Ardern Jacinda: Budget DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeArdern Jacinda: Budget Debate[Sitting date: 21 May 2014. Volume:699;Page:18181. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JACINDA ARDERN (Labour): I always enjoy the build-up in your introductions to the next speaker Mr Assistant Speaker Robertson. For all of the rhetoric in this House in the aftermath of the Budget I think it is still important to reflect that ultimately Budgets should be about one thing. They should be about people. It is easy to get distracted by all of the different debate around appropriations and year-on-year comparisons but underneath it all people are ultimately what a Government’s Budget should be about. At the end of the day there is no better measure as to whether a Government is serving the needs of the country the needs of the people in the country than whether the Budget is directed towards the immediate needs that those people are facing. If we were to distil down those needs I think it is pretty simple to see through all of the media coverage around people’s concerns at the moment and the worries that families have—and even when you are a politician and youdoorknock you know immediately at the top of your mind what people are worried about in their day-to-day lives.That is what this Budget should have been about. The things that people are worried about are really simple basic needs. Firstly they are worried about whether they can afford to live in a decent house—and not just whether can they rent it but whether they can ever aspire to live in their own home—and whether the home they are living in is warm and dry and that their kids are well and safe inside it. Secondly they are worried about whether their kids are generally getting a good start—the best start—in life and having all of the opportunities that they had as parents. No matter what and no matter how you paint parents from across the spectrum underneath it all almost every single parent without doubt wants better for their kids—without doubt. Thirdly people those individuals we are talking to on the doorsteps are worried about whether they have the kind of job that enables them not just to get some satisfaction from getting up in the morning and going and doing that job but to provide for themselves—that is whether they can sustain themselves with the income and the wages that they are receiving in that work let alone provide for a family.So in that context based on those three simple needs how did this Budget perform? Well the Government has talked a lot about the needs of families. I think probably it detected that there was a desire amongst people to see something for families in this Budget. I think that as Labour members we did a pretty good job of raising the profile of the needs of family members. We set the bar with the Best Start policy. We challenged the Government to do something also. But the challenge was based on evidence. There are 285000 children living in poverty in New Zealand. That is roughly 27 percent. But if you break that down even further for all of the Prime Minister’s rhetoric about what he has done for Pasifika people in New Zealand one in three Pasifika children is living in poverty. They are one of the major groups who are suffering particularly at present in that regard. We know also that of that group 10 percent are living at what has been called the hardest end of poverty. That means theyare living on even less than what the poverty line is established at which is 60 percent of median income. We also know that three out of five children living in poverty will live there for a long time. They are most likely to live there in their youngest years so under the age of somewhere around 4.When we know all of that what did this Budget do for that group? The Minister of Finance talked about tackling the hardest end of poverty. He said that last week in the House before the Budget came out. He said that that is what his Government was going to do. But did it? I almost find that there is an irony in this—that the Government stated that this is the very group that needed a targeted response but the targeting happened precisely around them making sure that they were the only ones almost who were excluded from the Government’s Budget measures. The Government extended the parental tax credit by an extra 2 weeks so families get it for 10 weeks now and it upped the rate a bit to $220 a week. That is all good stuff—not quite as much as we would have liked but all good stuff. But the Government then said the parental tax credit will not go to anyone on an income-tested benefit yet the majority of families living in poverty are those exact families. So unfortunately the notion of it being a “fudge-it Budget” started right at that place for the families who needed it most. And what did the Minister of Finance say those families would get? Well they should celebrate because apparently they got a CPI adjustment and that is about it.The Government has come back and said in defence of itself that it has made free health care for under-13-year-olds universal—starting next year I should add. Well I would wager that probably what the Government did was go away and do a rough calculation. Since National has come into Government we have had 40000 preventable hospitalisations for children. If you want to save money for the taxpayer one simple thing to do would be to try to put a bit more money into primary health care and see whether you can prevent those hospitalisations. It is a simple measure. It is a simple act to take. But as Dr Nikki Turner has said free doctors visits do not solve the root causes of poverty and therefore they will not resolve poverty-related diseases. And what are those poverty-related diseases? They are respiratory illnessesbronchiectasis and illnesses like that; more and more infectious skin diseases; and of course the one that gets batted around the most rheumatic fever. All of those illnesses come out of the basis usually that we have children living in damp cold overcrowded houses. So if you genuinely wanted to get to the root causes of those issues and therefore help those at the hardest end of poverty as the Government purports then you would have been dealing not only with the housing issue which we know that this Budget did not but with the fact that ultimately parents want to be able to manage their own circumstances. Where is their economic independence? Where is the focus on ensuring that they have the wages and the salaries required to make sure that they are able to ensure that their families are growing up in an environment that prevents those illnesses?But what else did the Government set out as its own measures for success in this Budget? We had veneer—the facade I guess—of wanting to support families but next was the surplus. The Government set up a goal that basically said that if it achieved surplus then it would have achieved every goal it needs to achieve as a Government—end of. That is all that needs to be done with this Budget. And yes the Government got there. But how did it do it? Well by holding on to ACC levies at a higher rate than it needed to by cutting down spending for the Christchurch rebuild—which by the way is meant to be our primary economic stimulus—and by reframing New Zealand Transport Agency spend as loans. It is doing that in the context of having already clocked up $56 billion in debt. We are paying $10 million a day in interest on the debt this Government has accrued. What a shameful thing that is.But what we have argued and Labour is strongly putting forward as a counter is a plan for surplus that at the same time resolves some of the systemic issues that the Government chooses to ignore. On poverty for instance we need to act immediately. We need immediate relief for those children living at the hardest end in their early years. The Best Start package does not help for 10 weeks; it helps those families for 3 years because we know that those are the most important years. The second thing is immediate action on low wages. We will lift the minimum wage and we will support a living wage but we will also recognise that we need to lift wages generally. We need a high-wage economy and you achieve that through investment in research and development through a monetary policy that supports exporters and our manufacturers and by just generally acknowledging that we have to do things differently if we are going to give our families the economic independence they deserve. On housing—because it is after all about kids about jobs and about housing—the market has failed. It is obvious. Everyone knows it; everyone has seen it. We are going to get stuck in. We will ourselves as the Government build 100000 affordable homes. We will introduce a capital gains tax so that our tax system is fairer and we will move away from a housing market that is dominated by speculators. We will say that if you want to own a home in New Zealand you need to be a resident here. That is fair enough. And we will make sure that we have the social housing we need to support those who need it most.Budgets should be about people. We know that New Zealanders want New Zealand to be the fair and equal place they grew up with it being. We can return to that. We can do it by making sure that every child has the very best start in life that every family has a warm dry home and that everyone has a job that keeps them supported and gives them dignity. That is a Government you could believe in and that is what Labour will deliver.