficiary gets. So if you’re one of a couple in a relationship and you’re entitled to child support, that child support payment is passed on to you and you get it—you receive it.

So this is what this bill does: it actually enables those sole parents, those single parents, to get the same as everyone else, and I think that that’s really important. It doesn’t suddenly mean that they are going to be incredibly wealthy, but people are certainly going to be slightly better off, by approximately $20 a week, and that is a help. But the main thing for me is this equity—this equity that we talk about that actually enables our families to get what they’re entitled to.

What was the purpose? We don’t know. What was the purpose in punishing sole parents or treating them differently? There actually really wasn’t a reason, except to say that “We think that maybe these sole parents deserve less rights and maybe they needed to be punished.”—and that’s what we’re getting rid of. In fact, it is one of the things that I absolutely love about this work that we do: it’s changing the inequities.

It’s a really modernised taxation system that is going to enable this to work, and that is one of the reasons that it has taken so long to get this piece of legislation here. It is a modernised system—automated—and that is an amazing thing for our community. They’re not going to have to ring in, because this will be done behind the scenes. I’m delighted, and I commend this bill to the House.

Second Reading

As the second speaker for the National Party, following from my colleague the Hon Louise Upston—and for members of the public who are listening, “honourable” indicates that the member has served as a Minister, so I defer to my colleague the Hon Louise Upston, who, having served as a Minister for social development and in other spheres, does stand to address the House from a premise of knowledge, from a premise of experience. The speech that has been shared with the public and the members in the House this evening from my colleague has gone down the track of an overview, at this second reading, of the Child Support (Pass On) Acts Amendment Bill.

I had the opportunity to address the House at the first reading of this, and I talked in terms of my role as spokesperson for the National Party for children, Oranga Tamariki, and also Whānau Ora. The perspective that I bring to the House in speaking to this bill will always encompass that child-centric lens and the whānau-centred lens that goes with it.

So this bill, having been before the House for the first reading, has gone to the select committee for a truncated process. My colleague spoke about the truncation of that. This has been referred to as quite a complex and intricately specialised piece of legislation, which would suggest that because of the complexity it requires the importance of engagement and participation of our New Zealand public. That hasn’t happened. The truncated process is that this has been introduced under urgency, rushed through the House, and is likely to come back to the House for the third reading in the next week or so. That, in my view, does not recognise or give due consideration to our New Zealand public and to the importance of this legislation and, importantly, our children.

Before coming into the House this evening, I had the privilege of attending a gathering which had been hosted by Arena Williams, a member of the Labour Government benches; her father, Sir Haare Williams—Sir Haare Williams, having been knighted for a lifetime of service as an educationalist, as a man who has served grassroots community, who has served in the creative arts industry, broadcasting. They are in the Grand Hall continuing to celebrate the contribution of his service to Aotearoa New Zealand. Why do I mention that? Because it’s appropriate to do so, and the appropriateness is that Tā Haare Williams’ kōrero was very much centred on the importance of his childhood, his nurturing, and the importance of education to lift potential and realise opportunity. His children, his tamariki, and his mokopuna were there, and here I am standing to address this House on the Child Support (Pass On) Acts Amendment Bill.

Before I come to the detail, what Tā Hare Williams shared was saying that every child is born royal, and the interpretation of that is that there is tapu associated with a child. The element, in terms of his concept of royalty, is about the special significance of our children, the sacredness that we ought to treasure and treat them with. So I just bring that to the House because it is important, in my role, from a child-centric point of view, to hear one of our kaumātua of this nation speak about the importance of our tamariki—tama, son of ariki, the gods.

So I share that, and I come back to the Child Support (Pass On) Acts Amendment Bill. [Interruption] The legislation introduces changes—and I think that this debate requires the level of gravitas and courtesy from the Government benches whilst I do address the House on this matter of children. I would ask that the members opposite give due indulgence to the importance of our children.

💬 Hon Louise Upston: It’s called respect.

It is called respect.

I turn to the bill. The legislation introduces changes to the way child support is paid to sole parent beneficiaries. My colleague has talked about how the National Party, although supporting it, has reservations. Those reservations I’ve addressed, in terms of the truncated process, the lack of respect from this Government in terms of engagement with our public and with those in this sector—the lack of respect.

The next matter that my colleague talked about, and it’s addressed in the select committee report where the National Party has expressed a differing view in saying that “members of the [National Party] are concerned that the estimated cost to the government is $354.27 million over the forecast period of 2021/22 [projected] 2025/26”. In the first reading of this bill when I addressed the House, I talked about the importance of our communities, our children being nurtured within their whānau, within their extended social network, and not having to be always dependent on the State to provide a measure of support to our whānau.

This kaumātua Haare Williams spoke about his upbringing, and I speak about the upbringing that I came from, where I didn’t come from a child welfare, State-dependent nourishment; I came from a dependency of mana motuhake within our whānau and the sense of responsibility within our whānau. Although many of our whānau could’ve turned to the State for that sense of oppressive welfare dependency, we relied on each other. We were nourished by the fact that we knew that the avenue and the way to opportunity was through grasping education. The Child Support (Pass On) Acts Amendment Bill—there is a purpose, there is a role for that to be provided. This bill outlines, importantly, that there’s a shift in terms of the process as to how it’s administered.

The point that I share with colleagues who are looking somewhat bewildered across the House is the very point that child support starts in the home, and so it’s about Government formulating not just in a singular role but a wider lens and aspect to ensure that our children are not locked into a sense of welfare dependency. I seem to have engendered some contribution and controversy with the statement that I’m making in saying leadership begins at home, in our communities. It’s not for the State to continually hand out; it’s for the hand up, and it is acknowledged that this is a support where the liable parent is liable and should be providing the sustenance, fiscally but in other ways as well. This child support bill is where the Government is supplementing the liable parent—and in fact not the Government; it’s the taxpayer that’s supplementing.

I’ll conclude my contribution in the House tonight by saying that this is a bill that is going to be adjusting the mechanics or the way in which child support is distributed, and that, ultimately, the responsibility must come back not to Government—comes back to communities, comes back to whānau, and comes back to what I’ve always referred to, and will continue to do, as mana motuhake. The National Party does support this bill through to the third reading, but there will be contributions at the committee of the whole House in terms of how this could be refined and improved.

Second Reading

E te Māngai o te Whare. I stand to try to give a little bit of dignity back to those whose dignity has been impugned by the opposite member. Pani me te rawakore—this is about those who need it most getting what is owed to them. I find it extraordinary that the only exception for so many years to whānau who would be able to be eligible for the pass on from the other parent who was not doing the majority of the caring, the only people who were not receiving that was solo parents. And of course, when we are talking about that, we are talking about solo mums.

This bill rectifies an injustice that has been standing since 1991. I have just been speaking to my colleague here, Lemauga, who told me that she was in fact on the first working party that worked to put child support together. She talked about the difficulties of that. Pani me te rawakore—this is about those who need it most.

Do not lecture us about the needs for people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Do not lecture us about that when we are trying to give those people what has been due to them since 1990. And that is the point of this bill. Do not lecture us about fairness when you’ve failed to deliver for so many years. Do not lecture us about respect when we try to give it. I honour Deputy Prime Minister Carmel Sepuloni, who has had the guts to give dignity back to solo parents and solo mothers. I honour those 14,000 children who will be raised out of poverty and those 141,550 solo parents who will benefit from this bill. I commend it to the House.

Second Reading

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a pleasure to stand on behalf of ACT to speak to the Child Support (Pass On) Acts Amendment Bill. We too will be supporting this bill, but with reservations as well on some of the provisions within this bill. Child poverty reduction is a really important issue, and I don’t think any party within this House wants to see any child living in deprivation and poverty. So anything that we can do to help with that, we will be supporting.

The issues we have, though, are very similar to those of previous speakers, where this process of such a complicated bill—it was very complex. It was done in such a shortened period of time, with a shortened report-back date, which meant that many people who may have submitted and who may have given some advice on how we could have made this bill better wouldn’t have had the time to come in front of us and give their points of view.

A good example of this is that we had around 13 submitters and we had quite a few changes due to their submissions and changes that were proposed by these submitters during the select committee process, and that was from just 13 submitters. Imagine if we’d gone through the whole proper process and had more come before us? They may have found more issues within this bill, so we won’t be coming back again to fix the problems that may be within this bill.

Many of them were quite technical changes that I’m really happy that we picked up on, because they’ve made a bit of a difference, including an income extension for child support relating to when the assistance is backdated. I mean, imagine if we’d missed that and that had come across and somebody was backdated a whole lot of child support, and then they would have ended up having that classed as income, which would have meant that they may have lost their whole benefit payment that month.

So these were issues that came up within the select committee process from submitters that may not have been picked up without their input. Having that shortened process meant that we had less people who have the skills and who have the experience in this area to give us advice on where we may have been able to improve this bill.

We also had changes around clarifying the derivation of income provisions for recipients of the unsupported child’s benefit, because the unsupported child’s benefit wasn’t actually included within this bill, but some of the provisions would have affected the unsupported child’s benefit. So we had to clarify that they weren’t included in that, and these were the things that were picked up in the select committee process.

So that’s why I think it’s really important that we stop making these processes shortened, because we’re not getting the advice and the skills from the people within the industries to create good law. Rushed law is bad law. We end up coming back to this House to fix things that could have been fixed in the first place, and it tends to affect the most vulnerable, which is the children that we’re trying to help within this bill.

So the first thing I’d like to talk about, really, is the unsupported child’s benefit. This is another piece of legislation that tends to separate children out, depending on what household they live in. So on one side, you’ve got unsupported children who may be living with family or grandparents that are taking care of them that won’t be able to claim this child support. What’s the difference between a sole parent claiming child support to put towards a child in their care for the things they need, and a grandparent or a sister or a cousin that is taking care of a family member’s child that needs that child support payment as well? You’ve got two classes of children there, and to say that we’ve got work going on with Oranga Tamariki that will deal with that—when will that work come across the desk? When are we going to deal with that and how much longer do the unsupported children have to be the second-class citizens to other children?

We’ve seen this in a few bills where children aren’t seen as equal, but they’re separated into whether they’re Oranga Tamariki kids, an unsupported child, or living with a sole parent. We’ve got different rights for children, and I just don’t see that as being OK.

So I really think that the unsupported child’s benefit should have been included within this bill, and that’s where it also becomes an issue of shortening the select committee process. We had submitters that came in to our select committee to talk about how great it was that unsupported children would be getting this. They hadn’t had time to go through the actual bill properly to understand that they were excluded, so some submitters didn’t even understand the bill that they were submitting on because that process was shortened and they didn’t have time to actually read through the bill and make sure that they understood it very well themselves. That just proves that we need to be very careful with how we’re dealing with these bills, and we need to be making sure that we’re giving them the time that they deserve to be scrutinised.

The other issue that ACT has with this bill is similar to what the previous speaker, the Hon Louise Upston, said about enabling liable parents who have the cost as a temporary additional support to 3 help pay their assessed child support. Taxpayers should not be subsidising this. It is the responsibility of a parent to pay their child support. If you have a child, you know it is your obligation to be supporting your child, and it’s up to you to make sure that you are doing that and that you can. I just feel that allowing it to be a cost for temporary additional support is something that we’re a little bit concerned about.

So we will support this, because I do feel that we have had a lot of people over the years speaking about having resented paying their child support and knowing that it wasn’t going directly to their children. I hope this does give parents a bit more faith in the system, knowing that the money will go directly to the children or to the parent that they’re paying for the children, and we’ll see if it improves on the amount of parents that actually are going to pay this. It may also encourage people to step up and actually name the father of their baby so that they can get child support from the parent that should be supporting the child that they’ve brought into this world.

So we do support this bill, but we do have some reservations, and we hope to speak to those more in the committee of the whole House. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Second Reading

Tēnā koe, Madam Speaker. I just want to say, before I go into the details of the bill, that every child, no matter their family situation, should have the means and should be unconditionally supported to thrive. It should not be a matter of whether they’re in a traditional Western-style, Victorian-era family or should be raised by a staunch sole parent or by a whole village. It does not matter. We should be enabling children to have what they need in order to lead healthy and thriving lives. And the Child Support (Pass On) Acts Amendment Bill will go some way towards that.

It will, within this slightly problematic child support system, ensure that caregivers are receiving child support payments. And this will affect tens of thousands of sole parents and lift a significant amount of children out of poverty. On average, children will be about $20 better off as a result of this bill. And I think it’s great that we’re seeing broad support across the House for this bill.

But I do want to push back on the repeated assertions, particularly from the National Party, on benefit dependency and children growing up in benefit-dependent households. I could have run a tally on how many times that has been said because then the member who keeps speaking about poor outcomes coming from growing up in a benefit-dependent household actually goes to the fact that it may be that benefits are too low to live on. Maybe has the member questioned the fact that these families have poor outcomes because we have created and designed a system to keep them in poverty—a political choice that the member’s party has upheld; a political choice that for far too many successive Governments we’ve created. So I don’t want to be hearing from that side of the House about benefit-dependent households having all these poor outcomes when these are the decisions that these members have taken in order to create a system that keeps calling our caregivers the most demeaning things, when actually we should all be rallying behind our caregivers to support them.

This bill, as I say, will go some way towards that. But, from the Green Party perspective, there are things that we would have liked to go further, because ultimately children should just be getting—in my view and in the Greens’ view—a universal child payment. An unconditional payment that is not tied to the family structure; one that allows people to thrive. We also, through the select committee process, saw that because of the way that the child support pass on will be treated as income, it will have complex interactions with things like the income-related rent subsidy and with your benefit entitlements. And we do acknowledge that the benefit system is already complicated to navigate and to understand your full and correct entitlements. So we do have concerns about this creating additional complexities, while acknowledging the benefits that it will bring to households.

In an ideal world with a longer select committee process, this could have been hashed through, but submitters who presented to this bill were overwhelmingly in favour of this. And having worked at the front line supporting people to access their entitlements at Work and Income, $20 may not seem like heaps, but it is cumulative and it is about the end goal that we’re working towards, which is not just to mildly alleviate poverty but to hopefully end it. That should be the goal.

I take that the members to my right were also talking about hoping that we can all come together to not support any child growing up in poverty, but when those statements are coupled with political decisions that have historically sanctioned sole parents and have created punitive conditions for sole parents for, say, in the past, not naming the other parent of the child in the birth certificate, it’s hard to take those comments seriously because, ultimately, if we’re not putting all of our efforts to ensure that all caregivers have level incomes and the means to preference children, that’s just rhetoric; it’s not action.

So the Green Party will be supporting this bill. We look forward to unpacking those complex interactions. But things like income-related rent subsidies for benefit entitlements and, as the previous speaker from ACT mentioned, the sort of distinction we’ve made for the unsupported child’s benefit for the purposes of treating it as income. So we’re looking forward to those exchanges with the Minister, and the Green Party supports this bill.

Second Reading

Fa‘afetai tele, Madam Speaker. And happy vaiaso ol e Gagana Samoa—happy Samoan Language Week, Madam Speaker.

This, the Child Support (Pass On) Acts Amendment Bill, continues this Government’s work to make the welfare system in Aotearoa New Zealand fairer and ensure that Kiwis live with dignity. That includes people who are on benefits, that includes sole parents, and that includes kids. Every Kiwi should live with dignity.

This bill does that by removing the discriminatory policy—and it is discriminatory—that has withheld child support payments from sole parent beneficiaries. This bill fixes that inequality by passing on the child support administered by IRD directly to the sole parent beneficiaries, just like it currently does for other parents receiving child support. It will still be income-tested as well.

In a nutshell, this is about fairness. It shouldn’t matter whether you’re a sole parent on a benefit or a sole parent that has work: you’re a sole parent looking after a child and the other parent is liable to help you pay for that child, and you should be receiving that money so you can support your child. It’s as simple as that. I don’t understand how others across the House can see it any different. That child deserves the money that’s coming from that child support payment, and that’s it in a nutshell. This is about supporting all New Zealanders, and this is about supporting the children.

As a previous case manager—and also working in the social sector for decades in the Ōtaki electorate—I know the difference that, on average, $20 is going to make to a household. These people aren’t just evidence and stats and numbers in a piece of report. These people have names that came to my desk. These people—sole parents that were desperate, that hadn’t eaten for three days but they made sure their kids ate, and they were so stretched that they were asking for food packages or whatever they needed—that $20 is a game-changer to them.

Why shouldn’t they get the same amount as anyone else? It shouldn’t matter that they’re on a benefit. This is a game-changer, this is a no-brainer, and this needs to happen. I commend this bill to the House.

Second Reading

Simon O’Connor—five-minute call.

Second Reading

Look, tonight’s a debate between, if you will, principles and pragmatism. And this side of the House—actually alongside the Government—is prepared to move on the pragmatic side. There are Kiwis raising their children under enormous hardships. And we see the need to step in and make things a little bit easier. I say a little bit easier, because, actually, no matter what happens here tonight, there’s still enormous pressures which those solo parents are going to face—amongst others, by the way—

💬 Terisa Ngobi: Don’t add to it with judgment, then.

—there’s so many different groups and dynamics. There’s some heckles coming from the other side. Of course, my wife for a number of years was a solo parent. My wife and I do foster care. We try to look after a number of people in our community, actually quite quietly—I’m actually now slightly embarrassed to have even said these things in the House, because we attempt to do it quietly. What we see, though, is a positive step amongst an area, which requires lots of steps. But why I started by saying this is a tension between the philosophical and the pragmatic is on this side, and, maybe I’ll just speak personally, philosophically, if you have children, you look after—sorry, the parents, Madam Speaker, should look after their own children. That is part of the social contract. The Crown, the State, whatever you want to call it, should stay out of that, by and large. This whole “community and village to raise a child”—it’s just such a trite phrase, and I’m not even going to try and elaborate on that in this little speech tonight. It is the responsibility of the mother and the father—and I’m being very deliberate with my language there: the mother and the father—to raise the child. The State, of course, for pragmatic and right reasons has stepped in to assist. That’s why we have the likes of these various benefits.

