Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Thank you Madam Assistant Speaker. If only we could make the world a better place simply by having good intentions then this Labour Government would have solved all of our problems. That was a beautiful speech with beautiful intent by the member who has just resumed her seat Priyanca Radhakrishnan. Yet sadly it will do nothing to lift any child out of poverty—unless of course they are suffering from a poverty of nice words in which case we've just seen the fix; it is in.The fact of the matter is that measuring poverty and inequality—Madam Assistant Speaker I'm sure you won't be surprised to know—is actually quite an interesting field. You can divide poverty and inequality measures up into measures that are relative and measures that are absolute—that is measures that try to compare the incomes of different households and measures that try to compare the incomes of different households against some absolute baseline.The problem with the measures in this bill is that with the possible exception of the absolute material hardship they are all based on relative measures. In other words they say Is a particular household under 50 percent of the median?" or "Is it under 60 percent of the median before or after housing costs?" Well that's great but the difficulty with that is even if everybody gets richer we end up with the same level of poverty. There have been times in history—examples of this in Ireland and in Hungary are set out excellently in the National Business Review by Lindsay Mitchell this week—where countries have gotten poorer but because the income distribution closed up their measures told us there was less poverty. So let's be clear. This is based on relative measures of poverty and it does not tell us what the real material hardship faced by children is.The second way you can divide up income and poverty measures is that you can divide them up by whether they are based on incomes or expenditures. What's interesting is that you can have households with relatively low incomes that nevertheless are consuming: they are spending on the right things and avoiding poverty. You can have households—and I might have lived in a few like this during university—that are OK for income but because of very poor spending decisions do not provide the necessaries that are required to live a prosperous life.That is the reality. We are measuring relative incomes of different households but this bill does not tell us anything about the actual levels of consumption. Are the kids getting enough food? Are their teeth being brushed? Are they getting to school at the right time? Are they consuming housing of a particular standard that allows them to live healthy lives? This bill won't answer any of these questions and it's worse than doing nothing because it brings us the distraction that as long as the chief statistician tells us that at least the family could have afforded to do that—or actually not even that: at least the family had enough income relative to other families to do those things—then they're fine. It is worse than doing nothing because it is a distraction from the real deprivation the real neglect of children that is harrowing in this country and damaging New Zealand's future.If the bill had said the following "We will instruct the chief statistician to replicate the Dunedin study on a smaller scale every year; we will go and test in randomly selected households how many children are getting the basic necessities of life." then I would have supported this bill. The ACT Party would support a bill that targeted real children's welfare not the statistical incomes that their parents are said to have relative to other parents in the neighbourhood.Sadly the bill does not do that but if it did the Government would have to face up to some hard facts. They'd have to fix the housing market—that's why we have deprivation. They'd have to fix education—that's why we have deprivation. They'd have to fix welfare dependency—that's why we have poverty and deprivation. But they've taken a soft option. They've distracted the country with relative income measures rather than measuring the real things that matter: how are children looked after; are they neglected; what do they consume; and do they have a real future in this country. The ACT Party will stand alone in Parliament opposing this bill because it's worse than nothing. It's a crock."