Turei Metiria: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Turei Metiria: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
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METIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 I will address the Prime Minister’s statement and I commend the comments of my Green colleagues who have spoken earlier in the debate. I also commend my colleague Rahui Katene whose contribution I heard last night about the social and equity issues faced in this country by Maori in particular and about the failure of this Government to address those in any form. I will pick up on some of the themes of what she was saying from a Green Party point of view. 
The Prime Minister said in his speech that he worried about the emergence of an underclass in Aotearoa—he said New Zealand— 
Sue Moroney 
: “New Zillun”. 
METIRIA TUREI 
: —in “New Zillun”. How fantastic that the Prime Minister would worry about such a thing but obviously he must be blind to the reality of hundreds of thousands of New Zealand families who already are part of an underclass in this country. Not only has the Prime Minister displayed his blindness and his failure to understand what it means to be a low-paid vulnerable family in this country. Everything he said yesterday in his statement every plan that he has for this country will further create that underclass. It will add more and more New Zealanders to that underclass; it will add more and more children to that underclass. I will discuss some of the plans to increase the underclass in Aotearoa. 
We have some 200000 children living in poverty in this country. Many of them are the children of beneficiaries identified as the children most likely to be living in serious and significant hardship. The social security system on which these children and their families rely is simply too poor to support their needs. Families cannot live on a benefit. 
I have had to live on a benefit—on both the unemployment benefit and the domestic purposes benefit. I know what it is like for those families to have to provide for their kids while finding a way to get themselves out of that situation. The people I have known over many years who have been on benefits and the people I have worked with who have been on benefits are fighting every day just for survival. They are fighting every day to find a way out. What they need is support from the State not cuts to services like the training incentive allowance which of course make it extremely difficult if not impossible for most people on the domestic purposes benefit to get a university degree when we know that a person with a university degree will earn a higher income than with any other kind of tertiary education qualification. Yet this Government has shut out domestic purpose beneficiaries—solo parents who are struggling to find a way to get themselves out of that situation—from being able to get the kind of degree that will enable them to earn a high income. 
What is this Government’s response to the increasing numbers of unemployed and beneficiaries? It is to blame and attack those families; to blame and attack the children of the poorest families. The benefit reforms highlighted by the Prime Minister in his statement simply entrench the inequality that this country faces. They simply entrench the poverty gap between the rich and the poor by forcing solo parents ordinary Kiwi mums and dads who for whatever reason find themselves in need of social support into a job market that cannot cope with them because there are no jobs for them to go to. That will not work. It will do nothing for those families and it will severely interfere with the ability of those solo parents to properly parent their children. It will force them away from their homes and families and away from their kids who need them. It will impose greater costs on those families. Looking for work alone costs money. It costs money in childcare and in transport and in a whole range of areas that John Key obviously has no concept of. He does not understand that and he has never understood that. 
Sickness beneficiaries are being subjected to constant assessment. People who are paraplegic people with severe illnesses and people who are unable to work and who therefore need the social security system to support them—as it should—are being pressured by State agencies which increases their stress and increases the likelihood that their illnesses will get worse. But it is not only that the Prime Minister is isolating those families and people from the rest of the New Zealand community through the abusive language that is used to describe them. We heard the abuse from this Government last year with its continual series of attacks on beneficiaries and we heard more of it yesterday. There are no jobs for these people to be forced into. The jobs simply do not exist. There are 40000 extra people unemployed. There are no jobs so why would any Government with any sense of compassion choose to attack those people who have the least amount of choice the least amount of political power? Perhaps it is because it benefits the Government in its votes. The process by which this Government is undertaking that work will create even further the underclass that Mr Key says he is so worried about. 
We know that the Government intends to persecute those New Zealand parents who are doing their very best for their families in trying personal circumstances. But what about the working poor? Just because someone has a job it does not mean that person has enough money to survive on. We know that people who work a 40-hour week on the minimum wage which is now $12.75 an hour will earn somewhere around $400 a week. Families cannot survive on that kind of money. We know that 450000 New Zealanders are earning less than $15 an hour on the minimum wage. That is 450000 New Zealanders who are earning a miserable wage. They are working full-time and they cannot support their families. Sometimes we hear the rhetoric from the Government that these are young people students or part-timers but these are people who do full-time jobs and have families and who struggle and struggle to find the support they need to take care of their families properly. What do they do? Well they have no choice. They use Working for Families for example to try to top up that income. 
If this Government chose to put up the minimum wage to a rate that was able to support a family—at least $15 an hour—this country would save $1 billion in Government social support. The Government could save $1 billion in social support if the minimum wage was raised to a reasonable level. That is $1 billion that could be invested in our schools which are desperate for funding to support the children. It is $1 billion that could be used for housing or for other forms of social support which could support both economic development—building more State houses—and the environment. But no this Government chooses not to support the families but to subsidise business because that in effect is what Working for Families does. By keeping the minimum wage low and having Working for Families or some other social support behind it what ends up happening is that this Government subsidises businesses and families suffer as a result. 
Housing was raised in the Prime Minister’s statement. There is no plan from the Government to increase the number of State houses. It is talking about selling off State houses. There is no plan; it will just sell off State houses in wealthy areas and buy cheap State houses in poor areas ghettoising those vulnerable families who need a place to live. Because there is no plan to build any more State housing we will have a continual round of families who are in the State houses then back on the waiting list being shifted around the country. There will be no consistency and no ability for kids to stay in the schools that they have become attached to and no ability for people to get secure work because their housing is so insecure. They will be separated from their families. 
Thousands of New Zealand families are still on the Housing New Zealand Corporation waiting list. They are waiting for a State house and those people will stay on that waiting list going through the cycle of poverty that keeps them poor vulnerable and out of society and which keeps their kids sick and out of school. This Government has no plan to fix that. It would like to keep it that way. It will not even fix the issues in the housing market to make sure that housing is affordable for New Zealanders. Perhaps it is in the interests of the Government and its voters to do that. It is not in the interests of the families of this country who are desperately in need of jobs living incomes and basic housing. 
There is no plan from this Government to fix that. The Green Party is here for a smart economy and for a sustainable and prosperous country and we have the plan that will do that.