But let’s be under no illusions tonight. While this is the right and pragmatic decision, we are asking all New Zealand taxpayers to fund what the Government’s proposing, hundreds of millions of dollars. And, again, the principle is being offended here, the principle that parents look after their children and that the State is not required is being slightly undermined.

But I really want to stress, from my side, the pragmatic element kicks in here, which is why I’m actually quite proud and happy to support the bill. We do need to support these families. But there is just that wider dynamic, that social contract, for want of a better quick phrase, where actually the State, the Crown, or the taxpayer does expect individuals and their families to step up and pay the cost of their choices, by the way—their choices, their actions.

💬 Angela Roberts: Children don’t have choices.

And so today—and I’m hearing the usual stuff: “Oh, the children.” Yeah, you’re right; the children don’t make these decisions. I used to work in the Ministry of Social Development. I can tell you the number of times people came in, basically using their children as blackmail. I’ve always found that actually quite disgraceful. You’re right. The children do struggle and suffer, but the parents have made choices. And, fundamentally, what’s happening here is the choices of parents are being transferred to a whole lot of good, hard-working, taxpaying Kiwis.

Fundamentally and, as I say, philosophically, there’s a bit of a problem here—that whole personal responsibility side. But, as I say, right from the start, pragmatically, as someone who has a little bit of insight—and I want to stress that; there are others here who have actually had a much wider and greater insight into these things, and I’ll happily defer—actually, this is the right decision to support. But let’s be under no illusion: this is going to cost a lot of money on top of a lot of spending by this Government, and it’s only one step. It’s only one step. We are in a cost of living crisis. Expenses are going through the roof. This will not solve the problem. But I am, in this instance, happy to commend the bill to the House.

Second Reading

Debbie Ngarewa-Packer—five minutes.

Second Reading

Tēnā tātou e te Whare. I’m a result of a tribe who brought us up collectively and continued to do that model despite having our natural development interfered with by the State. So I’m proud to rise on behalf of Te Paati Māori to speak to the second reading of the Child Support (Pass On) Acts Amendment Bill.

This bill will put to end the injustice of the Government refusing to pass on child support payments to the parents who are entitled to them just because they’ve been on a benefit. The estimated effect of this is approximately 141,550 single-parent families who receive an average of $65 per week of child support income with a median gain of $24 per week—$24 that those whānau need.

Following the abatement of income-tested financial assistance, those families will gain, overall, by an average, to my understanding, of $47 per week. So we will be voting in support of this bill, and we acknowledge the Minister for addressing this long-overdue issue.

We are concerned that child support payments will be considered income when determining entitlement to a benefit or other assistance. Honouring a long-overdue entitlement should not mean that already established income support is cut back.

While the net effect of the change will still be positive, Governments should not be continuing with such a mean-spirited approach to the welfare system. So we don’t want to see anything penalised because of these changes.

Whānau experience intergenerational poverty due to dispossession, land loss, and systemic racism, which was all created by the Crown. Inequality, inequity—again, all created by the Crown. The resources and the labour that have built the wealth of this nation—and the 1 percent who hoard it—were stolen and exploited from indigenous peoples and the working class; sadly, a lot who make up these figures of solo parents.

In the 1980s, the regulations and the industries gave our people some sense of agency, which were smashed to funnel more wealth to the rich, so unemployment soared. I’ve spoken about this numerous times, coming from a community such as Pātea. Instead of responding with care and compassion and restoring our dignity, the State responded with cruel punishment and hate.

In the 1990s, the welfare system was torn apart, benefits were slashed, aggressive media campaigns targeting the poorest in society, portraying people with the least as being the biggest problem. Sadly, I hear some of that tonight.

Solo parents, sole parents—who are disproportionately women, and, as I said earlier, wāhine Māori—have been treated with contempt for decades. There is never a chance to catch a break. Poverty is the norm, and barrier after barrier has been put in place to prevent whānau to live with dignity, to be able to raise their babies in the village carefully and without judgment. Simply surviving has been a daily struggle.

In 2019—and I know I’m singing to the choir, largely, in the House tonight—the Welfare Expert Advisory Group put forward dozens of recommendations focused on restoring dignity to the social security system in Aotearoa. If all the recommendations were implemented, we would be a lot closer to ending entrenched poverty.

We acknowledge that this bill addresses one of those recommendations, but, again, we remain really frustrated and hōhā at the lack of transformational thinking that we need to see coming from this Government in the refusal to act with courage and urgency to ensure that our whānau can do more than survive, but actually live with dignity and break free of this intergenerational trauma that holds us back and, sadly, sees us stereotyped by those, sadly, on my right.

I want to acknowledge those on the front line of poverty in this country: to our single mums and dads, our kaumātua, our tamariki, those whaea and those nannies who are working two-to-three jobs to put kai on the table; to the Whānau Ora practitioners; to the Kia Ora Hauora Champions; to the groups like Child Poverty Action Group, who have consistently pushed for lifesaving policies like extending the in-work tax credit to all whānau; to advocates like Auckland Action Poverty Group, who hold the powerful to—and the power to—account on behalf of our people.

This bill represents one small step, and Te Paati Māori thanks all those who have fought so hard for it. Our people have had enough of small steps; we need to push forward. This is not a time to be thinking about piecemeal change.

I guess, on that note, I just want to say, if we’re talking about passing on income, let’s talk about taxing the rich, let’s talk about making sure that wealth is redistributed, let’s talk about passing on the wealth they extracted from stolen assets back to tangata whenua and all families—all families—in Aotearoa who are struggling to put food on the table, to pay power bills, to get homes, to see doctors and dentists. This is what transformation looks like, and this is what Te Paati Māori will support. Kia ora rā.

Second Reading

Thank you, Madam Speaker. This has been an extremely interesting debate, listening to it, as I am, from my position of not being part of the Social Services and Community Committee, who have done such fantastic work on it.

I’m just incredibly interested by hearing some of the views being expressed about—and this isn’t the first time this evening; this is an ongoing conversation where the rhetoric that I hear sometimes from the Opposition is in complete conflict with my understanding of humanity. It’s in complete conflict with my lived experience of working with people who come from various different walks of life, some of whom may be on the benefit, some of whom may be solo parents. It’s incredibly easy to other people; it’s incredibly easy to other solo parents. If you are fortunate enough to be in a relationship that is stable and solid and without flaw, good on you. It’s not my experience that all fathers act responsibly with regard to the care and support—especially financial support—of their children once that relationship has ended.

I’m just going to share a little case study with you. Imagine, if you will, a middle-class woman escaping an abusive relationship. The father declines to pay child support as a form of financial control. Listening to some of the speakers here, you would think that that never happened. You would think that men did not use money—and I’m sure women, too, but here, most of the people we’re talking about are solo mums. You would think that men never used money as a way to continue to control the women in their lives—their ex-partners—and their children. It’s unfortunately the case, though. When I saw this Child Support (Pass On) Acts Amendment Bill come before me, what I saw was a way to start to address some of the inequities caused as a result of some behaviour by people as a result of maybe being reluctant to pay because they were reluctant to give Inland Revenue money rather than their children, even if they choose to pay.

I commend this bill to the House, and I really hope that it does as it says—raise 14,000 more children out of poverty. Thank you.

Second Reading

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise to give National’s final speech on this Child Support (Pass On) Acts Amendment Bill. As previous colleagues in the National caucus have said, National supports this bill, but our support is not without some significant reservations. There is no doubt that this bill goes some way to resolving some inconsistencies, in that it passes on, or makes payment of, any child support payments through IRD directly to beneficiaries receiving the sole parent rate of main benefit.

My colleague, the Hon Louise Upston, recalled that the genesis of this bill comes from many of the aspects that were brought through in the Welfare Expert Advisory Group report. I think we should remember that that report was released four years ago this month. Four years ago, in May 2019, that report was released, and yet now, at this stage, we have the frustration of looking at a truncated process that has been rushed through. The public have not had the opportunity to look at what is a complex bill.

I listened carefully to one of the Government speakers saying how important that $20 a week is to beneficiary families, and she’s quite right: $20 is an important amount. But my golly, it would have been even more important four years ago if $20 had been going into their pockets, because the cost of living crisis and the inflation has, well and truly, over four years, eaten that $20 a week up, and more. So those families are not going to be better off than they would have if this bill had been acted on four years ago. Let’s be very clear about that.

The bill introduces the new income-charging rules that are specific to the child support payments, and the automated charging of child support payments as income. What this means is that the child support payments will not be deducted against the taxpayer payment. The child support from the liable parent will not be offset against the taxpayer contribution. Now, a lot on the other side have been terribly enthusiastic about this bill, and quite rightly—that pragmatic side of us says that, yes, we should be doing this for those children. But we should not lose sight of the fact that this is $354 million that is taxpayer money. It’s very easy to be generous with other people’s money.

Will there be more child support payments collected? Well, like my ACT colleague, Karen Chhour, we are hopeful that there will be more money coming from those liable parents, because, similarly, I have had, particularly, fathers come into my electorate office saying that they resent the money not going to their children. We will be looking carefully at the evaluations to see if, in fact, there is greater collection of the support payments.

But of concern to us all should be that the number of individuals receiving sole parent support has increased by 21 percent since Labour has been in Government. Despite the comments of our Green colleague, Ricardo Menéndez March, about benefit dependency, we do not see benefit dependency as success, we do not see benefit dependency as being kind, and we do not see benefit dependency as being caring, as some of the other speakers have somehow concluded that it is. I can say from my years in vocational education, there was nothing more satisfying than seeing women, particularly, coming to second-chance education and seeing their self-esteem grow and seeing their sense of worthiness grow with gaining a qualification and seeing themselves as being able to enter into the workforce.

We want to see fewer children in poverty, but we are never going to get children out of poverty through taking taxpayer money and putting it towards them. The only way we will see fewer children in poverty is if we support those women, particularly, to get into employment.

So we are supporting this as a pragmatic change, but we do not see it as the solution. This Government should be concerned about the impact that $20 is going to have on these families, because they have absolutely eroded the worth of that $20 through the inflation and the cost of living crisis that has come about through their actions and through the inactions of this Government. This Government seems incapable of joining the dots between their reckless spending and inflation and the impact that has on fixed income families and, particularly, on beneficiaries. Just putting taxpayer money out there does not solve the problem. There has to be discipline brought to Government spending to also solve the problem.

Yes, we will support this, but it is not a solution. It is a stopgap and we must be putting much more effort—and we would have been much happier had we seen parallel effort from this Government with a focus to reduce the number of children in benefit-dependent homes, but we certainly have not seen that. However, National certainly has a policy of welfare that works, that will see young job seekers receiving proper needs assessments, plans to address barriers to work, job coaching from community organisations, and, where it’s needed, rewards and sanctions approaches so that there is more than just throwing taxpayer money at a problem. It would be useful if this Government could see that parallel action needs to take place.

So we are supporting it, but certainly with significant reservations, with a sense of frustration and concern that four years after the initial Welfare Expert Advisory Group report, we are now rushing this bill through. And, certainly, we are concerned at how this has eroded the support that is going to be received by the sole parent families from this. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Second Reading

Talofa lava, Madam Speaker. Listening to the previous speaker, Penny Simmonds, I just want to reflect on some of the things that I learnt in my previous role monitoring child health.

What I learnt is that our country’s child poverty rates weren’t the result of a single policy. What they were result of is a whole series of policies over time that undermined family incomes. Things like National’s 1991 benefit cuts, them selling off our State houses, their failure to adequately lift the minimum wage. Similarly, reversing this requires a series of policies. In this respect, I’m really proud of the work that our Government’s done to lift family incomes. Things like the Best Start payment, winter energy payment, increasing benefits, and reinstating the Training Incentive Allowance.

This bill is a further step in this direction, because what it does is it removes a discriminatory policy that withholds child support payments only from sole parents receiving a benefit. So what it means is they can be passed on, as already happens for other parents that are on a benefit. So once implemented, it’s estimated around 41,550 sole parent families will be better off by a median gain of $20 per week, which is really significant.

And I’d like to just thank all those who took the time to make a submission. The vast majority did support this bill, although some were concerned that we didn’t want to inadvertently create extra benefit debt. But we were reassured that the way the income-charging rules for child support payments had been designed would aim to prevent that. So this is just a really important bill and it will lift thousands of children out of poverty. I’m really happy to commend it to the House.

Motion agreed to.

Bill read a second time.

It is my very great pleasure to rise in this debate to talk about the first Budget that the Hipkins Labour Government has delivered. I’d like to congratulate Chris Hipkins and I’d like to congratulate our Minister of Finance, Grant Robertson, on delivering his sixth Budget.

This was a Budget that did exactly what it said on the tin: support for today and building for tomorrow. We know in our Government that there are many New Zealanders who are doing it tough right now. We’re here to support them, as we have in recent years, by doing the basics well. But this is a Budget that also provides strong investment in the services that New Zealanders rely on, and it has to get those priorities right. We still have to do the building for tomorrow piece. While we need to support New Zealanders today, we do need to make sure that we are building for our future so that we are ensuring that New Zealand and New Zealanders are well set up for the decades ahead.

Budget 2023 has made significant investment in education, health, and housing, and this is the right thing to do. This is the bedrock of opportunity for each and every New Zealander. A warm, dry place to call home, the right to be well, and the right to an education are all the things that sit as the values base that underpins Budget 2023.

But as well as being a Minister of the Crown, I’m also a very proud representative of the Wigram electorate, and when I go around the Wigram electorate, I can see how some of the measures that we have put in place are there for everyday New Zealanders. I want to talk about the $5 prescription fee and removing that. I know from talking to my constituents and talking to pharmacies in my electorate that this is a significant issue for a number of constituents.

I visited with a chemist last week who was telling me that he had patients—constituents of mine—who would go into that chemist and make their own decisions on which one of their prescribed medicines from their GP they could afford to pick up that week. They would go in and they would have to say, “I can only afford two of those six medicines that my GP has prescribed for me. Can you help me make the choice on which ones? Is it my blood pressure medication, is it my diabetes medication, or is it something else that I really need?”, and that is not the bedrock of a fair and decent society. This does make a difference, so it is alarming—and I know it is alarming for many New Zealanders—to hear the National Party making absolute claims that they will bring back that surcharge for prescriptions, and they believe it because they know it was the National Party that brought in those surcharges for prescriptions in the very first place.

The other thing that I have heard from my constituents and from pharmacists in the electorate is how important that local pharmacy is as part of the infrastructure of health within our communities and within our neighbourhoods. While I was visiting one of the pharmacies, a constituent came in and he was so happy that he could actually return to picking up his medicine from that local pharmacy, which he’d been going to for years, because he would no longer, from 1 July, have to pay that surcharge.

Getting into the real world shows just how important that prescription charge removal is. We hear belittling of it, saying, “Well, it’s OK. It’s only $100 a year, and then the free prescriptions kick in.”, but if you have to go and pick up $75 worth of prescription in one go and you’re on the pension, that’s $75 you cannot afford, and I think it shows just how out of touch the National Party are.

There were some other things that I was incredibly proud of in that Budget that will make such a difference. I want to talk about the bringing in of KiwiSaver contributions for parents who are on paid parental leave. This was a Budget for women. This was a Budget with so many wins for women in it, and none more than the fact that their retirement security is not undermined by time out of the workforce. They know that they are still building pūtea and their children’s future through retirement savings throughout that time they take out of the workforce. These are the things that make a difference, and it is something I am incredibly proud that we’ve been able to put into this Budget.

I’m also incredibly proud—and I know it is going to matter to my constituents—of the savings that can be made around early childhood education. I know that nearly $135 a week for those families that already have their two-year-olds in early childhood education is going to make a significant change. I also know that that up to $135 a week will make a significant difference for those families who are making the decision about whether or not a parent can go back to work. These are the things that make a difference to the lives of everyday New Zealanders, and these are the things that are incredibly important.

As well as the support for today that we’ve put in place, I also want to talk about some of the long-term funding and thinking and vision that sits within the pages of Budget 2023. I want to talk about infrastructure spending. The Government has taken significant steps to finally address the infrastructure deficit that we have in this country. We had committed $71 billion worth of infrastructure investment over five years, in addition to the $45 billion that we have spent in the last five years on infrastructure, and it is this deficit that is one of the most crippling deficits that New Zealand faces and that we simply have to continue to have a commitment to address. Infrastructure sounds like such an abstract thing, but for those in our communities, that is their schools, that is their hospitals, that is our public housing, that is their rail and their road network—the very things that make everyday life absolutely livable and that are critical for our communities, our neighbourhoods, our cities, and our country.

One of the things that we will be doing alongside this Budget is also working through the Infrastructure Action Plan. This comes out of the Infrastructure Strategy that is the result of our Government’s commitment to making sure that we are taking a strategic approach to infrastructure, that we are doing that plan, and that we do need to do that futureproofing of our infrastructure.

But, in the final minute and a bit of my allotted time, I want to talk about the commitment that this Government has yet again made to public housing in New Zealand. This Budget continues the funding that we have put in over our previous five Budgets to amount to the funding of 21,000 new public housing places. This is something that is turning around decades of under-investment—

💬 Nicola Willis: The waiting list is longer. There’s more kids in motels.

—and worse in public housing. Now, I hear the former housing spokesperson for the National Party calling out, “What’s with the waiting list?” Well, what I can tell that member is that if they had not sold off the houses when they were in Government and if they had built at the rate that we are building public houses, there would be over 20,000 additional public housing places in New Zealand today. So I know that there are members in that National Party that feel the shame of not only their inaction but their dereliction of duty on public housing in their nine years in Government. But our Budget 2023 continues our absolute commitment to turning around that dereliction of duty and to rebuilding a commitment to public housing in this country, and that is something that we will continue to do.

