Street Maryan: General Debate 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Street Maryan: General Debate 
[Sitting date: 29 August 2012. Volume:683;Page:4874. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon MARYAN STREET (Labour) 
: 
 The Prime Minister has admitted that he could not live on the minimum wage. How does he expect anybody else to? How does he expect anybody else to live on the minimum wage? Forty percent of children in poverty are in homes where the parents or parent are employed are in work. We are talking about the working poor as a developing group in our society something that none of us ever thought we would see happen. Chester Borrows has just said that my generation did not live in anything like the poverty we are talking about today but my parents believed that education was the way out of poverty—education was the way out of poverty. But I want to draw a couple of other things to Chester Borrows’ attention. I want to tell him that the highest income earners in this country have seen an increase in their incomes while at the same time middle-income earners have seen a drop in the value of their incomes and the least well-paid have seen an even further drop. 
 Poverty is real. We have a report that reinforces some of the causes but also some of the effects of poverty that we know about. I want to make the link between health outcomes and poverty because it is not sufficient now simply to say like my parents did: “Go and get a good education and you can drag yourselves up by the bootstraps.” Let us take one example in this report. Let us have a look at some of the connections between health and poverty. It says very clearly that children growing up in low-income households face multiple risks so nobody starts from the same starting point. They say that these children have a 1.4 times higher risk of dying during childhood than a child from a high-income household. They are more likely to die of sudden unexplained death in infancy. They are three times more likely to be sick. Hospitalisation rates for these children are higher than for those from wealthier areas. They are at greater risk of contracting infectious diseases as these spread more easily obviously in houses that are overcrowded and inadequate. So these children start off way behind the starting blocks. 
It is not sufficient for the Government to say that we need to grow the economy by making businesses more productive. If that were the answer I wish it had done something about it already. But that is not happening either. But even if it were it would not be sufficient. There is an undercurrent of poverty in our society now that we have not seen for decades. We have certainly not seen it in my lifetime. 
One of the things that I find really disturbing about this report is that we are famous for being a food-producing nation. It says that poor nutrition is a significant problem in New Zealand. Why is poor nutrition a significant problem in New Zealand? We know that poor nutrition in pregnancy can lead to premature births low birth weights and childhood learning and developmental difficulties. We know that. So they say we should have a child nutrition strategy. We did not have a complete child nutrition strategy when we were in Government but we went a long way towards it. We introduced Fruit in Schools axed by this Government. We introduced Healthy Eating - Healthy Action programmes. [ 
Interruption 
] Yes come on. Let us have the correction. Let us find out why it is that private companies are sponsoring Fruit in Schools. Private companies are sponsoring breakfasts in schools. They get really get advertising out of it for sure. We instituted Fruit in Schools. We instituted Healthy Eating - Healthy Action programmes which this Government has axed. We introduced tuck shop guidelines in school tuck shops which made sure that school tuck shops offered only healthy options. What did this Government do? Cancel those.