Katene Rahui: General Debate 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Katene Rahui: General Debate 
[Sitting date: 21 July 2010. Volume:665;Page:12542. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
RAHUI KATENE (Maori Party—Te Tai Tonga) 
: 
 I want to put the topics canvassed so far in this debate into a wider context. Yesterday the New Zealand Youth Choir returned from a spectacular tour of Singapore South Korea China and Australia and the tour finished with a spectacular simultaneous broadcast across Australia and New Zealand. Everywhere the choir went it received the support of packed houses. It showed the massive talent that we have here in New Zealand and it represented New Zealand with massive pride. Tomorrow the Aspiring Leaders Forum will bring together a group of young people to share their ideas and philosophies on leadership whether in the fields of politics the arts business or sport. Yet what was the breaking news this morning? It was “Youths arrested after crime spree”. We are told that yesterday afternoon in my home town of Nelson the police arrested two rangatahi at Taser-point and gunpoint after having set police dogs out to track them across farmland. It appears that two young people aged 15 and 17 years had gone on a spree from Christchurch to Nelson stealing cars and evading apprehension. 
It seems to me that we have the emphasis all wrong. The crime spree that I think this nation should be focusing on is the moral crime of child poverty. Just a month ago the head of OECD social policy Dr Monika Queisser told the Government’s Welfare Working Group that New Zealand was out of step with other countries. In her estimation high child poverty was the third-biggest issue in New Zealand’s social policy. She noted that 15 percent of New Zealand children live in families with less than half the median income compared with an OECD average of 12 percent and that the gap between the material deprivation of children and older people is the biggest in New Zealand out of 27 countries. I ask where the breaking news announcement is that will stem the tide on this utterly unacceptable high rate of child poverty. 
It is not just international experts who are telling us this. In a report released this month by the Government’s own watchdog the Human Rights Commission we were told that New Zealand needs to take a much stronger stand on child poverty. The  
Right to an adequate standard of living: focus on the right to social security 
 confirmed that recent policy initiatives show that it is possible to reduce child poverty rates substantially over relatively short periods of time. However the report challenged the Government to also remember that sustained progress requires continued commitment and specific targeting of those who are the most vulnerable. 
Earlier in the year the Race Relations Conciliator stepped into the fray pointing to the 2010 statistics that one in three Maori and Pacific young people are unemployed and saying that there will be serious long-term effects. The grim reality of child poverty the generally poor living conditions for low-income children and child poverty’s disproportionate impacts on Maori have long been brought to our attention by the Child Poverty Action Group. This group has told us that one in six New Zealand children lives in poverty that a third of children live in overcrowded conditions and that we have the highest rate—the highest rate—of youth suicide in the entire OECD. 
These are not statistics to celebrate. We must fix a vision in our sights that invests in the promise of prosperity for all children. We must promote success and be proud of the amazing achievements of our young people such as the achievements of the Youth Choir the aspiring leaders the Youth Parliament or the hundreds and thousands of amazing kids in our communities. But we must also ensure that every child has the right to a fair deal a decent life. 
The Maori Party campaigned on the aspiration of setting a deadline to eliminate child poverty by 2020. We know that this will have to work alongside other subsequent policy developments such as raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour raising core benefit levels and extending the in-work payment of Working for Families to all families. 
We were thrilled to see that another of our policy goals was shared by this OECD expert and that is the proposal to have a universal child allowance to tackle child poverty. She observed that the countries in the OECD that have achieved low child poverty—the Nordic countries and France—often have universal child benefits and she suggested that New Zealand might want to explore this in more detail.