I look forward to hearing the plans from other political parties about what their commitment to public housing going forward is. What operational funding would they put in to show that they too are intent on fixing a housing crisis?

Talk about avoid the elephant in the room. Here we are going into the third year of a cost of living crisis, and did that Minister think that she might consider talking about what her Budget actually does for the back pockets and bank accounts of everyday working people? No, they didn’t rate a mention, because what that Government is obsessed with and focused on is how many press releases they can issue congratulating themselves for spending New Zealanders’ money better—they think—than they could themselves. And what was the latest example of that from the very Minister that just sit down? She decided that the best way to use New Zealanders’ hard-earned taxpayer cash was to launch an all guns blazing campaign—ads on TV, ads on social media, a full-colour printed booklet out to hundreds of thousands of letterboxes—advising people on what they should be doing to save money. And what were the tips? The tips were, of course, they should unplug their appliances, they should keep their showers to less than five minutes, and perhaps invest in a slow cooker. That’s what that Minister’s advice is to everyday New Zealanders struggling through a cost of living crisis made unbearably worse by the decision making and economic management of her Government.

It’s a disgrace and actually what we needed in this Budget was not Ministers congratulating themselves on yet more press releases; we needed three simple things: (1) a plan to grow this economy and make it more prosperous so this can be a country that can afford the cancer drugs, the high-quality schools, the hospitals that New Zealanders deserve. Was there a plan for growth? No, there wasn’t. What this Budget needed to do was to demonstrate that Ministers have finally got the message that people don’t just want spending for spending’s sake; they want value delivered from every Government dollar. They want to see Ministers tightening their belts on wasteful spending just as New Zealanders have had to do in their own households. Did they get it in this Budget? No, they did not.

The third thing that this Budget needed to do was it needed to redress the balance that has become so out of kilter these past five years, where the Government is taking more and more cash from New Zealanders while they get hit by inflation, hit by the cost of living, and are being required to pay more and more tax. This Budget should have delivered tax relief to working people and it failed to do it. So on all three counts, we have in front of us a failing Budget that doesn’t respond to the challenges New Zealand is facing.

Actually, the New Zealand economy is in a really fragile place, and you can see that with the struggles that everyday New Zealanders are having in their homes. Inflation has been out of control for more than two years, and according to these official forecasts, it won’t come back into target, not later this year, not next year, but not until 2025. If these people are still in charge, prices are going to keep increasing at a clip and inflation will remain out of control. That is what New Zealanders talk to me about. They say, “I worry that every time I go to the supermarket, my groceries cost me more.” You know, I spoke to someone at the supermarket the other day. She works at the supermarket and she talked to me about this thing called checkout anxiety where she has growing numbers of people who, when they see that number flick up on the screen, they look away and then they look back, and she said that more and more often what they do when they look back at that number is they go to the groceries and they take things away. They take the cheese away, they take the biscuits away. They can’t afford them. But what Megan Woods thinks their money should be used for is not tax relief—no, they don’t deserve that; they don’t deserve to keep more of their own wages; she should have it so she can send colour brochures out to people telling them to unplug their appliances.

What we see in our economy is that with the roaring inflation that Grant Robertson has done everything he can to fuel, we are left with one big heavy lever and it’s Adrian Orr’s interest rate crank-up. Interest rates have gone up faster than they ever have in New Zealand’s history. They have gone up so fast that a family with a $500,000 mortgage who fixed it two years ago and who are re-fixing it this week will find themselves having to find hundreds of dollars more every fortnight—more than $700 more, just to service their mortgage. And what happened? The week after Grant Robertson laid down this big-spending Budget, interest rates cranked up once again. But the people opposite don’t seem to care about mortgage holders in this country. They are not focused on them at all.

Then we look at what’s happening with the economy in terms of our ability to pay our way in the world. We now have the biggest current account deficit—the difference between what we’re earning and spending—than we’ve had in the history of records of that number: the biggest deficit since 1988, the biggest deficit in the developed world. Do you know what that means? It means simply this: we are not earning our way in the world, and yet the Budget does nothing to address it. Borrowing is up massively in this Budget. I think New Zealanders deserve to know that while debt pre-COVID was around $5.4 billion, next year it will hit $91 billion. This is quite literally a Government that is borrowing more every day and is set to let debt keep climbing and climbing and climbing. By 2026, the costs of the interest on that debt alone will be the fourth-biggest item of spending in New Zealand after social security, health, and education.

What New Zealanders say to me is “What do we have to show for it?” Because the spending has gone up at such a clip that when you break it down to a household basis, it’s up $28,000 a year per New Zealand household compared to when Labour came to office. And so every New Zealand household, every New Zealand family, should be asking, “Have I got $28,000 worth of value out of Labour? Am I seeing less violent crime? Am I seeing surgery waiting lists being cut? Am I seeing shorter waits for the emergency room? Am I seeing more children attending school regularly? Am I seeing more achievement in our schools?” The answer to all of those questions is no, because we have members opposite who have a remarkable, extraordinary ability to spend and spend and not deliver results for the people whose money they’re using to pay the cheques. The result is this: New Zealanders are being taxed more than ever, at a time when New Zealanders are making extremely tough decisions to balance their household budgets, to pay their bills, when we have, increasingly, people turning up at food banks because they cannot pay the mortgage, pay the rates, pay for the swimming lessons and pay for the food, when we have New Zealanders under so much financial pressure that a lawyer I spoke to last week who works in the area of marriage break-ups, said, “Nicola, I’ve never been so busy. It’s really sad. But when mortgages get this big, it puts a lot of pressure on relationships, a lot of pressure on families, and we are seeing those cracks in our community.”

So what does this Government do? It says not only do you have to face record inflation, not only do you have to face really high interest rates, but we are going to tax you more, too. New Zealanders have been pushed into higher tax brackets. They’re paying a far higher proportion of their income in tax. The tax take for the Government is up so much that Treasury warns in these documents that the tax taken from wages alone will grow on average around $4 billion a year over the next four years, and a billion of that is just inflation taking money from New Zealanders’ pockets. It’s not right, it’s not fair, and a Government with an ounce of sense, with an ounce of care for the people who are struggling would say, “You know what, we’re going to stop some of this silly wasteful spending. We’re going to stop Michael Wood spending $51 million consulting on a cycle bridge over Auckland Harbour. We’re going to stop giving $2.5 million to the Mongrel Mob to do a little bit of drug counselling. We’re going to stop sending colour brochures out, telling people to have shorter showers, because all of that stuff can’t be justified when New Zealanders are doing it extremely tough, and we’re going to offer tax relief.” But they refused to do that. And so what we have, opposite, is a Government that is running out of other people’s money. It has completely run out of new ideas for fixing this economy, and this is a Government that is running out of time.

The Budget debate that we’re engaged in is an important part of the parliamentary process so I do want to start off with some acknowledgments to colleagues around the Chamber. The first one that I want to say is a big tēnā koe—that’s “thank you”—to the speaker who’s just spoken to us for the last 10 minutes, Nicola Willis. The second thing that I would do is thank every other person in this Chamber for their mahi, or work, for enduring the last 10 minutes of the member’s speech. Finally, could I just acknowledge the pīkarikari hunahuna, or rare misstep, of the member opposite earlier this week as he chose to try and make a tacky little culture war out of my colleague Kiri Allan’s work to try and bring in bilingual signs across New Zealand. His mistake, of course, was that he didn’t speak to Chris Bishop, Chris Luxon, or any of his other front-bench colleagues who have run away from that tacky little culture war just as quickly as they could, and I thank the member for Pakuranga for his efforts in that regard.

That particular episode laid bare the small, petty, negative, and divisive approach of the party opposite at the moment. This is a party, as we heard over the last 10 minutes, that is entirely negative in its outlook, has no new solutions to offer New Zealanders, and is focused instead simply on creating division for political advantage—and cuts; cuts wherever they can find them. That contrasted so strongly with the speeches in the Budget debate from the Minister of Finance and the Prime Minister, speeches that were focused on national inclusion, on how we extend a hand of help and a hand up to New Zealanders who are finding things challenging in the current environment, but most importantly on how we plan for the future of our country. There was nothing that made that contrast between this Labour Government and the negative National Opposition so clear over the course of Budget week than the issue of prescription charges. This is a policy that every single member on this side of the House and I daresay on that side of the House has received volumes of feedback about over the past couple of weeks.

Let’s be very clear and have this on the record. It is the policy of this Government to make it cheaper for Kiwis to access the medicines they need when they are sick, and it is the policy of the “coalition of cuts” to make Kiwis pay more for their medicine when they are sick—no bones about it. And that tells you and everyone who was watching this Budget debate everything that they need to know about the priorities of this Government and the priorities of the “coalition of cuts.”

I am proud of that investment. I’ve heard from community members, I’ve heard from pharmacists up and down my electorate of Puketāpapa Mount Roskill, who speak to the fact that this is the right thing to do to ensure that folks in our community don’t have to worry about getting that medicine and that we take their cost of living pressure off them. It just makes sense. We heard from the previous speaker who likes to make so much of the National Party’s economic credibility. But this is a party that knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing, to the detriment of the long-term interests of our country. What happens when a person can’t afford or is worried about having to pay for their prescription charge and they don’t go and get it? We had 130,000 people who didn’t pick up their scripts last year. What happens to those people that can’t afford five bucks to pick up the prescription charge? Well, very often, the answer is that they will get sicker and they will need more healthcare, potentially in the hospital system. Now, that’s terrible for that person and their whānau—none of us should be happy about that—but it’s also the most economically ludicrous and stupid thing that you could hope to do. It is far better to invest up front in the health and the wellbeing of our people rather than deal with the long-term consequences of that, which will erode human capital, erode human wellbeing, and cost us all more as a country in the end.

I turn to another significant Budget investment that speaks directly to that as well, and that is one that I know that every member on this side of the House is exceptionally proud of, and that is our investment in bringing back the training incentive allowance. We hear so much from the other side of the House about the upgrading of people and the value of work, and that people should get off the benefit and into work, that they should improve themselves, and that they should get into education and climb the ladder. But when it comes to actually providing a little bit of support, a little bit of a hand up to people in that situation who are on benefit and who want to climb the ladder and want to get into tertiary education, the record on that side of the House was to pull the ladder up. It is this side of the House and Minister Carmel Sepuloni who has led that change. It means that from this point forward, that training incentive allowance will be there. Boy, people will still have to work hard for it. People on benefits, sole parents and the like, often have so much that they have to deal with. These people are going to still have to work damned hard to get that degree, to get that diploma, to get into work, but with a little bit of support, a little bit of belief in those people, this Government is going to back them to make their way through. And that is what our Government believes, and that is the difference between this side of the House and that side of the House.

There is so much else to be proud of in this Budget in terms of what we’re doing for supporting our young people as well. I want to ask the other side of the House: how about the Apprenticeship Boost? This is a policy that our Government put in place during COVID, that period when employers were facing hard decisions about whether they kept people on or not. We saw what happened during the global financial crisis under the previous Government, where often the first people to lose their jobs—last on, first off—were the young apprentices, and we were determined not to see that happen again, because, firstly, we want to support those young people, and, secondly, if you have a long-term view about the future, they’re exactly the young people that we need to invest in. They’re in there building skills and confidence, building and growing our economy. So the Apprenticeship Boost, which we brought in during COVID, has supported around 200,000 of our young people to make sure that they sustain their apprenticeships, contribute to their whānau, build skills, build great careers in the trades, and contribute to our economy.

We’re making it permanent—we’re putting the Apprenticeship Boost in there to make sure that those young people and their employers have that little bit of backing from our Government. Here’s my challenge to that side of the House, who are negative, negative, negative all the time: what would they do about the Apprenticeship Boost? Would they take it away again and see our apprenticeship system crumble as it did under successive National Governments in the 1990s and the 2010s?

One final thing on education, one that hasn’t been spoken about all that much. On the evening of the Budget after Grant Robertson had read it out, I received a text message from a champion bloke in my community, who leads a team of social workers, working with our young people, often with really tough backgrounds. He said, “Thank you for the investment in alternative education, a sector that’s done it really tough over a long period of time. But this is a sector that often picks up our young people who have fallen through all of the other cracks, fallen through the education system in the primary sector—don’t even worry about tertiary education—kids that have dropped out of school often have the most difficult and complex backgrounds, and the kids who are powder kegs if we don’t get around them and get them on to a better path and help them to realise their potential. And it’s often alternative education that does that.” The additional $30 million through Budget 2023 is going to help that sector provide that support to some of the people in our communities who need it the most.

Finally, I do have to turn to some of the outstanding initiatives in the field of transport that came through in Budget 2023. I’m really proud of the fact that this is a Government that is going to make it cheaper for over two million Kiwis to use public transport around our country, with free fares for our under-13s, half-price fares for under-25s and everyone with a Community Services Card, and half-price total mobility fares for our disabled community. This is double- or triple-duty—it’s about easing cost of living pressures for those families. It’s potentially a $30 a week saving for a Kiwi family with two kids using public transport. It’s about reducing congestion and reducing carbon emissions by getting people on to more public transport as well. It’s a policy that wins all round, and it’s just going to help Kiwis that little bit more with some of those cost of living pressures.

This is the biggest public transport package that any recent Government has offered—cheaper fares for Kiwi families, better pay for our bus drivers, and a huge investment in the lower North Island trains to more than double the services on the Wairarapa and the Kāpiti lines so that more people in this region can get on to clean modern tri-modal trains to make journeys around the region

We’ve also invested in the electric vehicle (EV) charging network. Our Government has taken New Zealand from being one of the worst-performing countries in the world to one of the best-performing countries in the world for EV uptake, and with our $120 million to build out a nationwide EV charging network with fast-charging stations around the country, public charging stations in every small town of more than 2,000 people, we’re going to open up that opportunity to more and more people. This is a Budget that is about securing things for Kiwis in difficult times now, but planning for the future. What a contrast with the “coalition of cuts.”

This is a split call—Damien Smith.

The last two weeks have not been kind to Minister of Finance Grant Robertson’s Budget. It’s his last Budget with this Hipkins Government, and even he and the Prime Minister have flattered to deceive. It’s been a fizzer, a cold shower was needed, and there’s only one appliance to unplug: this Government.

Sure, it was a big-spending Budget, but there was nothing in it for hard-working New Zealanders and nothing to help with their household cost of living crisis. The kindness proves to have been cynical, and Government plays on its big-spending, big-borrowing, driving deficits as the rest of New Zealanders tighten the purse strings. They presented no plan for growth, no tax relief, just costs.

Robertson’s first objective and legacy should have been on controlling inflation.

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Mr Smith, we use full names in the House, please.

Yes. The Minister’s first objective and legacy should have been on controlling inflation and the cost of living crisis. He now leaves the legacy of Government spending reaching an all-time high and billions in debt charged to our kids and grandkids. Rising prices hurt businesses, workers, consumers, and household family members. Even in non-inflationary times, the Public Finance Act requires the Minister of Finance to exercise prudent fiscal management.

Simply, tough choices were not made on Government resources in this process, and the recovery process has been set back to 2025, 2026. A budgeted increase, and on COVID spending of 12.6 percent, nearly doubles the rate of inflation, with the economy at full employment. Now, that was hardly prudent in these times.

Tax revenue is at 37 percent of GDP under this Budget, and it’s up 2.5 percent of pre-COVID taxation levels. Core Crown expenditure in this Budget is up 33 percent, and it was as low as 27 percent in 2018—and $60 billion more in taxes and spending in the last 10 years has doubled.

Are we happy with this return? Are we happy with this Budget? Are we happy with this management of the economy? Are we happy with core Crown spending being 11 percent higher than revenues?

Then, to add to the cost of living pressures, the Reserve Bank (RBNZ) had to raise interest rates by 25 basis points. Governor Orr claimed the bank has raised the official cash rate high enough to contain inflation. This is a mighty statement from the RBNZ, and the Treasury will also be held accountable for its assumptions in this Budget.

It required Orr to ignore the Budget’s surge in spending and take projected future climbs in expenditure as a percentage of GDP at face value. That’s what we’ve been doing for years now: taking the Minister at face value. Yet, the Minister has persistently failed to keep spending within past forecasts, and this is leading to financial instability.

But even if these projections above are accurate, Treasury concluded that Budgets would keep interest rates higher for longer, and a cap on future rates rises is cold comfort for hard-working Kiwis already hurting from high interest rates.

Then we come to all the dollops of poorly directed spending. The Minister who talked about wellbeing has issued nothing more than cynical election bribes in this Budget. Had Robertson been motivated by wellbeing—sorry, the Minister—his spending would have been more directly targeted. Free prescriptions for the residents of Remuera and Karori hardly address needs. Middle-class welfare was bad enough, but subsidising the video game industry was unfathomable. This Budget should have been about putting food on the table. It’s not a game and game makers can’t help with that. Kiwis don’t care whether their video games are made here or in Australia.

But perhaps the Budget’s biggest fault is what it didn’t do. It didn’t address the affordability crisis, crime, Pharmac, and other health benefits. And now we have a Budget which will show negatives for the next period. As Roger Partridge said, “All-in-all, the whiff from [this] sixth Budget just gets stronger. [And we hope that the] voters don’t sniff [this Minister] out.” ACT knows it will support hard-working Kiwis in the future.

Thank you, Mr Speaker—to speak to the Vote and appropriations in the Budget for primary industries, agri, all things forestry, biosecurity, and food safety. Minister, if you’re a rural person, you’re affronted by the vacuous and asinine nature of this $1.1 billion appropriated in that Vote. It speaks to $176 million for policy design and initiatives. Trying to reconcile that when you’re a rural New Zealander, affronted by all the nonsense that the rural sector is trying to digest—policies in and around on-farm management; emissions control, what that looks like; the development of methane mitigation technologies. Well, let’s delve into this: $9.4 million extra in that $176 million in this year alone. Gracious me! The Minister, by virtue, is receiving an increase of $9 million extra to develop policies, and yet, by virtue, if you were to argue and ask of any rural New Zealander how they feel about outcomes, they would wager you they are significantly worse.

