Woods MeganDr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram): Labour will be opposing this legislation. Labour will be opposing this legislation for a very simple reason: it does not deliver for New Zealanders. We have just heard a number of things from the previous speaker who has just sat down Joanne Hayes. I want to pick up where she left off and that is with Christchurch schools. I want to challenge that member to ask her ministerial colleagues and the Prime Minister to come to Christchurch and apologise for the appalling process they ran in closing and merging our schools in our city. It was so bad that last week the Ombudsman issued a report pointing to the psychological harm that that Government did in the city of Christchurch with the way it botched the process. To the speaker who has just finished speaking I challenge her to ask her colleagues to front up and apologise to the people of Christchurch for that.The previous speaker also attempted the Government's spin that this was a family package that delivered for families. Well the speaker is deluding herself. This Government is simply not being straight with New Zealanders because let us be really clear this is a tax cut that delivers the most to the highest-earning New Zealanders. The bottom 50 percent of taxpayers get only 20 percent of the benefit from this tax package. This is what Chris Bishop so elegantly said was a package that was delivering for the bottom of the heap. Well I say to Mr Bishop: you are talking about 50 percent of New Zealanders when you call them the bottom of the heap". That is not only arrogant; it is offensive and it is emblematic of a Government that is out of ideas. It is tired and it has got absolutely no idea what life is like for ordinary people. I think that is a statement from Mr Bishop that he should come down and apologise for.But after 9 years in Government—and even the Government Ministers are having to point to it being 9 very long years—is there anything in this Budget to fix the housing crisis? No there is not. The Government has failed to do anything to address the housing crisis. What there is is there is an accommodation supplement. We have said that we would support the accommodation supplement. Are we supporting the increased payments on the accommodation supplement because we think this is a fundamental way to address housing issues in this country? No; it is not. It is recognition that people are struggling to put a roof over their heads but accommodation supplements are not a long-term strategy for addressing a housing crisis and that is all this Government can come up with.What we heard was one of the previous speakers say that we had a wish list to build 100000 houses. No we do not have a wish list. We have a plan and it is something that this Government lacks. This Government has no ambition and no plan to address the housing crisis in this country. What we have is a Government that is content to sit back and for an increasing number of New Zealanders housing is seen as a luxury—a luxury that they cannot afford. That is not something we are willing to stand by. This is a Government that lacks any ambition about it.But let us have a look at some of the other things. If you are delivering for families I would expect there to be some good boosts for health so that people can afford to get the kind of healthcare they need. Was that in this Budget? No it certainly was not. There was a monumental botch-up in terms of what was going to which district health board and a lot of egg on the face for the Government which had to be corrected after. This is a Government that cannot even count properly to put the money in the right place in what will be its final Budget.What we had was the Minister of Health calling out that we on this side of the House had a wish list. I do have a wish list and my wish list is that when an 8-year-old expresses suicidal thoughts they do not have to wait for longer than 12 weeks to see a professional. That is what is happening. That is what this Government thinks is a wish list.We held a very successful public meeting in Christchurch last Wednesday night when well over 350 people packed into the Transitional Cathedral to talk about this issue—to talk about mental health particularly youth mental health in Christchurch. I have to say it was one of the most moving political meetings that I have ever been to. A lot of very brave people stood up and shared their experiences of their struggle in the system and of this Government that has let them down. It has consistently underfunded Christchurch's mental health service at a time when that city needed it the most and people feel so let down and so abandoned by a Government. I do not see the provision of those basics as a wish list. It is concerning to me that that is what this Government sees. It thinks about wish lists when it sees that.Did this Government deliver to schools in this Budget? Did this Government seek to restart and refill for schools the $158 million in operational funding that it needed to make up the shortfall? No it did not. Instead we have our schools again struggling through with frozen operations grants needing to use their operational grants to fund teacher-aides increasingly to get through in the face of the kinds of pressures that they are facing. And what are those schools doing? They are forced to pass those costs on to parents. They are increasingly asking parents to dip into their hip pocket to pay for the whiteboard markers to pay for the photocopier paper and to pay for the tissues. When I went to school the school provided the chalk. The school does not provide the equivalent in many places now; parents are being asked to provide that because this Government is underfunding the operational grants of our schools and that is something that cannot be ignored.Another issue that has been raised by speakers around the appropriations in turn is the Canterbury rebuild. Well I have a question for the Ministers associated with that portfolio. I want to know whether the impairment of investment in Southern Response services the additional $444 million—when will the Government come clean on Southern Response and tell us how much money is actually going to be spent and when the end date is? I think many New Zealanders have lost sight of the fact that there are literally thousands of Cantabrians who are still waiting for their insurance settlement to come through who are still waiting to get on with their life. They are still arguing with Southern Response they are still arguing with the Earthquake Commission or they are having to have their botched repair repaired for another time. That is something that this Government simply is not delivering on and something that absolutely has to be addressed.I would also like to touch on R & D spending which Stuart Smith brought up saying how great all this is and how it is that we cannot set unrealistic targets like matching the rest of the developed world in terms of investing in research and development. Well when the Minister of Science and Innovation came to the select committee and I suggested to him that perhaps we should have a measure to see how well our spending was being used he said the only measure he wanted to use was how much money was being spent. This is a Government that is unwilling to look at how its spend is going. That is a Government that perversely will not let businesses make those decisions for themselves. This is a Government that will not back an R & D tax credit to put that control back into the hands of businesses.Then we had quite frankly a bizarre speech from one of the members of the Government benches about immigration and about how our policy was going to starve the regions of the workers that they needed. Well I suggest they actually read; it can be quite an enlightening experience. If they did read our policy what they would see is that we do not have an income threshold of when you are allowed in this country. Instead we are going to allow regions to put together skills shortage lists and decide what it is that they need in their region. We have seen this work quite successfully in Canterbury over the last few years and we are going to ask regions to do that on a region-by-region basis. I can tell you it is very popular in the South Island and I see there could well be a local MP listed on the skills shortage list in Clutha-Southland as the party struggles to fill that spot.We oppose—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Order! The member's time has expired."