Logie Jan: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLogie Jan: General Debate[Sitting date: 29 July 2015. Volume:707;Page:5438. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAN LOGIE (Green): E te Māngai o te Whare tēnā koe; tuarua ki ngā mema o tō tātou Whare; tēnā koutou katoa; tuatoru mihi atu ki Te Wiki o Te Reo Māori tēnā koutou tēnā koutou katoa.[Greetings to you Mr Speaker; secondly salutations to the members of our House; and thirdly I acknowledge Māori Language Week. So greetings and accolades to you all.]I am normally quite a positive person in this world. I love this country. I love our wild places and where I grew up managing to explore and I love our people and our cultures. I love the vision of the Green Party and what I believe it can offer this country. But the Government is pointing out that some people on this side of the House seem a bit grumpy. I have got to say that personally I am grumpy. After question time today I was shaking at the fact that this Government will not rule out contracting social services—the protection of our most vulnerable children—to a company that has been responsible for putting children in cagesoverseas. That does make me furious. It makes me furious in terms of the well-being and the preciousness of the people of this country. I believe that is worth being angry about. The fact that this Government for the ideology of privatisation is sacrificing the well-being of our people and environment does make me angry.A month ago we heard from the Minister for Social Development that she was open to considering Serco—the Guantánamo Bay of the corporate world—as a provider of community care for our most vulnerable people: young people victims and survivors of domestic and sexual violence. Let us unpack this. The Minister for Social Development said that she was open to allowing a company with the track record of Serco to provide social services to some of the most vulnerable people in this country.Maybe that should not have been a surprise to me considering that she gave Serco the contract for Mt Eden prison and defended Serco when it was failing 40 percent of its targets and then just continued to dismiss the concerns that were being raised with her about prisoner safety. Yesterday when she was questioned about the revelations around Mt Eden prison of drug rings fight clubs concerns about a suspicious prisoner death and the broken legs of prisoners within Serco prisons she still said: “I think with any of them … actually the quality of the contract is the really important thing.” Maybe she was admitting that actually she had not done a very good job in setting up the contract with Mt Eden. Maybe she had learnt those lessons and she thought that the contract would solve it in the future for social services but really she is telling us that the track record—the ethics of a company—does not matter in the face of the opportunity to privatise our public and social services. This Government would rather do business with Serco the Guantánamo Bay of the corporate world than properly partner with our community organisations or strengthen our Public Service and this is part of a pattern that we are seeing from this Government.In education we have an equally problematic privatisation agenda playing out in chaos and uncertainty for children and families. A number of these charter schools with serious problemshave been in the media. The Ministry of Education raised concerns about Whangaruru School and the Middle School West Auckland before the contract was granted by the Minister who was hell-bent on privatisation and was overriding the concerns raised by the ministry. Maybe the Minister again thought that a tight contract would offer protection no matter the risk to the children and their families or the eventual cost to the State of their failure—the cost to the State and the removal of funding that could have been used constructively within our public school system.Of course we are also seeing the sell-off of State houses. It was initially promoted by the Government as supporting community housing providers—something that most New Zealanders and the Greens would certainly support in addition to State housing—but it now seems to be yet another opportunity for the Government to help out its mates the property developers and the Government will not even be putting the profits from that back into housing.What we are seeing is a Government that has been quietly opening up prisons State housing stock Work and Income schools social services—