Cameras on boats: $68 million, with a fisheries Vote appropriation of $100 million—an increase, I believe, of nearly $8 million in the Vote alone this year. From proof of concept 2019 to now, there were 300 cameras on boats proposed, and yet here we see 35 to 40 that are installed with 15 operationalised and data-sharing: again, an exorbitant amount of money, and outcomes for the industry when they are, by virtue, helping themselves design their own regulation—certainly vacuous.

And on the list goes. A roll-back of funding in—yes, reconcile that: a roll-back in funding for biosecurity. Now, I’m trying to reconcile that with an industry that has been confronted with all manner of biosecurity threats here, already trying to deal with Caulerpa and gold clams, an organism that could actually decimate the aquaculture industry. Now, that industry alone has been proposed by many to be worth hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars in the coming decade. A $6.9 million decrease in biosecurity monitoring and clearance—now, again, I’m trying to reconcile that with all the threats that this country faces: biosecurity coming through our border, M. bovis, and foot-and-mouth scares. Now, foot-and-mouth would absolutely decimate rural New Zealand. We’re cognisant of it. Every week, I receive emails about the threats, which are literally one plane ride away, and yet here we see a roll-back of biosecurity monitoring and clearance. Decreased funding for expenditure, arguably, is in the most sensible areas as our biosecurity space, but we’ve pulled that back by, as I say, $7 million.

There is a myriad of things that the rural sector is affronted by. Emissions pricing scheme on-farm, freshwater plans—what on earth does that look like?—fisheries and the rural sector: a lot of rural people are fishermen; they’re affronted by the development of regulations to come on the back of cameras on boats.

Again, I leave this remark for this House when I speak to my fellow colleagues here, representing rural New Zealand: the largest sum I have ever seen on policy design is this, and yet the outcomes, I wager anyone, are perverse—$176 million. Go anywhere in rural New Zealand and ask them what their rural confidence is, or the lack thereof, and they will categorically tell you it has never been so bad. I wonder where this $176 million is actually going and if the advice is being heeded.

I rise as a proud rural member of this House, and spend a lot of time with my constituents up and down very small rural, regional communities. The things that those rural and regional folk, whether they are farmers, horticulturalists, whether they are trying to break bread in the forestry industry or cafes, whatever it is, the sense that I get is that what they want and what they have been asking for for many years is a Government that shows up, is a Government that listens, and is a Government that responds. Alongside my colleagues, over the last 10 or so days, we have literally been going into small communities—whether that’s the Moerewas, whether that’s Whangāreis, whether it’s Ruatōria, Te Araroa, Potaka. We’ve been going into those communities to break down what the Budget means for them.

I’ve got to acknowledge my colleague, the Hon Grant Robertson. This is the fifth Budget—the fifth Wellbeing Budget—that he has delivered in this House. It was a very simple message that he gave to New Zealanders on the assertion of our colleague, the Rt Hon Prime Minister, Chris Hipkins. The instruction was clear: everything that we have to do in the current economic environment that we are in, it must be focused on the bread and butter issues.

There are four things that Norman Kirk said, and I think that this is why I believe this Budget is the perfect Budget that has been delivered for the times that we’re in: somewhere to live, food to eat, clothing to wear, something to hope for. Somewhere to live: this is one of the largest, most significant investments in our Budget. It literally was about education, health, and housing. Of all the parts of that Budget that I look to, two things, in particular, stuck out for me. It’s that recommitment to social housing. That’s something that we, as a Government, have been dedicated to during the time that we have been in—3,000 more public homes.

I saw that the “coalition of cuts”, they also released some sentiments around housing and housing policy last week. I eagerly looked through the eight pages of their policy document. The thing that struck me, which goes to the core of the difference of beliefs between that side of the House and this side of the House: they needed to find some money, and the question that we always ask on this side of the House is, “Well, where are you going to get the money from when you propose new policy?” Well, it shouldn’t surprise any of us, but guess where it was. It was in their social housing plan. It was to cut the funding that goes into social housing. It was to cut the funding that goes into Kāinga Ora.

So there was something funny that happened during the Budget last week or the week prior when the Government announced some of our core platform things that literally target those families that are finding it the toughest right now. When we made the announcement—in particular, the scrapping of those co-payments, those five bucks on the prescriptions, the mask slipped down a little bit from the veneer of the deputy leader on that side of the House. The mask slipped down and she said, “We’ll scrap that co-payment.” Last year, 130,000 prescriptions weren’t picked up—130,000 people did not get the medications that they needed, that their doctors said that they needed, putting, ultimately, more pressure on a healthcare system, because they simply couldn’t afford it.

When that scheme first came in, it was three bucks; it was put up to five bucks. You know, we all would have, whether it was on that side of the House or this side of the House, we were absolutely full to the brim with correspondence about that. There was a couple of particular types of feedback that I recall—and I might not get it absolutely right. One young woman, she said, “Look, if you don’t know what it’s like to have to transfer $1.28 out of one account and three bucks out of another account to have to go into that pharmacy and buy your prescriptions, please don’t come at me.”

There was another woman that made some interesting reflections. She was a doctor. She said, “Look, we, as young doctors, used to work in the hospital system and couldn’t understand that when we’d prescribe medications to people that their ailments would continue to accumulate and that they’d end up in the hospital system worse than ever.” Her proclamation was that that simple act of scrapping that $5 payment would be absolutely lifesaving. It would have an absolute, immediate impact on the healthcare system and, indeed, the profession. So I want to acknowledge my colleague Dr Ayesha Verrall, and, of course, with the backing of our finance Minister for something so small, so targeted, that helps ordinary New Zealanders.

The extension of the 20 hours early childhood education: up and down my electorate, what I was hearing from our constituents is what that means for a whole heap of—not just mums—mums and dads who are trying to raise their kids, trying to juggle a bit of this and a bit of that to educate their children, but also work part time to pay the bills. I literally had one mum up the coast, she had a big tangi about what that would mean for her as that meant that she could go about her business and could continue her work. It’s a little thing, but it is the little things that for most of us on this side of the House—which is why we got into politics, to be champions for those that didn’t necessarily have a voice. Because some people, when they let their mask slip down, they let the rest of New Zealand know that their core motivations and drivers for being in politics are to consolidate wealth, consolidate power amongst a handful of a small few, when this side of the House always has been and always will be committed to ensuring equitable distributions amongst those that need it most.

I had the privilege of—I don’t know if it was a privilege—being stuck in a van with Willie Jackson. But anyway, I had the privilege of going on a bit of a road trip with some of my colleagues: the Hon Willie Jackson, Peeni Henare, Kelvin Davis, Willow-Jean Prime, Nanaia Mahuta. Off we go in a van so that we could go to those communities that often don’t have their Cabinet Ministers showing up in force, but to say, “We’re here for you. We see you. Indeed, we have developed a Budget that has been designed for you.”

We were very proud as a Māori ministerial group to be able to go and share some of the things that really impact the lives of many Māori. That was upping the Budget with respect to Whānau Ora. It was investment in housing. But a little star of the show—I don’t know what Tāmati is going to say, being a proud lad from Te Arawa, but I can say, as a member of Parliament for Te Tairāwhiti, that has the best kapa haka in the country on our backyard, the $34 million investment for Te Matatini was absolutely so well received. We will see that that’s all about ora—wellbeing. It’s all about every aspect of what is good within our communities—communities coming together to create, to feast on mātauranga Māori, feast on our tikanga, and to grow that within those homes. That was a big highlight for many of us on that tour.

But, look, putting on my other hat now as the Minister responsible for cyclone recovery, I also want to acknowledge the depth and breadth of the hardship that’s been felt—real pain within my backyard. Now, whilst we had old mate Simeon Brown, who barely makes a misstep, or kua pīkarikari hunahuna, as my colleague the Hon Michael Wood said earlier—whilst he was in my electorate talking about bilingual signs, we were in my electorate talking and working alongside agencies, looking at some of the broken infrastructure as a consequence of Cyclone Gabrielle. I’ve got to acknowledge my colleagues—on top of the $890 million that’s been invested into that cyclone recovery, there was an additional almost a billion dollars through the Budget that was set aside, but particularly, for me, it was the $275 million for regional roading for immediate recovery. Now, for those people up in Potaka or those people up in Te Araroa suffering from literally broken infrastructure that was put in in the 1950s, that type of announcement will be immeasurable. Support for today, building for tomorrow—the “coalitions of cuts” will not deliver for New Zealand, but I’m proud of our side of this House.

Split call—the Hon David Parker.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Can I add my support to the original motion put to the House and oppose the National Party amendments. The Finance Minister, the Hon Grant Robertson, has delivered a Budget which decreases Government spending as a percentage of the economy, as a percentage of GDP, which is now coming off the heights that were necessary during COVID, notwithstanding the fact that additional expenditure has been necessary this year to meet the costs of the storm events that we have seen have so devastated some of our communities. The Budget forecasts show that the Government finances are in good shape. New Zealand’s debt remains very low relative to our peers, much lower than Australia, Great Britain, the United States of America, as a percentage of GDP and below the ceiling that we have set for ourselves. We returned to Budget surplus in the same amount of time that the last National Government took to return to surplus after the Canterbury earthquakes.

You can already see one of the essential debates at the next election will be whether you have tax cuts as promoted by the National Party, allied with service cuts or the alternative proposition that will be coming from the Labour Party by the time we get to the election. Of course, the last time National announced their tax cuts they gave something like a dollar a week to someone on the minimum wage and hundreds of dollars a week to a higher salary earner. It’s against that background that I want to spend the rest of my time talking about some reports that were released by the Government through Inland Revenue and the Treasury in respect of an inquiry as to the effect of tax rates paid by high-wealth individuals.

This work has been done over the last year and a half by Inland Revenue, with cooperation of around 311 families who each—and a family is essentially an individual, their life partner, and dependent children—had an average wealth: their net assets were $276 million each. Their effective tax rate, including their income tax, the tax paid by their trusts, the tax they paid through company structures, all of the GST that they pay on their personal expenditure—their effective tax rate was 9.5 percent. That was a much lower rate than I was expecting. We know that the super wealthy construct their financial affairs so that most of their income is on capital account rather than taxable income, but none the less I was surprised how low that tax rate was. No wonder why we’ve had rising inequality in New Zealand at the top end. This is a world-leading study because it’s based on actual data, it’s not modelled data, and it has shown that inequality of wealth in New Zealand is worse than we had previously understood it, in part because of the very low rate of tax that is paid by the super wealthy on their income.

At the same time, a report was released by the Treasury called Tax and Transfer Progressivity in New Zealand, and it showed the tax paid by other New Zealanders, by ventile—which is 20 groups of 5 percent—showed that a middle income New Zealander generally pays tax at more than 20 percent, including all of their economic income, their wages, and if they own a property, their capital gains and the imputed rent on their property, if you’re into that sort of thing. For someone who has only salary income and they were being paid $80,000 a year, they would be paying an average PAYE tax rate of 22 percent, plus they would be spending about two thirds of their income on GST inclusive goods and services, equivalent to about 8 or 9 percent of their income spent on GST. That 8 or 9 percent, added to the 22 percent average tax rate, means that that sort of person is paying 30 percent of their income in tax every year compared with the super wealthy paying only 9 percent.

As a consequence in part of that, legislation has now had its first reading through the Budget process on the tax principles bill so that we can report against sound principles for the tax system like progressivity, efficiency, horizontal equity—people in the same position should pay the same amount of tax but wealthier people should pay higher rates of tax than less wealthy, lower income people.

Returning to the Budget, we are on track, back to surplus. We have had these cost of living adjustments, the likes of prescriptions. It’s a good Budget and I commend the Minister of Finance’s motion to the House.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Hon Priyanca Radhakrishnan, five minutes.

Budget 2023 builds on the support that we on this side of the House have been providing to New Zealanders in the face of cost of living pressures. We know that times are tough. We know that it’s particularly difficult for those that are low and middle income households and those who have young children. Budget 2023 is a Budget that focuses on targeted cost of living support that will not exacerbate inflation pressures, while also laying the foundations for long-term benefits, including increasing education and health outcomes and meeting our climate change goals.

The changes that kicked into place on 1 April were changes that supported over 1.4 million New Zealanders, including those receiving a main benefit, students, superannuitants, and that was funded through Budget 2023. There’s also a particular focus on parents and young families, including through the expansion of 20 hours’ free early childhood education support for two-year-olds, free public transport for children, and half-price public transport for under-25s and community services card holders, and half-price fares that Budget 2023 makes permanent for Total Mobility services as well.

I just also want to spend a short period of time just focusing on the fact that we are also scrapping the $5 co-payment prescriptions. That will lead to better health outcomes for individuals, for families, and will support our health system. Soon after the Budget was announced, a young Kiwi Indian doctor tweeted—I don’t know her personally, but her tweet went viral. She said that as a new graduate in the early 2000s at Middlemore, it took a long time for us to figure out why patients were being readmitted when they’d been discharged with antibiotics for pneumonia or medication for heart failure. Turned out that they were too whakamā—that’s ashamed or embarrassed—to tell us that they couldn’t afford what was then a $3 prescription fee. So they quite rightly came back into hospital for a $700-a-night readmission, and Middlemore started to send people home with packs of medication. This is one simple change that will help the 135,000 adults who didn’t pick up their prescriptions because of the cost to be able to do so. It’s also one that invests in our health system and will level the playing field for community- and family-owned pharmacies as well.

This Budget continues this Government’s year-on-year investment in initiatives to eliminate family and sexual violence as well. It will specifically support more accessible services in ways that are relevant to those who need to access them. Budget 2023 will also enable existing mainstream family and sexual violence support providers to be able to meet the accessibility needs of disabled people and tāngata whaikaha Māori. It also expands the safeguarding pilot run in Waitematā which will help to protect disabled people who are at risk of violence through specialist services, because people should be able to access the support they need in the ways that are relevant to them.

This is also a Budget that adds to our Government’s record investment in supporting disabled people, both through ensuring that we can invest to help ease the cost and demand pressures on our disability support services, and also to scrap the minimum wage exemption. Currently, we have disabled people being paid less than the minimum wage for their work on the basis that they are perceived to be less productive—that is just not right. We are delivering on a commitment we made and ending this discriminatory exemption. We’ll introduce a wage supplement so that disabled people are paid the minimum wage, but in a way such that we can also protect the opportunities that are afforded to them.

Finally, on this side of the House, we’re committed to supporting all New Zealanders in ways that are equitable and relevant to them. On that side of the House, if given a chance in October this year, the “coalition of cuts” will take us backwards. It is their policy to take us back to a time that led to the very inequities that our communities have faced and to worsen outcomes. So many from our ethnic communities advocated for a ministry to ensure that their voices are heard at the highest decision-making levels. That “coalition of cuts” will scrap the Ministry for Ethnic Communities, amongst others. We will lose—

💬 Hon Judith Collins: How does that member say that? How can that member say that?

Because that is ACT policy. And in the absence of National policy, that is the policy of the “coalition of cuts”. They will take us backwards and ensure that the voices of our people are silenced. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Tēnā koe, Madam Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. I’d like to talk first about what’s good in this Budget. When I look at the Budget at a Glance, especially on the first page—the cost of living support—I see a whole lot of initiatives that actually were first campaigned on by the Green Party or started by a Green Minister in Government. For example, free public transport for kids, half-price public transport for people under the age of 25—these are policies that the Green Party has been campaigning on for a long time, and I, as Associate Minister of Transport last term, began work on the Community Connect card, which sees half-price public transport for those with a community services card or with disabilities.

Of course, that doesn’t go far enough. We’d like to see it go much further. We would have liked to see half-price public transport made permanent for everyone because we have seen a huge increase in the use of public transport, despite the problems with bus cancellations. We would like to see free public transport for under-18s and much greater provisions for those with community services card and disabilities.

KiwiSaver contributions for paid parental leave—again, I’m very proud to say that this was an initiative that I commenced research into when I was Minister for Women.

Extending 20 hours’ early childhood education to two-year-olds—excellent policy. We wish it was coming into effect sooner. The Green Party put this in our manifesto and announced it nine years ago.

Scrapping prescription co-payments—we can’t take credit for that one, but it is good and we support it.

Cheaper energy bills, lowering household energy bills through expanded Warmer Kiwi Homes programme—that’s insulation, that’s new heating, and that’s hot water heat pumps and LED lightbulbs. Of course, this was a longstanding Green Party initiative that Jeanette Fitzsimons kicked off back in 2008, and we’ve seen hundreds of thousands of homes made warmer, drier, healthier, and using less energy thanks to those programmes.

The Climate Emergency Response Fund is being put to good use, and there are a lot of good initiatives in that space.

But then we come to what is missing from this Budget. We have to say that while some steps have been taken in the right direction and we support those steps, it is nowhere near the transformational changes that we need to truly tackle climate change and achieve equity within our communities here in Aotearoa.

So what is missing? Let’s start with the Climate Emergency Response Fund, which is down more than $800 million because the Labour majority Government chose to ignore the recommendations of the Climate Commission, against the advice of the Minister of Climate Change, James Shaw.

What else is missing from the Budget? Well, I’m sorry to say we still don’t see any full implementation of the recommendations of the expert advisory group on fixing our welfare system. So the Government asked last term for advice on how to fix our welfare system, but they still haven’t implemented the recommendations—really, any of them, and nowhere near fully. We also didn’t see increases to Working for Families, which is really needed by those working families.

We don’t see the massive increase to student support that’s needed. My colleague Chlöe Swarbrick ran a people’s inquiry into student wellbeing, and found that two-thirds of students can’t afford the basics on a regular basis, and 91 percent of those students said they would take public transport much more if it were free. That would mean they were able to access more classes at university.

