Sepuloni CarmelCARMEL SEPULONI (Labour—Kelston): I just want to refer back to what Minister Anne Tolley said earlier and that was in respect of being judged for the way National treats the most vulnerable. She acted and spoke as if that judgment would be favourable but we in the Committee know that National will be judged harshly for the way that it has treated the most vulnerable.I want to quote Minister Alfred Ngaro from a recent magazine article just to highlight really my concern for his lack of aspiration for our people. He said  'We had a three-bedroom house that was full of family between 12-15 people no insulation no running water and an outside toilet' he recalls. 'But living in that house I never had the sense that we were impoverished. We saw this country as the land of opportunity and lived and breathed it.' " The way I read that is that basically he is saying to all those people out there who are struggling with unhealthy homes and who are struggling with overcrowding in houses because they cannot afford to get their own housing that they should be grateful for what they have and they should be grateful because they are in the land of opportunity they need to work harder and life is good. Well that is not the case for so many of our people.I think that Minister needs to look at the statistics with regard to our Pacific children and respiratory diseases and the admissions to hospital over the winter months. The number of our children who die because of those respiratory problems—those respiratory problems that are largely brought about because of the substandard living conditions that they are forced to live in the ones that Mr Alfred Ngaro is basically saying should be celebrated. So I want to call him out on that because our people should not be grateful for substandard living conditions but that is what they have had imposed on them by the National Government.Mr Ngaro is a list MP in west Auckland so I am surprised that unlike the rest of us who work in west Auckland he does not see the reality of the housing crisis that has been inflicted on our community by the National Government. I want to talk through some of those cases that have come through my office—like my colleague Kris Faafoi did—because the reality is so far removed from that Government's rhetoric it is a joke. No one can accuse me of making these stories up. These stories are documented. They are in the papers. They have been interviewed—these are real people real lives and real struggles with housing.The first family I want to talk about is the Fa'avale family who have two children. Mr Fa'avale found himself in the situation where he could not work any more because of a workplace injury. He was not given the right gear in his workplace and so he had to give up working. Before long basically the family could not continue to pay their market rent and they were evicted. On the day that they were evicted Mr Fa'avale was supposed to have the operation on his eyes but he could not because he was concerned with looking for accommodation. No emergency housing was available to them so they ended up living in a makeshift tent in Henderson under a tarpaulin at the back of a Housing New Zealand house. Luckily Housing New Zealand did not know about it otherwise they would have been moved on. There were already other people living in that house so only one of their two children could live inside the house and that child cried every night knowing that his parents and his 4-year-old brother were sleeping outside under a tarpaulin.We had to take that case up with Housing New Zealand and Work and Income and of course they jumped into action when an Opposition MP brought it to their attention. But that Government should not be waiting for Opposition MPs and the media to bring these cases to its attention. I was so disgusted when I showed up at that house with a journalist and saw that poor 4-year-old child come out of that bed having just woken up with eczema and mosquito bites covering his body. That is the reality Mr Alfred Ngaro. There is not much to celebrate there and that family was not feeling very happy about their situation.Chris Bishop: Probably because there was a journo.CARMEL SEPULONI: I want to talk about—Mr Bishop thinks it is funny. Keep going Mr Bishop. Your whole Government thinks the housing crisis is a joke and will not take it seriously.I want to talk about the family from my electorate who were in emergency accommodation at a motel on Lincoln Road over the school holidays. They were evicted after 10 years in a rental house because they missed a couple of weeks of rent earlier this year. Going to visit them at that Lincoln Road motel during the school holidays—a 5-year-old a 7-year-old a 9-year-old and a mother who had taken 2 weeks off her job at Tegel to stay home with those kids. Talking to those kids I had the 7-year-old turn around and say with tears in their eyes—I am not even exaggerating—"Thank you so much for helping our family." This was another family that was homeless under that Government's watch. So I do not know what the Minister is talking about when she says that Government will be judged fondly for what it has done for the most vulnerable people in New Zealand.I have sat through the annual review I have listened to the officials and I have listened to the Minister. The reality is that the additional money that the Government puts into benefits—it cannot even tell us whether or not it has had any impact on the child poverty rates in this country. It has not done anything to address the real hardship that families are facing and that is why we are in the situation where we have least 41000 people who are homeless. It is not the reality that we all grew up with in this country. It is so foreign for us still. It still shocks me when I go to my local shopping centres and I am faced with rough sleepers outside those shopping centres. It is not the reality that we in New Zealand know and it is not what we want to see every day but we have got a National Government that continues to ignore it and to pretend that it is actually attending to the needs of our most vulnerable when that is not the case.I want to point out what came up in the annual review around the Ministry of Social Development's role with regard to getting people into employment. It continues to bother me and worry me that a large number of the people who are going off benefit are not in fact going into employment. It came up last week that an increasing number of people who are going off benefit are going into prison and a decreasing number of people who are going off benefit are going on to study. You have to wonder how aspirational that is. When you listen to the rhetoric from that Government talking about social investment talking about long-term cost savings—because it is not going to save us money if what we are seeing is people going off benefit and into prisons and it is not going to save us money if people are not getting the upskilling and training that they need when they find themselves in a period of unemployment when they cannot get work.So we have an increasing number of people going into prison. In fact if we look at the numbers in terms of the trend if it continues on that path in 4 years' time one in 25 people who go off benefit will actually be exiting because they are going into jail. What kind of legacy is that and how aspirational is that for our people who find themselves out of work?We had a 40 percent drop in the number of people who are going on to study. I have to refer back to one of the first actions of that National Government—another action that was anti-aspirational not supportive of some of the most vulnerable families—and that was the cutting of the training incentive allowance. Of course there has been a drop in the number of people picking up study because they are not supported by that Government to get into study. Instead what they are encouraged to do in whatever way is to just get off benefit and where possible go into the nearest fastest minimum-wage job which does not actually see them better off and which does not actually see their long-term employment prospects improve. As a country we should be concerned about that.The Government has been trying to celebrate the fact that there has been a slight drop in benefit numbers but the reality is that families are not better off. We see that with the increase of hardship grants given out—74000 additional hardship grants compared with last year. We see that with the extra $20 million that needed to be spent on emergency housing. There is $100000 a day being spent on motel accommodation. We see that with the types of hardship grants that families are having to seek out. Those hardship grants are in the area of food and educational costs—the basics that we would expect any New Zealand Government to provide for with regard to families in this country. So families are struggling; there are no two ways about it. And actually when you look at the hardship grants it is not just beneficiaries who are having to access them. It is an increasing number of working families—10 percent of those hardship grants that were accessed were actually accessed by working families. It has been 9 long years of incredibly incredibly harsh treatment of the most vulnerable in this country and actually an increasing number are vulnerable because of the actions or the non-actions by that side of the House."