Sage Eugenie: Budget DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSage Eugenie: Budget Debate[Sitting date: 07 June 2016. Volume:714;Page:11703. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Deputy Speaker. It is time for New Zealand to be the cleaner fairer society that all Kiwis want it to be. It is time that we put families first so that everyone has a warm dry and secure home that they can call their own. It is time that the Government realised that we need to protect water quality. It is time that we invested in protecting the thousands of species in Aotearoa New Zealand that have these islands as the only place that they can call home. It is time that we had an attention to water quality and controlling land uses that pollute water quality and to cleaning up our rivers and lakes. It is time that we took action on climate pollution and worked to stabilise our climate.But that is not what we have got with this band-aid Budget from the National Government. It is more of the same: more of not caring enough about New Zealanders—not caring about those who are sleeping in cars on the streets and in garages. It is not caring enough about people who have got damp cold mouldy homes because the Government has failed to invest adequately in the Warm Up New Zealand housing insulation programme. This is a Government with a Budget that does not care.If it were the Green Party with Labour in Government we would have been promoting a major increase in the State housing build so that people do not have to sleep on the streets in garages and in cars. We would have ensured that the $90 million that this Government demands from Housing New Zealand as dividend payments goes to build 450 new homes as emergency housing and that the tax payments that this Government demands from Housing New Zealand are similarly allocated. Instead the Government keeps those dividends because it wants to bribe voters with tax cuts next year.On the climate—the greatest crisis facing humanity—what do we have in this band-aid Budget? There is one mention of climate with the bill that removes the two-for-one unit subsidy for big polluters. The Government needs to tackle climate change. It needs to have in the Budget a spending programme that helps to ensure we can reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Yet we saw in question time today the dismissive approach of the Minister of Finance to the major costs to our economy from sea level rise and storm surges associated with climate change.The costs of adverse weather events to our land transport network alone in the last 10 years have increased from about $20 million annually to $90 million annually. The New Zealand Transport Agency has estimated that there is a huge cost of nearly a billion dollars from replacing the more than 160 kilometres of rail lines 222 kilometres of State highways and more than 2000 of local roads that are at risk from sea level rise and storm surges. Yet the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment’s recommendation that there be a working party established to look at the fiscal and economic risks from climate change has not been tackled with the establishment of such a working party.If the Government is willingly blind to the economic cost of climate change then it is not going to invest in tackling our emissions. That is something that the Green Party would change. We would not be slashing AgResearch’s investment in climate science—in real work to actually reduce our emissions. We would not be lavishing $100 million on encouraging an expansion of irrigation—the Government wants to see another 200000 hectares of land put into irrigation in the current financial year through Vote Primary Industries and the Crown irrigation fund—because the cost of that irrigation is likely to lead to an expansion in dairying and more greenhouse gas emissions.We have a plan to reduce our greenhouse emissions and to clean up our rivers rather than encouraging more intensive land use that pollutes rivers and increases nitrate levels in our aquifers. We would invest in housing so that all New Zealanders have a warm dry home. This band-aid Budget does not care about the climate does not care about the homeless and does not care about inequality. We need to change that and change is coming.