We don’t see paid parental leave for all parents. We don’t see it at a reasonable rate—it’s less than the minimum wage—and not everybody can access it.

We don’t see free high-quality early childhood education for all children from the end of paid parental leave. That’s a gap we have to close. It just doesn’t make sense: you finish your paid parental leave, which is extremely inadequate by global standards, and then there’s a gap still of at least a year and a half before you get the support for early childhood education. And many people can’t afford to return to work, not to mention that in places like Wellington, you can’t even find a place at an early childhood centre—I mean, it’s extremely difficult. So we need more investment in that area.

We see a gap of an ambitious programme of regional rail investment. This is something that people around the country have been calling out for. If we’re going to address our climate targets and connect our communities, including in rural areas, we need to see a step change in our investment in regional rail and we need to see public investment in bus services.

Aotearoa once had affordable, high-quality, frequent bus and train services right across the country, connecting our communities, even to very rural areas. We can have that again, but we need to see the step change in investment.

The 18 trains that will be purchased for the lower North Island business case—welcome investment, well overdue, and we were campaigning for that more than a year ago. But we need to see much more than that to achieve the real low-carbon connectivity for our communities, and we need to see more public transport in our towns and cities right around the country. It’s great to have the half-price public transport and free public transport for kids, but it doesn’t benefit those who don’t have bus or train or ferry services available to them, and that’s where Government need to do a whole lot more.

There were no e-bike or cargo bike subsidies, and the high cost of those vehicles is a barrier to purchasing them. But once people have access to those vehicles, they have very quick, convenient mobility, and that is one way we can help both reduce congestion and enable more mobility while reducing emissions and reducing the cost of living for households. Unfortunately, the Government has not taken that on.

What else is missing from the Budget? Future years of the public housing programme—yeah, that’s an interesting one. The Green Party would like to see a commitment to future years of the public housing programme.

Nature and conservation—we would have liked to have seen Jobs for Nature made permanent. We need much greater investment in conservation research and that work to do the trapping and pest eradication so that we can truly achieve the goals of predator-free Aotearoa.

Why are these things missing from the Budget? I don’t believe it’s because the majority Labour Government doesn’t want to do them; it’s because the Labour majority Government didn’t fix the tax system when they had the opportunity this term. I mean, they have a majority; they could fix the tax system.

We have the research which shows that the very wealthiest New Zealanders are paying extremely low marginal tax rates on their income. So we know inequality’s getting worse in New Zealand. It’s just a fact: if we don’t have a fair tax system, wealth will become more and more concentrated in the hands of a few. That is a mathematical fact, and that’s why during the 20th century we had a decrease in inequality at a time when there were extremely high marginal tax rates in that post - World War II era. If we want to achieve anything like that again and if we want to have declining inequality—that is, a fair society; a society where people truly have access to the things that they need and the income that they need to live good lives—then we need to tax the rich.

Inequality is a political choice—it is not inevitable—and the Green Party is not shying away from the fact that it is our political priority to make sure that we have a fair tax system so that we can afford to invest in the services and infrastructure that benefit all of us as a society. We are not better off letting the rich get richer. Even the rich know this—that’s a why a huge number of the super-rich wrote a letter saying that, actually, they would very much like to be taxed at a greater rate so that we have a fairer tax system. But we don’t need their consent.

The reality is that the majority of New Zealanders would be better off with a fairer tax system, so I guess the message for those people is that if you want a fairer tax system—and we saw that more than 50 percent of New Zealanders would support a wealth tax—then you’re going to have to put the Greens back in Government, because Labour, unfortunately, are just tweaking around the edges. They’re not willing to take on the political leadership needed to achieve the goals that we all want, which is action on climate change, protecting nature, and achieving equality in our communities, which means investing in our people, and we can afford to do that.

The inequality we’ve seen in New Zealand was the result of political choices, many of which started in the 1980s but carried on in the 1990s, and we still haven’t done anything to address that inequality that was caused in 1991 after Ruth Richardson’s “mother of all Budgets”. We know that in the 1990s, child poverty massively increased in Aotearoa New Zealand, and it really hasn’t declined since then.

If we want to take on the serious issues—because climate change is, in part, driven by inequality; those who own the most and who have the most wealth contribute far more to damaging climate emissions than people on low incomes or on median incomes—we need to make sure that every person in our country has access to the things they need to live with dignity and to live a good life. That means support when they are sick and they cannot work. That means decent, healthy, affordable housing that is available to all.

It is not right in this country that some people can have many, many houses and some have to sleep in cars. The Green Party will address this in the next Government.

The Hon Peeni Henare—a five-minute call.

Madam Speaker, thank you very much for the opportunity to contribute. Can I first start off by congratulating the Prime Minister for once again, alongside the Minister of Finance, delivering a Budget that actually delivers for our people. Over the last week, we have visited a number of places around the country to talk about the Budget, and I’m really proud of the work that we’ve done.

I want to start by talking about the $168.1 million investment into Whānau Ora. A small journey over the six years I’ve been the Minister for Whānau Ora—I can, hand on heart, say that that is a 145 percent increase in funding going to Whānau Ora. We know Whānau Ora have stood up right across the country to support communities during crises that have, sadly, afflicted our communities right up and down the country. Whānau Ora stood into the breach, Whānau Ora delivered for them, and we’re continuing to deliver for Whānau Ora.

What’s interesting when you look at the Whānau Ora aspiration plans for community, one of the things that they continually bring up is our kaumātua and kuia who, not only for themselves but also for the many grandchildren that they care for—as they go to the pharmacy, they continue to talk about the high costs of actually getting the medicines that they need to look after themselves and their tamariki, mokopuna. On this side of the House, removing the $5 fee for prescriptions is a huge move, and I want to point out two particular people who have already spoken to me about this matter.

There are only a handful of qualified Māori pharmacists in this country. I’m proud to say that one of them is my nephew, a young fellow by the name of Hemi McKechnie, named after our grandfather. He said to me, “Uncle, this is one of the most amazing things for the community in the Far North that you will ever see.” It’s for those rural whānau, it’s for the whānau who simply can’t afford prescriptions, and what they end up doing is having to make a call on whether or not they’re going to buy food or whether or not they’re going to buy medicine.

What this particular initiative did in this year’s Budget has made it clear that we care about those families receiving the medicines that they need. We need our kaumātua and kuia to be healthy. We want our tamariki to be healthy as well, and this goes a long way to making sure that there is equitable healthcare for those people who are looking for the medicines that they need to be well for their families.

The other one is a place called Horouta Pharmacy, owned by Māori and run by Māori. When I was in Tūranganui-a-Kiwa, I got to have a chat with them about what this means to their people. In a place like Tairāwhiti, which has been hit so hard by the recent weather events, they are saying that whānau are coming in, celebrating, and talking to them about how much this means to them. Five dollars to that side of the House might not mean much, but when you’re a kaumātua, a kuia or a family member trying to weigh up meeting the challenges that they have in their household, $5 goes a long way.

What’s clear on this side of the House is we’ve made it clear that this particular initiative is one that we will not back down from and we will continue to support. On that side of the House, they’ve made it clear that it’s gone. They’ve made it clear to our families out there that, actually, “No, no. You should be able to afford it and you should just go and get it.” Well, that’s not the reality. I’ve been around the country, spoken to these pharmacies, and spoken to those who work in the sector, and that tells me and it tells them that on that side of the House, those members don’t actually care whether or not our families receive what they need.

I’m really, really proud of this Budget: continued support for Te Matatini. What was interesting is while the other side might bemoan the fact that we’re giving money to Te Matatini, they weren’t shy in showing up to Te Matatini in February with their blue T-shirts on, trying to look for support from the Māori community in what was an event that brought together not only Māori communities but, actually, people right across this country.

So $34 million is an investment, not just in Te Matatini but in te reo Māori, mātauranga Māori, and Māori enterprise which supports Te Matatini, which many on that side won’t know because they don’t fully understand how Te Matatini works in our communities and how important it is. I encourage them to simply head up to Tairāwhiti, where it’s known as one of the bigger areas that participate in Te Matatini. There is also Te Arawa waka, my good friend Mr Tāmati Coffey—one of the most successful areas in Te Matatini. They’ve made it clear to us that not only will that money support Te Matatini and those groups that go there but it supports the whole industry around it. It supports whānau, it supports those who compose, and it supports those who make the outfits. It is really, really important to them that we show that support.

On this side of the House, I’m proud on what this Budget delivers. But we know that there’s more work to be done, and we don’t shy away from the challenges that have already been brought to us, but we stand by our Budget. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

The Hon Ginny Andersen—five minutes.

Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. Talofa lava. Look, I’d like to talk about all the good things that are in this Budget—all the good things that New Zealanders have to look forward to—during a tough time for Kiwis, who have had a tough time with the cost of living. There are the small changes that look to make a big difference for New Zealand, both in the here and now but also for the long term.

When I picked up the esteemed publication known as the Wainuiomata News, I saw Clive, the “Happy Chemist”, and do you know what? Clive is even more happy now because scrapping that $5 co-payment will mean a big difference for communities in Wainuiōmata. Ron Chin, the chemist right next door, in the Wainuiōmata Pharmacy, agrees.

Some of the reasons that they provide in this esteemed publication are really good to relay and I’m going to relay some of those reasons that our local pharmacists back having this co-payment scrapped. The number one reason, they say, is that it improves the health and the wellbeing of people in their community. For those people who don’t pick up their scripts because they can’t afford it, that actually goes towards and contributes to higher rates of strokes, higher rates of heart attacks, sight loss, and mental health instances and episodes that don’t need to have happened. A report from the Independent Community Pharmacy Group out this month, which both of these pharmacists referred to, says that all of those negative health outcomes in our community are driven largely by that co-payment being in place, which prevents people from picking up their scripts.

The other big point that they make in the Wainuiomata News is that it stops people from going into secondary care—into our hospitals. By having all of those good medicines available—freely available—for people to utilise, it stops small problems becoming big problems, and the really sad thing is that National proposes to scrap it. National proposes to take it away and go back to a time when all of those negative health outcomes were being driven higher because of the fact that there was that co-payment in place.

I don’t want Clive, the “Happy Chemist”, to be unhappy. I want him to stay happy. He does a great job for our community. We deserve to give those local community workers all the support they get to have those great relationships with local people and to understand their clients to help them make sure that they get the right medical treatment as early as possible, and that’s what this Budget delivers.

My second point—I was going to do three, but I think I’m out of time, so I’ll go straight to the amazing game development rebate, which is at the other end of the scale. This is looking to our long term. This is enabling us to be the smart, nimble, and really creative little country that we are by making sure that we back these small gaming industries. By having the 20 percent rebate, we will keep those companies here in New Zealand, and we will make sure we have jobs for our kids that they can aspire to grow into.

I’ve visited PikPok, I’ve visited CerebralFix in Christchurch, and, on Friday, I’ll be down in Dunedin with the Prime Minister to meet more of those local gaming industries—along with Ingrid Leary—and, look, all of those ones that we visit say how important it is to back this industry. I mean, PikPok, for example, develop amazing stuff. They’re one of the big leaders in game development on phones and apps, and they’ve got a new one out that those members opposite might want to take note of and download. It’s called Clusterduck. You can breed ducks, and you go check it out. It’s a great game and it’s doing very well. Clusterduck is doing very well for PikPok, and you might want to check that out, I say to those members opposite. It’s great—it’s a good game.

So what does that do for our young people? It means that we’ve got creative people who think outside the square having jobs here in New Zealand, and it means that we have an industry that’s generating a lot of money, not just in our own country but also overseas. Some of those big exports offshore are really driven by having the backing of Government in this space. We knew for a fact that Australia was coming here and headhunting some of our key developers, and that’s why it was important to keep them right here.

We want weightless exports. We want a high-skill, low-wage economy, and we—a high-skill, high-wage economy, and making sure that we do—

💬 Hon David Bennett: And a “low-wage economy”.

No, what National wants is low wages; we’re the opposite, Mr Bennett. We want high wages, and we want to make sure we keep emissions down by having smart schemes like this to make sure that our young people have opportunity and that our Kiwi businesses that are innovative get the backing they need to thrive and grow, and to make sure that we have a strong economy that gives our young people huge opportunities. This is a great Budget, and I look forward to all of the further opportunities that it brings New Zealand.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a pleasure to rise and speak to this Budget. Let’s start with the prescription co-payment, first of all. The policy of this Labour Government is to fund the wealthy for free medicines—that’s what this is. It’s medicines for the wealthy, it’s drugs for the wealthy—that’s what this Labour Budget policy is. It fails every sense of equity of access, where the wealthy get the same benefit as the vulnerable.

So here’s a question to the other side: given the policy removes the co-pay for those who pay $5, will it also be removed for Australian and UK tourists, who currently pay a $5 co-pay? Is the Government now subsidising tourists as well? Explain that to us.

This Budget co-pay policy is better called Labour’s drugs for the wealthy. That’s what it is, and it’s not surprising that the media called it “silly” and “garbage”—not my words. On the day of the Budget, a “silly” policy and “garbage” policy is what independent commentators called it.

We had a co-pay policy already in progress that we’ve announced that removes the co-pay but targets the most vulnerable. There are three entities: community service card holders, beneficiaries, and SuperGold card holders—everyone that the opposite side is talking about who will benefit by removal of the co-pay—but those who can pay are then asked to pay the sum of $100 capped, in total, per family for a year.

The Government says it’ll benefit 135,000 adults who didn’t collect their prescription. Here’s the question: isn’t it highly likely that many of them are community service card holders, are SuperGold card holders, and are beneficiaries? Surprise, surprise, it’s exactly those who we were anticipating targeting, and if you don’t think that’s correct, then show me the data. Show me the data on community service card holders, beneficiaries, and SuperGold card holders in that 135,000 people that you’re claiming did not collect their prescriptions, and I bet you’ll find that they sit well within our policy.

So why make a universal policy? Our policy is targeted. Well, Grant Robertson actually had something to say about that. When asked immediately after the Budget why the co-pay was universal, Grant Robertson said, “We don’t means test health.” Now, let me just think about that for a minute: “We don’t means test health.”—what a load of rubbish. He’s already damaged the economy. Don’t come into health and do any more damage than Ayesha Verrall and Andrew Little have already done. They’re doing fine, thank you very much, Grant—they don’t need you to make it any worse.

But, no, no, he had to open his mouth and say, “We don’t means test health.” Explain to me, then, the means test for the community services card, which accesses health services, or the aged residential care summary, which has a financial means test, which also comes from Vote Health. Of course as a Government, they means test health, and so for Grant Robertson to use that as an excuse was pathetic and it showed he did not understand the domain. Go back and keep ruining the economy; don’t come and ruin health. They’re doing a good enough job by themselves, thanks very much.

There’s also a trust factor here, with Minister Verrall, on 2 May—two weeks before the Budget—when asked if she would remove the co-pay, telling Pharmacy Today, “The Government still has no plans to scrap the co-pay.” Two weeks before the Budget, when asked by Pharmacy Today whether she would remove the co-pay, she said, “The Government still has no plans to scrap the co-pay.” Clearly, that was not correct, and it calls into question what other statements presently, in the past, and going forward we should also anticipate as being not correct. When she will blatantly tell journalists that “No, we are not considering removing the co-pay.” no more than two weeks before she did, I think there’s a credibility issue right there.

Let’s look at how the Budget 2023 weaves into the campaign Budget of 2020 and the promises they made. This is the campaign 2020 from the Labour Party and three Budgets they’ve now had to address these issues.

Let’s see how the final Budget did. The last one they’re ever going to do—and, my goodness, we all hope it is the last one. But in the last Budget they did just a few weeks ago, let’s see what they said. Campaign 2020: fund 20 additional mobile dental clinics. Where are the dental clinics? This was the last Budget—where are they? Campaign 2020 promised $37.5 million—where are they?

I asked Andrew Little where they were, and, in fact, the media did when they asked them the same question when it didn’t appear in 2021 Budget or in the 2022 Budget. Here’s what he said. Andrew Little said that the Government was still committed to its dental policy: “That’s our promise we went with into the last election, we haven’t got it in this Budget, we’ve got two more to go, and I’m determined we will fulfil that promise.”, he said. “We don’t get to do everything in a single Budget. It remains a promise to be fulfilled by us but we’re in Government for three years—this is the first Budget of that three-year period, and we’ll come back again. We have that commitment and I’m determined to see it through.”—there’s the first failed campaign 2020 promise. The 20 mobile dental caravans have disappeared.

Let’s look at what else was a campaign promise, and if it wasn’t so sad, this would be a comedy: Labour will reduce planned care waiting lists by investing a further 200. How has that gone for you? How has it gone for you, reducing the planned care waiting lists? I can tell you: they’ve quadrupled, they’ve expanded way beyond what they were when we handed over in 2017, and yet, in your 2020 campaign promise, you said, “We will reduce planned care waiting lists.”—no, you won’t. You won’t. You have no chance of reducing them by the time of the campaign. In fact, with the winter coming up, it’s highly likely to be worse.

There’s two failed campaign promises that this Budget had its last chance to attend to, particularly with the 20 mobile dental caravans, and they just did not appear. They’ve disappeared—the first, failed 2020 campaign Budget.

I want to talk now about the concern I have about how bad the health system is, and I want to ask the question why Ayesha Verrall hates the Waikato. That’s the question I want to ask: why does she hate the Waikato?

Why I say that is because what we are aware of is several things. First of all, when ambulances divert, it’s a big deal. This was a diversion from Auckland Hospital on 8 March. So that’s front page news, and it led TV’s One News. When ambulances divert, effectively you shut the hospital and say, “Drive past us and go somewhere else.” Front page news, it led One News, and all the rest of it. OK, explain to me why then, last month—in the month of April—Waikato Hospital had three ambulance diversions in the month of April. The instructions to the diverting ambulances, because Waikato Hospital was so full, was that the ambulances could divert from Matamata and I think it was Te Aroha, and maybe go to Tauranga. That was the advice: “Don’t come here, we are full. Go to Matamata or Tauranga.” That’s a tragedy. Who would have known that there were ambulance diversions at Waikato Hospital last month or that, indeed, an ambulance did divert, as the Minister wrote to me in answer to written question No. 11431, saying that an ambulance did divert to Tauranga Hospital—unbelievable.

There were ambulance diversions at Waikato Hospital last month, and yet we have no remedy for Waikato Hospital. It is not one of the eight emergency department (ED) hotspots. How do we explain that? It is one of the most troubled EDs—they’ve got ambulance diversion, for goodness’ sake—and they’re not one of the eight hotspots.

Even worse, Minister Verrall’s vaunted winter plan: minor ailments for pharmacists, and it arranged 24 things, actually. Explain to me why Waikato is not part of the winter plan—how does that work? I’ve just said to you that they had three sets of diversions in April, that at least one ambulance was diverted to Tauranga—and it is not a short distance. If you’re going from Matamata or Te Aroha and you go past Waikato Hospital and go all the way to Tauranga, that is not inconsequential, and yet, Waikato Hospital is not considered an ED hotspot and Waikato Hospital does not get the winter ED plan. It was something that said that pharmacists, for example, could deal with minor ailments, and yet Waikato is one of about 10 regions, as we add them up, that is not part of the winter plan.

I come back to my first statement: why does Minister Verrall hate the Waikato? I think that needs an explanation, because every action she does and every indication she gives is that she hates the Waikato. They are desperate and they need help, and they are not to be dismissed by a Minister who is out of touch and won’t even call it a crisis.

I want to talk, then, to GPs. GPs are finding it very hard-going. This statement—so the Minister made an announcement about a nursing pay boost, and on that same day, one of the GP organisations replied, “Nurse pay boost announcement is premature and insulting”. The average rise was 8 percent. They were having discussions the day before with the Minister, and she went out pre-emptively and already said what they were going to get.

Let’s look at the 2022 Budget, which had $44 million to community care coordinators. It turns out none of that has been spent, because they can’t organise themselves into what community care teams should be. When I asked the Minister, “Well, what sort of roles could it be?”, she said, “Well, care coordinators, pharmacists, physio, and kaiāwhina.” I then said, “And how much might they be paid?”—and here’s what’s riling general practice up. So in this Budget, this Government is going to pay a care coordinator $127,869 a year; a pharmacist, $158,242; a physiotherapist, $148,936; and a kaiāwhina, $99,784—all for teams that haven’t even been constructed yet, and they haven’t used any of the 2022 Budget. This Budget is a shocker. Thank you.

Tēnā koe, te Mana Whakawā, ngā mihi. What a negative, niggardly speech. It must be frustrating for Dr Reti, the spokesperson on health, to find out on the news what the National Party health policy is around prescription charges. Make sure you switch on in a timely fashion because it changes with every news bulletin. First of all, they were going to cancel the prescription charges, and now they’re going to bring them back in some muted way.

But I can tell you that in my visits—and my email inbox is full of pharmacists saying that this is a good policy. It is a good policy for a number of reasons, but most fundamentally because it makes sure people are healthy. Yes, those people are our elderly, our low-income people, our weak, and our vulnerable, but what would they do? They would get rid of them. On the one hand, we can take people’s health seriously: removing prescription fees; 100,000 healthier, warmer homes; and national super to stay at age 65. The choice for New Zealand here is clear. What would they do? Impose prescription charges, raise the super age, and not fund healthier homes.

Now, the real policy driver over there sits a bit to one side, really—doesn’t it?—because it’s a coalition that they’re looking at, and it is a chaotic coalition of cuts. They haven’t even got a policy out there, but I took some time to read the ACT Party’s manifesto. Look, KiwiSaver: we are going to fund KiwiSaver whilst parents are on parental leave to make sure that people, when they end their working life, aren’t disadvantaged by looking after their kids. What would the other side do? Have a look at the policy—the alternative Budget that’s out there. They would ditch the Government KiwiSaver subsidy. They would make people retire poorer. They would raise the superannuation age. That is appalling, and it doesn’t look after those that need it most.

What would they do about carbon? How would they decarbonise? We’ve got the Clean Car Discount, we’ve been putting money into rail, and we’re investing more into charging stations so that people can use their electric cars. What were they going to do on the other side of the House? Repeal the zero carbon Act. That is the policy that is out there at the moment. The great leap backwards is what we would get from the other side of the House in Government, so think very carefully about the choice that you have.

What are we going to do for children and families? Extend 20 hours’ free childcare to under-twos. What would that side do? What’s in their alternative Budget? End the Best Start payment—end the payment to give kids the best start that they can. That’s what the coalition of cuts are going to do. They’re going to try and find money by stealing kids’ lunches, basically. That’s basically where we end up—taking food out of children’s mouths.

Here we are, supporting our most innovative industries. We’re supporting film. We’re supporting our innovative gaming industry. I have received correspondence from gaming developers in Christchurch saying, “We need this. We will now stay and employ young people in Christchurch in this industry.” What will the “coalition of cuts” do? Read their alternative Budget: ditch the film rebate—the rebate that has a thriving film sector in New Zealand. It is one of the lowest-carbon, highest-value industries that we have, and they would cut it off at the knees.

So what have we got here? We’ve got a party on this side of the House who is willing to see New Zealand grow in a low-carbon way and to look after those that need it most, and what do we have over there? Parties committed to a low-wage, low-care economy. Over here, we’re growing wages, we’re growing the economy, inflation is falling, and what does the alternative Budget say? Freeze the minimum wage for three years.

Over that side of the House, that’s what you’ll be getting: freezing the minimum wage, and they have the audacity to pretend that they’re telling a high-wage story. It’s absolutely false. It’s unconscionable.

This side of the House cares for people, and we know that by growing the economy, by putting money where it’s needed, and by building long-term and resilient infrastructure, we can do that. Over there, the chaotic “coalition of cuts” will undercut everything we’ve worked for and earned. This is the Government that does this. Stay here—vote Labour.

Thank you, Madam Speaker, for this opportunity to talk about the great Wellbeing Budget 2023—Support for Today; Building for Tomorrow. I’d like to focus a bit on that building for tomorrow part and talk about infrastructure. It’s a wonderful thing to talk about, and it’s something that this Government has been very focused on.

We started up the Infrastructure Commission, and that group produced a strategy. In response, on the day of the Budget, the Infrastructure Action Plan was launched, or was shown to the world, and this document is a very important one. It includes 331 actions, and you can see them—“Actions at a glance”—if you have a look at that action plan. It includes strategic objectives, and one of those is for a circular economy. This is a key Government work plan that goes with that circular economy. We have the Construction Sector Transformation Plan, the Emissions Reduction Plan, and, of course, the Waste Strategy, which Minister Parker launched in March.

Then you can go to Annex 1 of this plan, and it includes these 331 actions and the time frame table. Under the “Expected Completion Year: 2025”, for instance, that includes progressing bans for hard-to-recycle plastic packaging and enabling business to reduce food waste, as an example.

So it’s a very important plan. I haven’t heard that many people talk about, and it’s something that I commend to anybody who is interested in the future of New Zealand and how we’re going to do infrastructure well to have a read of that.

Also in the Budget, there was the $100 million for the new infrastructure delivery agency. So this is for central Crown infrastructure. It was formerly Ōtākaro and it’s really for those agencies that don’t do the day-to-day delivery of big infrastructure projects and, of course, there are a lot of those in central government. So examples include Archives New Zealand. They are building a new building here in Wellington, and that’s not something that they’re expert with, so this new infrastructure delivery agency will be able to help. It is also helping the new plant health and environment biosecurity facility. Also in the Budget is the $6 billion National Resilience Plan, and this is both to respond to the more immediate cyclone recovery and to futureproof our infrastructure.

A sort of softer form of infrastructure—it depends on your definitions—is housing. It’s obviously incredibly important to our people, and the Budget provides for an additional 3,000 new public houses. In addition to those new houses, there’s also the grants—the Warmer Kiwi Homes grants—for another 100,000 houses to receive those. There are huge wins with that increased insulation with houses being warmer, and in terms of the health benefits you get as well.

Also on infrastructure, we can think of roads and what goes on roads and why we need more roads, and sometimes it’s because people aren’t using public transport. So encouraging public transport has a benefit for congestion, which we heard Minister Michael Wood talking about in question time today. It’s going to be free for under-13-year-olds and half-price for under-25-year-olds. This also reduces carbon, and it helps with household budgets.

Another issue that we face as a country is distributed renewable energy, particularly when we have natural hazards, when not everyone can get power back. So there’s $50 million here for energy resilience for low-income and energy-insecure communities, and that’s something I’m very pleased to see.

There’s also $39.2 million for improving the mapping of New Zealand’s coastline and identifying coastal areas at significant risk of climate-related hazards and natural disasters. That is also very important for infrastructure planning and it’s important for the part of the world that we come from.

There’s an increase in electric vehicle (EV) chargers, and, of course, it would be remiss of me not to talk about the scrapping of the $5 prescription fee. That policy work is coming from the wonderful University of Otago and its centre of public health, with Professor Pauline Norris there. It’s doing a really good study showing that the removal of the $5 decreases hospital admissions and the length of stay in economically deprived areas. We’re also increasing EV chargers around the motu. It’s a great Budget.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I did an interview with One News on Sunday, and the very first question they put to me was “Does the Labour Party have any new ideas?”, because they, like the public, have realised after this Budget that this is a tired old Government that after six years has absolutely nothing new to offer.

The Labour Party talk about their vision, but what we end up with is rehashed, reheated, and recycled tired old ideas that will not take this country forward. Instead of serving up vision, they are serving up old, reheated ideas.

The fact that Chris Hipkins and Grant Robertson had to spend so long in their speeches at the party conference on the weekend talking about the National Party was to make up time in their speeches because they were so devoid of any actual new ideas or vision to take this country forward. Nothing they had to say was of any value—no new ideas, no vision, no aspiration. Nothing to transform this economy. Nothing to fix our broken health system. Nothing to reduce crime. Nothing to fix our dismal results in education.

With crime out of control, with gang numbers up 200 in the last two months alone, with shopkeepers literally putting themselves inside cages to keep themselves safe, with a ram raid every 15 hours, and with violent crime up 33 percent, we get Ginny Andersen telling us that she feels safer—Ginny Andersen telling us that she feels safer. No new ideas, a few more fog cannons, and just more out-of-touch Ministers telling us that we should feel safer because they do. Well, good on you, Ginny Andersen.

With a health system that is so in crisis that we have 35,000 people on surgical wait-lists, 54,000 people on a wait-list for their first specialist appointment, and people waiting on gurneys in corridors in hospitals because they cannot get in to wards, what do we get? We get a letter. We get a letter sent to those 30,000 people on the wait-list asking them if they still need that surgery. This is the new idea that we get from this Government. What we don’t get is how do we improve the number of surgeries that our old district health boards but new Te Whatu Ora are doing. We don’t get any new ideas on how to drive efficiencies in the health system, how to do more surgeries, or how to incentivise and give targets to Te Whatu Ora. We just get tired old ideas of megamergers and centralisation that inevitably, as we all know, lead to worse outcomes for the Kiwis out there, who deserve better.

With an economy that is in the bottom quartile of productive economies in the OECD, you would think that after six years of this Government that we would have some vision, some aspiration, some solid economic plan to drive sustainable growth so that we can favourably measure ourselves against those other small advanced economies. The Government has the ability to do something about this, and Grant Robertson has done absolutely nothing. In this Budget we got no new ideas, no vision, and no ability to grow our economy so that we can deliver better outcomes for Kiwi families.

With an education system that in Minister Hipkins’ own words over the weekend should have “the power to transform lives”, we have 11.7 percent of our decile 1 kids able to pass a basic literacy and numeracy assessment at age 15. Only 30 percent of those same decile 1 kids are going to school regularly—the highest rate of unenrolled kids we’ve ever had in this country, under Chris Hipkins’ ministership as education Minister.

For a Labour Government that spews forth platitudes and empty words, like from Hipkins over the weekend—“I remain as committed today as I was 20 … years ago as a student protester to breaking down the barriers to participation in education at all levels.” For those young people who rely on an education system the most to transform their lives, to lift them out of poverty, and to change their circumstance, this Labour Government has failed them in the most insidious way, because education is the great empowerer. It is the lever that our young people use to change their lives.

The quality of their education should not be dictated on what their parents do or where they live, yet the record of this Government is something to be utterly ashamed of. Chris Hipkins’ words are empty. His Government is tired, and there is nothing new in this Budget or in his announcement over the weekend that will see kids achieving at the very highest levels.

National is the party of educational achievement. We are the party of educational aspiration. We will get this right. We have already announced our first education policy of many to be announced, Teaching the Basics Brilliantly, to set kids up for a life of success by focusing on literacy and numeracy, guaranteeing that no matter where you live, you have access to the same curriculum—the same core content knowledge—no matter where you go to school, to guarantee that every single child gets an hour of reading and writing and maths every single day, to guarantee that teachers get the professional development that they need in literacy and numeracy, and to guarantee that every single child will have their progression monitored and reported back to parents. We will set a goal of having 80 percent of our kids at curriculum by the time they hit high school so that they have every opportunity to succeed at high school, and we will get our kids back in the top 10 of international rankings.

But what we’ve had from Labour in education is a moral and a social failure. Chris Hipkins’ words at conference were empty. They sounded good, but when you look at his record as education Minister for over half a decade, you find a trail of failure. From the megamerger of our polytechnics—which is a variation on the same tune as the health outcomes, which are totally dismal—in which we’ve seen this Government sink $200 million to solve a $40 million deficit, what have we ended up with? Well, we’re going to find out later this month, but what it sounds like is between a $60 and $100 million deficit and fewer people training at our polytechs. That’s what Chris Hipkins has delivered as Minister of Education. It’s been an absolute, unmitigated failure.

In six years, he has not been able to get our kids going to school for more than 50 percent of the time, and, you know, they use these patronising and useless campaigns—“Every day counts”. What do we see? We see our kids going to school regularly less than 50 percent of the time, and we see—what—one attendance officer in the 84 that they’ve promised in the first three months of that policy being delivered.

I need to talk about the flagship policy of this Budget, which is now lying in tatters around the feet of Jo Luxton, a Minister who should know better because she has owned an early childhood education (ECE) centre herself, and she then said publicly, “I don’t know why 75 percent of the sector say it won’t work”. Well, maybe you’d know if you’d talked to them before you launched the policy.

Nobody knew about it. The whole sector is saying, “Well, actually, if you’d come to talk to us, Minister, we would have told you that it doesn’t work.” Well, guess what? Now 90 percent of the sector have signed that same letter and are coming to a meeting in a couple of days’ time in Jo Luxton’s office to tell her why this policy won’t work—because it was funded on a one to 10 ratio. No one in the whole country for the two- to three-year-old age group works on a one to 10 ratio. No—

💬 Hon Jo Luxton: Yes, they do.

Oh, maybe Jo Luxton does. In the two-year-olds’ room? I have yet to walk into any centre that operates on one to 10. That’s what they’re doing to the sector, which will mean that fees will have to go up to compensate for those free hours.

So if you have a baby at ECE, if you have a child who is doing more than 20 hours, expect your—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! Order! Not the Speaker.

—sorry—expect their fees—thank you, Madam Speaker—to go up, or the ratios to head up to one to 10. If that’s what the Minister wants to happen, well then, good luck to our under-threes in a one to 10 ratio, which cannot be described by anyone as safe. Or what will happen is that centres will just opt out altogether of 20 free hours because they cannot make it work, and guess what’ll happen? Fees will go up. Ninety percent of the sector have now signed this accord telling the Minister that her policy was rushed, it was ill advised, it was not consulted on, and it will not work. For all of those families out there who believed this Minister and believed this Government on Budget day that they were somehow going to get $133 a week, well, there will be a backtrack, and I am sorry to those people who believed this Government that they were going to get some help with the cost of living in their childcare policies.

We have put forth a childcare subsidy that was welcomed by the sector, that is workable, and that puts money back every fortnight in parents’ pockets for every age group, no matter where your child is at ECE. This policy is in tatters around Jo Luxton’s feet and she is going to have to fix it; so watch out for a backtrack.

National are the party of new ideas. We are the party to make sure that we’re going to get our health, our education, our economy, and our law and order back on track, and bring on October.

This a split call.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Well, that speech, from the party of backtracks, the party of flip-flops—honestly, one has to wonder. One has to wonder. Then we hear from that member Erica Stanford that this side of the House has no vision. Well, hang on, what is the vision that we hear from the opposite side? Boot camps—whoa!—tax cuts for the rich—well, that’s visionary!—and we hear about the current rates of children that aren’t doing so well in our NCEA levels. Well, what Government was in power and had national standards in when those children were attending school in their most formative years? Honestly, I can’t believe the stuff that comes out from that side of the House.

I want to commend the Hon Grant Robertson for this Budget. It is a Budget for the times and it focuses on the issues that matter to New Zealanders. It supports New Zealanders with the cost of living, it delivers services that New Zealanders can rely on, and it has fiscal sustainability. It’s balanced and it’s targeted, and I want to congratulate the Minister for it.

One of the things I want to talk about first and foremost is something that is near and dear to my heart, and that is ending the minimum wage exemption for those who have disabilities. For whatever reason it is, it is currently legal that they are able to be paid less on the basis that they are perceived to be less productive. That is just wrong and that is discriminatory, and so I am really proud of the fact that the Hon Priyanca Radhakrishnan has brought this to the Budget. We will see some people on the disability benefits—

💬 Erica Stanford: Come on, tell us how your ECE policy’s going to work.

—that will now receive the minimum wage and that means a lot to those people, and I’m really proud of that.

Ms Stanford is very keen to hear about the 20 hours’ free early childhood education (ECE), so I will talk about that. It is something that I am quite proud of because it will save parents up to $130 a week in their back pocket, unlike what we’ve heard from the Opposition, where they may save up to $75 unless the centres just do a workaround and charge fees for that.

This Government has put $1.2 billion into the early childhood sector in this Budget. It is a record amount of money into the sector, because what we saw under the previous Government was not much at all.

Actually, I find it really interesting that recently, I was talking to a previous Minister of Education from another party in this House who loves the 20 free ECE hours policy that this Government is putting forward. What that policy will mean is that it will break down barriers for those who could not normally afford to pay for early childhood fees. We have the most expensive fees in our early childhood sector—some of the most expensive around the world—and what this will do is it will reduce barriers to education.

Education is the most transformative influence in our lives. It is one that overcomes every disadvantage with which a child might begin life. That is something I said in my maiden speech, and that is something that I absolutely hold dear. What this will mean is that parents who want to return to the workforce or perhaps they want to return to study but are finding early childhood fees unaffordable as they stand—this provides opportunity.

The Hon Dr Megan Woods mentioned before that this has been the Budget for women, and it has. It is largely women who are the main caregivers at home, and this will provide opportunity for our women to get back into the workforce or to get back into study, and therefore be able to contribute to the family income. We do know that, currently, families are struggling, and so the ability to have an increased income will benefit families.

The ability to save on early childhood fees and to have $133 in their back pocket will mean so much to the families here in New Zealand who are facing the cost of living crisis. This policy has families at the forefront, foremost.

The people of New Zealand can trust this Labour Government to put people first. And when we think about it, there are two propositions going into this election. There is “Chippy”, the boy from the Hutt, and there is Christopher Luxon, who caught a ministerial limousine down to the Beehive some few hundred metres away to make an announcement

I want to start by apologising to the people that that Leader of the Opposition may have called “bottom feeders”, perhaps who don’t have $5 to put towards prescription charges. I want to apologise to them for the fact that some people think that that is a “nice to have” policy when we know that there are parents who have transferred 87c from one bank account to another in order to get the medication for their family. I apologise to them. I think of the people in my electorate of Taieri, the people who are benefiting, will benefit, from the early childhood education (ECE) changes that will put $133 back into their pockets, because we know that more than 60 percent of people who are using ECE are already putting their two-year-olds into care. This is a direct payment back into their back pockets.

I think of the gaming rebate for Balancing Monkey Games—in fact, that fantastic little digital games company in the heart of South Dunedin have advocated to get that rebate because they were really struggling, competing with the Australian game producers. I went and saw them—and I want to shout out to Anna and Sam Barham and the team. They are young, ethically driven, they’re edgy, they’ve made amazing games, and they are bringing the digital economy into what was an industrial area. That’s a climate change proposition, an ethical proposition, and most of all, it is a jobs opportunity proposition for our young people in South Dunedin. So thank you for advocating, and thank you to the Minister, the Hon Ginny Andersen, for listening to the backbench coalition that were advocating for those changes to make sure that our gaming industry can continue to thrive in New Zealand.

Last week, I went down to the Hillside workshops with the Hon Grant Robertson, a place that has benefited over several Budgets to the tune of $105 million. What we are seeing is visible development happening. We are seeing the prospect of many jobs in my area and again economic development for an area that has long been forgotten by other Governments, particularly the National Government who tried to gut it in 2012.

So, on the other hand, we have the National Party—slippery and out of touch. They would change the prescription charge. They have changed their policy on tax cuts for the wealthiest of New Zealanders. Remember how long they hung on to that? For months and months and months until finally it was untenable. They let it go. They didn’t just do a U-turn on the clean car discount, they did an absolute doughnut. And they have a leader who is prepared to call some of the most deprived New Zealanders “bottom feeders”. They are the “coalition of cuts”. They are the ones—may I remind you—who cut the Police. They did cut Hillside in 2012. They would cut superannuation to 65-year-olds and 66-year-olds. So unfair. That is a taonga that was created by Sir Michael Cullen, a very proud member who came from my electorate. They would cut basic services, they would possibly cut the changes that we have made to wages for nurses and teachers. And let’s remember, some of those wages have gone up for nurses by 30 percent. The top base rate used to be $60,000; it’s now in the $90,000s for nurses. And as my colleague, the Hon Jo Luxton said, that is a feminised sector. These are changes for women. These are changes that benefit women.

The tax cuts that the National Party would give would be inflationary. They would hurt the poorest New Zealanders, and they would also hurt middle New Zealanders. And let’s not forget that a vote for National in this election, is a double deal: two for the price of one. You get National and you get ACT, and that is what gets me out of bed every day. The thought of the most right-wing Government that this country has ever seen stripping away the benefits to workers and the support and the rights of hard-working New Zealanders is something that gets me out of bed every day. This Budget looks after them. It’s a great Budget.

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Angie Warren-Clark, split call.

Thanks, Mr Speaker. It’s a real joy to stand and speak in regards to this Budget. I have been listening along today and I must say—I’ve turned some speeches off—the Opposition have spent a lot of time using their very, very dramatic hand movements and not saying very much at all. I’m getting tired of hearing their same old lines.

I am delighted for us to be talking about this Budget, and it’s because we know that it is a bread and butter Budget. It is going to bring us back to the land of milk and honey. It is a delightful Budget that is actually focused on not being inflationary, so it’s doing some double duty for us.

I was recently in Whangārei and visiting Buchanan’s Chemist. Buchanan’s Chemist is based in Tikipunga, one of the most deprived communities, very close to Ōtaika, which is the most deprived community in the country. They told us that the clearing of the $5 fee is literally going to change a massive, massive thing for the community there. It means, there, essentially, that people are going to get medicine.

Now, we know—everyone knows—the shame that people feel when they’re actually looking and they get asked whether or not they have enough money to be able to afford their prescription. I know that in respect of the women’s refuge women I worked with, we basically had a donor who would support us to be able to pay for prescriptions so our māmās wouldn’t be sicker than they were when they came to women’s refuge. This is materially going to change the way that we care for our people in this country, and we’re really delighted—we’re really delighted—for those community chemists and pharmacies that are actually going to be able to continue to work and care for their people. So I am really pleased about that.

I’m absolutely really, really delighted. I’ve been talking to my niece, who has a little 18-month-old. My niece is an occupational therapist. She is going to be able afford to pay less than $133 a week in childcare when her little Lucy gets to be able to go into free childcare at the age of two. Not only that, my niece is working in the hospital. She’s working as an occupational therapist. It means that she’s going to be able to do an extra day’s work a week, which is going to help her family and also help our health industry. It’s a massive win to have that, and I’m delighted.

I cannot understand for the life of me how the Opposition can consider that this is not a good policy. I cannot for the life of me understand how they cannot understand about this double hat this policy does.

There is one small policy that I really want to talk about as well. This is a passion of mine and something close to my heart. It hasn’t been mentioned to date. I’m really delighted with the $13.5 million put into the food rescue or food security funding. I’m really delighted about that, because this is an industry that essentially has stood up every time we have a crisis in the country and has helped and supported with food insecurity. I’m really delighted that this money over the next two years is going to help those services to be able to do what we know they know how to do well, and that is to mobilise and support our communities who are doing it hard.

The good thing about it as well, though, I have to say, and I’m really pleased about this, is that, actually, in terms of the cost to the environment and the cost to the community, it is, again, doing double duty.

This is a Budget that I’m really delighted to talk about. The Budget adds on the changes that we’ve had from 1 April, and there’s a huge amount of things that we’ve done. One of the things that I think we all need to acknowledge and recognise is that our superannuitants who are getting the winter warmth payment have also had their increase from 1 April. We continue to care for our superannuitants; we won’t be raising the age to 67. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s an honour to take part in this Budget debate. It’s actually only the second time I’ve participated in a Budget debate, because the first time when I was elected as an MP I was actually on leave for a short time with my baby, who I had while I was an MP. I’m delighted to be able to sit here today in the House with my colleague Steph Lewis, who is another person in our caucus who has become a mother during this term. The reason I mention that is because there’s one thing that stood out to me in this Budget, and that was the emphasis and the focus that this Budget has on mothers and people playing that role of mothers.

So, famously, the Opposition brought in the “mother of all Budgets”, which devastated our social services. This Government, I’m very proud to say, has bought in the exact opposite: a Budget for all mothers. There are a number of things in this Budget that are really, really significant and really look at the way New Zealanders live their lives and how we can make things easier for them in the really normal, everyday bread and butter issues that they face.

The first thing is going to work. How do parents go to work? They need, obviously, someone to take care of their children. We’ve had a very successful policy of 20 hours’ free from three. We’ve now extended that to two, and I have full confidence that this policy will work in the favour of parents, people who are actually pulling money out of their back pocket in order to not only be able to pay for good quality childcare but actually go to work.

And how are they going to get their children to work? Well, that’s another thing that this Budget has: free public transport for those under 13. They don’t have to worry about that any more. By the way, it’s also good for the environment.

Another thing that happens to parents is that children get sick. We know that. Steph Lewis and I know that. It’s something that happens all the time, so people have to pay for medication. People have, unfortunately, budgets which often don’t stretch for unexpected costs, so even the $5 fee is a struggle for many. This Government is getting rid of those prescription fees, and I couldn’t be prouder of a Government that stands for high-quality healthcare and access to high-quality healthcare.

There are other things in this Budget which do really help working parents, and especially women. One thing that hasn’t been talked about as much, perhaps, but I think is a really significant policy is the policy of the Government matching employer KiwiSaver contributions to allow parents to take the time out to actually take that parental leave and know that it’s not going to be disadvantageous to them financially by the time they retire. This is a fantastic policy which really speaks to the values of this Government: equity, equality of outcomes, not necessarily of treatment—of outcomes. So this means that when people retire, they won’t have to worry about the fact that there is a deficit.

There are also other changes that will affect, really, the whole life of New Zealanders. The changes that we made to the Warmer Kiwi Homes announcement will really help lower household energy bills—another thing we know which is affecting the cost of living for New Zealanders. These are all essential changes that have come in that really will help address the cost of living, and I’m so proud of this Budget for that reason.

In fact, this Budget was one of the first Budgets to introduce a gender budgeting snapshot, which is a tool which looks at the Budget and how it affects people depending on their gender. I was really pleased to see this included on the Budget. We need to know that the policies that we implement in this House do not have negative effects on people because of their gender, because of their ethnicity, and these types of tools will really assist us to make sure that we can implement policies that help everyone.

But what do we hear from the other side? Negativity—negative National constantly talking down New Zealand and New Zealanders, telling us not only that they don’t agree with our policy on prescription fees but that they are going to cut it when they come in, making healthcare more expensive for New Zealanders. That’s what the Opposition stands for. Absolutely shocking.

And another U-turn: they say they’ll bring it back in even if it is targeted. Well, let me tell you that better policy is universally getting rid of that fee so people know that when they go to the pharmacy, they’re not having to be paying for that additional cost.

So I stand by this Budget and the changes that it will implement. It’s a Budget for this time. It’s a Budget that works for working people, but particularly for working women. It addresses many of the key areas that affect their life as a whole, and I commend it to the House with the original motion.

So this is a Budget that is set in the context of a cost of living crisis, where every household up and down New Zealand is doing it considerably tougher than they were several years ago. So what is the Government’s answer? It’s, “Let’s spend more of their money for them. Let’s have higher interest rates for longer. Oh, and let’s tell them to have five-minute showers. Let’s tell them to unplug their appliances. Let’s tell them how to turn the heater down.”

It just absolutely smacks of complete disregard and a complete disconnection to the reality of the lives that New Zealanders are facing today. And they’ve only been in for 5½ years, so they’ve completely missed the point. It’s quite interesting when you think about the $28,000 of extra spending this Government is spending for every household every year—and $28,000. And I know my colleagues are pretty clear about what $28,000 would buy. And remember, this is the Government who believes they can spend that money better than you can. So I invite people—as I’ve been doing around the electorate in the last week since the Budget—to say how an individual or family would spend that $28,000. I bet you it would be in different ways than the current Government. Oh, but they want people to be grateful to the Government for giving their own money back to them and expecting that that’s actually purchasing something.

Well, let’s have a look. Let’s have a look at some of the areas. I want to talk about social development and employment and I want to talk about child poverty reduction, because one of the things that $28,000 for every household is buying is another 33,000 people on the jobseeker benefit in the next two years. So the result from that side after six years in office will be an extra 81,000 New Zealanders on the jobseeker benefit. Oh, but this is the time that the Minister of Finance says we’ve got record low unemployment, times are great. Really? Really? Tell that to the people who are receiving the jobseeker benefit. Tell that also to the businesses who have been desperate for staff. When I had Into Work workshops around New Zealand in every region they’re like, “Where are these job seekers? Where are these job seekers?” We want people to be in employment, but one in 20 New Zealanders today is in receipt of the jobseeker benefit. It doesn’t sound like success to me. One in five New Zealand children being raised in a benefit-dependent home. And what we do know is that their life outcomes are worse in health, in education, in income, and in justice.

So what in the Budget was aimed at supporting New Zealanders into work? Oh, guess what? Flexi-wage, the big unemployment initiative—funding has been reduced. Māori trades training has been reduced. So instead of actually putting money into supporting people into work and into training so they can stand up on their own two feet, this Government, when the number on jobseeker benefit is going to increase by 33,000, is cutting it. They’re cutting expenditure—to me it’s actually an investment, but they’re cutting it. They’re cutting funding into programmes that would support New Zealanders into work. And if you look at the businesses out there, the businesses who don’t have a business unless they’ve got workers will be wondering why on earth a Labour Government is supporting people to stay on welfare, to be stuck on welfare instead of supporting them with practical tools into work—like our Welfare that Works policy. I’m really proud of that, we’ve focused on a group of New Zealanders, 50 percent of them under Labour, under 25, now long-term welfare recipients at a time we’ve had record labour shortages.

So that is an absolute failure. That is an absolute failure of this Government for not supporting Kiwis into work. It means a life of less opportunities, less choices, because the Government hasn’t done the work to support them off welfare. So with regard to their flagship policy, the Flexi-wage extension, in the campaign the Prime Minister—it was Ardern at the time—said, “We’ll get 40,000 people into work.” Guess what? They got to 25 and gave up. And now they’re reducing the funding into the Flexi-wage extension. Well, I want to know from members opposite, how do you look someone who’s out of work in the face and say, “We’re actually cutting support for the things that could make a difference to you and your family and to support you back up again to work?” Well, have a look at those initiatives. Much of the employment support is being reduced. [Interruption]

They obviously haven’t read the Budget so they don’t know the numbers. So let’s put a few of them on record. What are we looking at in terms of some of the cuts? Some $14 million for Māori trades training fund, $68 million decrease in their flagship Flexi-wage extension—that is about supporting people into work and supporting them to stay in work so they can look after themselves and their families. So not only did they not make the target, they’ve given up. They have given up. So when we talk about welfare dependency, yes, it’s a fiscal cost. But guess what? It’s a human cost. And it’s a human cost that that side of the House are ignoring. They are ignoring the impact and the impact on the children who live in those households, and they are writing off their futures.

Do you know how you reduce benefit dependency? You actually tackle it right at the very start. Instead, that side of the House is willing to grow the number of people, the number of children being raised in benefit-dependent homes, and their outcomes—I will repeat it again—are worse in health, they are worse than education, they’re worse in income, and they’re worse in justice.

They might say “This was a Budget for mothers.” It was definitely not one for children who are raised in benefit-dependent homes, because that side has given up on supporting people into employment and in actually helping people up and on with their lives. It’s an absolute disgrace.

And so the other side might say, well, you know, we’re a bit negative. Well, guess what? We actually see that New Zealand has masses of potential, but that actually requires you to do something. It’s called enforcing the social contract so that if somebody is out of work and they’re looking for work and they’re not playing their part, there should be a consequence. It’s called a sanction. No surprise that it’s dropped by 50 percent since these guys have been in office.

What are we seeing? An explosion in welfare dependency. And their very own flagship policy that was to support people into work—Flexi-wage—they’ve cut. Oh, so they’d rather that someone, you know, does some training when there’s actually a job there tomorrow, a business who is reducing their hours because they don’t have enough staff. Some are actually closing—

💬 Angela Roberts: Because you need trained people so you get an apprenticeship.

No, there are jobs out there today where businesses and people will train you from scratch. And so Labour ignores the very real challenge of people who are on the jobseeker benefit—100,000 of them have been there for more than a year. More than a year. And, actually, on this side of the House we believe in people’s ability. We believe in people’s ability to get back up. We believe in people’s ability to look after their families with the right support at the right time. And that’s why our Welfare that Works policy engages community organisations who are connected on the ground and actually supports people not only to get a job but to stay in a job.

Because again, Labour has failed to support people into work: 22 percent who come off welfare are back on it within 12 weeks. That’s a disgrace. And again, you are gutting people of their opportunities. I don’t see this Budget as anything to crow about. If anything, it is absolutely gutting to see that opportunities for Kiwis out of work will be failed by Labour.

Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker. It is my privilege to rise and take a call in support of Budget 2023. The previous member speaking, the Hon Louise Upston, talked about the human cost, and I want to touch on the human cost of 135,000 people not being able to afford to pick up their prescriptions—the cost not just to their physical health but their mental health, the cost to their families, to their children, and also the financial cost to our health system when, because they couldn’t afford to pick up their prescription because of a $5 co-payment the previous National Government brought in, they end up getting sicker and sicker and sicker, to the point they need to go in and fill our hospitals. The members on the opposite side want to talk about why we aren’t doing more for waiting lists. How do we do more for waiting lists? By freeing up our health resources, by making sure that those we can treat at that early intervention level are getting the help that they need so as we can better target our resources and our healthcare professionals in our hospitals. That is why we have brought in a plan to remove the $5 prescription payment as of 1 July this year.

Last week we had a recess, and I took the opportunity over recess to go and pop in to a few of my local chemists in Whanganui, and not only are individuals thrilled with our announcement but so are pharmacists. I spoke to pharmacists who have been helping pay out of their own pocket for peoples’s prescriptions. I spoke to pharmacists who have been going down the prescription list, trying to figure out which lifesaving, life-preserving medicines somebody should buy this week because they couldn’t afford their full prescription list, and which they can afford to defer until next week. That puts a heck of a lot of pressure on our pharmacists. So I want to acknowledge the work that they do to support our communities.

The other side has also talked about targeting—they say, “Don’t make it universal, we should target it.” Well, one of the things that the pharmacist I spoke to said is they don’t want that. They don’t want to have to have a conversation with the people who walk through their doors about money. People who walk through their doors don’t want to have to have a conversation about whether or not they are eligible for free prescriptions or whether they are just over the cusp and have to pay for their prescription. This policy is something that will have a huge positive impact on communities across Aotearoa, and I commend finance Minister Grant Robertson and Prime Minister Chris Hipkins for bringing this initiative in.

As the local member of Parliament for Whanganui, I also want to do a shout-out and acknowledge the Budget announcement where we’ll see a $12.5 million contribution to the design and initial building stage for a new school in Hāwera, Te Paepae o Aotea, which is the new school that has replaced Hāwera Intermediate, following the fire several years ago, and Hāwera High School. This has been a long journey for the community of Hāwera, and I am beyond thrilled to see this commitment that will enable them to move forward as a community and for students, teachers, and staff to be on their way to getting a world-class facility that they can be proud of to work and learn in.

I also want to touch on the infrastructure component in our Budget. We’ve committed $71 billion across the next five years for new and existing infrastructure investment. And I’ll tell you why that’s important. In Whanganui we’ve got the suburb of Castlecliff, which is protected by the north and south moles at the end of the Whanganui awa. Without those moles, the suburb of Castlecliff would be prone to coastal erosion. But unfortunately, through lack of investment over decades, they were literally crumbling into the sea. It is this Government that has invested in the Whanganui port revitalisation project, and that is why I’m so thrilled to see a commitment to investing in our infrastructure now and for the future. This is important to make sure that we build back better from that infrastructure deficit that we have inherited as a Government and make sure that we are prepared for severe weather events. Thank you; I commend the original motion to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s with great pride, as the member of Parliament for Ilam, that I rise to take a short call in this Budget debate. Ilam is, obviously, as we all know, the very best electorate in Aotearoa, but it may be one of the most misunderstood. We do have the traditional leafy lanes, we do have wealthy homes there—very lovely they are. But we also have the second largest social housing area, one of the largest number of different ethnic communities, and we also have our fantastic university—the best university in the country. And this makes for a very vibrant, interesting, and challenging place to be and to be the member of Parliament for.

It’s in this context that I would like to highlight a few aspects of Budget 2023 in which there is, as we’ve heard, much to love—far more than I can do justice to in the few minutes that I have. Because, unlike many, it seems, in the House sitting comfortably on the Opposition benches, I know what it means to have to choose between getting a prescription filled or buying a few loaves of what I would rudely call “plastic bread”—the stuff that they sell as a loss leader in the big-box supermarkets. I’ve seen, in my work as a midwife, under—it has to be said—a National Government, firsthand what it actually means to be unable to heat your home, to be unable to complain about the black mould in your home that’s making your children sick because you can be evicted without reason or notice, to be unable to afford hot water to wash yourself, your children, or your clothes. So I don’t mind admitting that I felt extremely emotional when Minister Robertson came before caucus and told us that we were going to be scrapping the $5 prescription fee, because I know what a massive difference this is going to make to the health of our people.

If you care about people, then you know how important this is. If you only care about money, then it still makes sense because it saves money on hospital bills from unnecessary admissions. When people are able to pick up all of the medication that their clinician physician has prescribed for them, they often don’t need that hospital visit, and that saves us money. We heard from the Hon Rachel Brooking earlier about the research at Otago University that shows that really clearly: 135,000 unfilled prescriptions, which is why, when I read on the day of the Budget announcement that National would reintroduce the $5 charge if elected—

💬 Matt Doocey: That’s right.

“That’s right.” Mr Doocey says—I thought it was a joke. I thought it was a really bad joke in the style of The Onion satire. But then I heard the party double down, and then I found it in black and white. And in my opinion, it is cruel and economically stupid, and the National Party can never ever claim to care one jot for anyone who is struggling to make ends meet.

They oppose for the sake of opposition, for the simple sake of contrariness. And at this point they’ve had to walk back so many policy statements or clarify so many positions that barely any of us know, including their own benches, what they stand for now. Whatever the most powerful lobby groups think is probably what they want—whatever their largest donor thinks. Who knows? Who knows what they think? They don’t. They don’t communicate it with each other. Simeon Brown says one thing one day, walked back the next. You cannot trust a word the National Party says. You can’t trust a word they say. You can’t trust a picture they publish. You can’t trust them even on legislation they co-wrote, which would be funny if it wasn’t so serious.

So I reflect on whether or not women should trust Christopher Luxon when he says, on the one hand, abortion is murder, and, in the next breath, that women’s reproductive rights are safe in his hands. The legislation that his member co-wrote is not safe in his hands. The National Party have no idea what they stand for. And that’s why you cannot trust a word they say. You cannot trust them to stand by people who have less than they do, because they’ve shown us really clearly how much they care about the people of Aotearoa, the elderly, the poor, children—not one jot. I commend the Budget to the House.

Yesterday, I was asked by a journalist, in my experience in this House, what I had found most surprising and what the kind of characteristics of it were. I said to him that I found it surprising that we had so much in common in all of the parties but also found it absolutely surprising what a stark contrast there was between parties, and how much of a difference it would make who led this country. That’s really something I’ve thought about during the time that I have gone out to my constituency and talked about this Budget, because this Budget does show that difference.

I take up that point that was raised by the Opposition that the public needs vision and they need a future. They certainly do. That’s why this Budget is about building for tomorrow at the same time as securing people now. I think that the public deserves hope and vision in their future. I want to just talk for a minute about some of the things that I think show that hope and vision belongs in the leadership of the Labour Party.

The first thing that I’d like to talk about is actually something that most people wouldn’t necessarily think of as helping them, and that is the money that has gone into New Zealand Steel. Now, that, to me, was a big deal because the money that’s going into New Zealand Steel is going to take out a whole lot of carbon. It’s going to make a huge difference and it’s going to make a difference to the planet, it’s going that wide. But it’s also going to secure a whole lot of jobs in New Zealand that are high-paid jobs. That’s the economy we need.

We have a problem in New Zealand with not having high enough productivity, with not having high enough wages. That’s a problem. We have to transform our economy—we have to transform our economy. It is not a matter of having a choice. We cannot have a slow transition; we have got to make a good, sound, and visionary transition. So this helps us do this.

This is going to reduce our carbon emissions by 1 percent annually. That’s a big amount. It’s a big number. It’s incredibly important that we get behind enterprises that are willing to do that.

It was great that we got behind the gaming designers in this country, in the Budget, because I’ve met with people who are in those industries, and it’s a weightless industry. It’s incredibly good for our youth that they’ve got a place that they can go and be creative and actually just earn decent money. It’s a really important thing. That’s the kind of economy we have to grow in New Zealand.

Would we have an economy like that under National? I seriously doubt it, because it hasn’t happened. Everything that this Government does that’s proactive gets naysaid; there’s always a reason why it’s got to happen tomorrow or the next day or the day after that or perhaps the next decade. Anything that gets in the way of the short-term gain is actually being put down, and one of those things I saw on the Transport and Infrastructure Committee was the Clean Car Discount. I’ll never forget what I saw there, the games I saw being played by the Opposition about supporting what was, in fact, an incredibly effective scheme. It has worked. And it was always just going to happen some other time. But they said it was this, it was that. We have to do these things. We have to be visionary. We have to give people hope. That is incredibly important.

Finally, I want to talk about apprenticeships, because they’ve been raised a little bit here. The Labour Government has committed to making the Apprenticeship Boost permanent. It is so important that our youth don’t miss out right now, that they go into high-wage work, and this scheme supports them doing that. That is something we cannot turn our backs on. It is important that our older people have the winter energy payment; it’s important that their pensions go up. It’s important that our young families get childcare at decent rates. That’s all important stuff. It is so important that our children actually get apprenticeships. And what did the National Party do? At its crisis, it cut the apprenticeships. That’s the contrast I pick up.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’m very proud to be standing in support of this Wellbeing Budget. We have economists around the world who look to us for our leadership in a just transition and our ability to develop a Wellbeing Budget. It is fairly unique actually, globally, and people look to us and the way that we can look at our economy more broadly than just GDP output. This is about the wellbeing of our children, our young people, our businesses, actually, our economy, and our planet. We’ve had a lot of conversations about all the wonderful things in the Budget, and just about every speaker on this side of the House has been able to get up and go, “But wait, there’s more.”

I’m going to focus on a couple of bits that everyone knows are dear to my heart: education and our rural communities. Obviously, extending the 20 hours of early childhood education to two-year-olds is critical. It’s a double whammy. Not only is it helping with the cost of living for every household that has to pay, at the moment, for those 20 hours, but it frees parents up to make the choice to go back to the workforce or enter the workforce if they choose to do so. We heard from the other side of the House how concerned they are that we need more workers. This helps households, businesses, and our babies.

The other thing that we’ve heard a lot about us is the scrapping of the prescription co-payment. For those of us who live in small communities, this has a profound impact. We really need our community pharmacies to survive and to thrive. They need to know that our communities don’t have to wait to go to town once a week and have those big-box pharmacies who can cross-subsidise that $5 subsidy. I need my community pharmacy in my local village to survive. It’s really important. We see rural communities and we support them.

We’ve heard a lot about free public transport for our students, for our young people, and the half-price transport, which is great for those of you who have that choice. But you know what’s great? And this is the “But wait, there’s more.” We have put in money to make sure that our school bus drivers get the pay rise that they deserve. For those of us who live in rural communities, there are 100,000 students around the country who rely on the school bus service. Those bus drivers are amazing. They do a split shift. They do long trips, sometimes in really dodgy weather, and, you know, some of their passengers can be a little challenging, and that $26.4 million over four years is critical. We need to make sure we have a bus service that is what our rural communities need. We see them and we support them.

I want to talk about investing in our future with education. Alternative education got a 30 percent increase per student placement.

💬 Anna Lorck: Wow.

Thirty percent—yeah. You didn’t know that, did you? There’s so much great stuff in this Budget, we haven’t been able to cover it all. This will impact on more than 2,000 of our precious students to re-engage and stay engaged in education—some of our most vulnerable students in our communities.

I want to take this opportunity to shout out to Stacey Seyb and her amazing team at a little alternative education centre in Stratford, Ngā Wānanga o Māui Pōtiki, which means the wānanga of little Māui, and I guess it reflects the really positive approach that they take. They value these students in the way that we value Māui. They see them as inventive and creative and possibly a little bit challenging and not easily put into a conventional box. These people are doing amazing things with our most vulnerable students. They uplift them and they set them up for employment and further education. This will help those providers who have done so much with so little for so long to do a little bit more.

Finally, like most of my colleagues, I want to just do another mention of the Apprenticeship Boost. I guess the only thing I want to reflect on here is that when firms are planning and building their workforce, they really need certainty and confidence, and an apprenticeship isn’t for a few weeks; it is for years, through thick and thin. We will stand with businesses. This Government is committed to businesses and building a workforce that will ensure a just transition for all of our people. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker, for the opportunity to talk on behalf of the National Party in this Budget debate. And I want to start with the interesting event last week—wasn’t it interesting that TVNZ 1 Kantar poll? Who would have thought a Government, after their Budget, got no bounce in the poll? I would say—

💬 Erica Stanford: They went backwards.

They did go backwards, Erica Stanford. I would say that is unprecedented. And it speaks volumes to how, on that side of the House, the Government side, they think they’re connected to New Zealanders but, really, they are just in the beltway of Wellington. And what was also interesting about last week was a news item that said Te Whatu Ora—or Health New Zealand—was going to write to 30,000 Kiwis who are waiting on the surgery list to ask them if they still need their surgery, just in case just magically their surgery needs have disappeared. Thirty thousand Kiwis are going to be written to by Te Whatu Ora - Health New Zealand to ask if they still need their surgery.

The reason I raise that is to contrast what’s happening at the moment in the UK: the Labour Party in England is actually advocating to fund the private sector to pick up capacity to reduce surgery waiting lists in the UK. And why is that important? Because every funding announcement comes with an opportunity cost. So they can stand on their side of the House and crow that they’ve removed co-payments so well-to-do and wealthy people don’t have to pay their $5 for their prescription, but the cost that comes at is $620 million. I challenge any Government MP to go out and talk to Kiwis and say, “Right, you’ve got $620 million. What would you like to prioritise?” And I guarantee you no Kiwi says, “Get rid of the co-payment”. They would say there’s a range of issues in the health system that you should prioritise for that $620 million, like reducing the surgery wait-list. So Kiwis, when you’re out over the next six months talking to your Labour MP—that’s if you can find them, because they’re missing in action at the moment—and asking why you can’t get on the wait-list, it’s because they prioritised getting rid of the co-payment for wealthy people over thousands of Kiwis on a surgery wait-list. Who in their right mind would have prioritised that for over $600 million of vital health system funding?

And that also comes on the back of another event that happened a couple of weeks ago. A mental health patient waited in the emergency department (ED) for 94 hours—four days. A doctor at the time in the Auckland ED described it as the longest ever wait in ED history. And what was in the Budget for patients like that, gridlocked in ED? Nothing. In fact, what was even more of a kick in the guts was that in the last Budget, in 2022, the Government announced $100 million for mental health, and $27.5 million of that was for crisis respite beds that might have prevented that vulnerable Kiwi waiting four days in ED. And do you know how much of that $27.5 million had been spent by March? Zero—absolute zero. And what was interesting was that the Health and Disability Commissioner, at the time of the reporting of that vulnerable Kiwi stuck in ED in crisis for four days, called on the Government for a plan. Who would have thought that a Government that came in to power six years ago promising to transform the mental health system would be called on by the Health and Disability Commissioner for a plan in mental health.

Two years ago, the Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission, in their first damning report—which found that despite the $1.9 billion for mental health, the Labour Government had made no material improvement—also called for a plan. Here we are, six years in. So it’s not surprising that in this Budget, mental health was hardly mentioned. In the old days the $1.9 billion was like a trophy; they paraded it around. They don’t mention it much these days, a bit like a millstone around their neck, a bit like the 40-odd recommendations from their mental health inquiry just quietly shelved away.

And what’s concerning today in the UK, as well, which has come out through The Guardian, is that the police in the UK have said to the health services in England that they are no longer going to respond to mental health crisis call-outs unless there is life at risk. We’re no different over here. The Canterbury police have said that 55 percent of their work is responding to mental health crisis call-outs. Where was the acknowledgment of that in Budget 2023? Because the history of the mental health co-response services is that under the last National Government in Budget 2017, Bill English announced $100 million for mental health social investment projects. One of them was the mental health co-response service to pair up mental health professionals to go out with police to mental health crisis call-outs. Labour came in, after promising to transform the mental health system, and cut that—the first thing they did in 2018.

There you had the last National Government, Bill English, giving $100 million for social investment to go into co-response services to make sure that when vulnerable Kiwis ring up in their time of need for a health response, they don’t get the criminal justice response that’s happening today. The last National Government was actually ahead of its time. They were ahead of the curve. This Government’s come in, they cancelled the funding, and every Budget we wait for them to reprioritise that funding again for co-response services and in this Budget they didn’t deliver.

Here we go: 55 percent of police time is taken up with mental health crisis calls. There was nothing in this Budget for them. So they can talk a big game about mental health but here we have it once again—Budget 2023 was about waving the white flag in mental health. The biggest barrier to timely mental health and addiction support in New Zealand is the mental health workforce crisis. There was nothing in the Budget to address that.

And so you know it’s time for a Government to move on when they run out of ideas. These guys are absolutely bereft of ideas in mental health and in health. And their only—or their biggest—flagship policy was to remove the co-payment, a $5 co-payment for well-off Kiwis. And then they crow, “Oh, I’ve spoken to a pharmacist who’s really supportive of this.” Well, I’m not surprised they’re really supportive of this. This helps their business model.

They got rolled by private business. Think of where you could have prioritised $620 million in the health system, and I guarantee you Kiwis would have come up with a better option than this. So I’m not surprised that the Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission is calling for a mental health plan six years in from this Labour Government and that the Health and Disability Commissioner is calling for a plan six years in from this Government. We actually have no plan in mental health. What’s very interesting is the Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission will release their next report into mental health tomorrow. I guarantee what it’s going to show, just like written parliamentary questions are going to show—skyrocketing vacancy rates in our mental health workforce and a drop in the number of people accessing services. The mental health inquiry found an indicative target; we needed to increase access from 5 percent to potentially 20 percent of the population—$1.9 billion. We’ve made no difference under Labour.

Thank you, Mr Doocey. Just before I take the next call, can I just compliment the member on speaking without notes. There’s been a lot of members who are reading speeches, so it’s encouraged that members actually stand up and speak without notes. So I’ll compliment the member on that—to bear no relationship to what was in the speech, I might add.

I move, That this debate be now adjourned.

Motion agreed to.

Debate interrupted.

This debate is adjourned and is set down for resumption next sitting day. Members, the time has come for me to leave the Chair for the dinner break.

Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m.

Child Support (Pass On) Acts Amendment Bill

Second Reading