Goldsmith Paul: General Debate 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Goldsmith Paul: General Debate 
[Sitting date: 29 August 2012. Volume:683;Page:4876. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
PAUL GOLDSMITH (National) 
: 
 I would like to start by paying tribute to the 40 or 50 young New Zealanders who are working away in this building not far from here in the EmpowerNZ conference organised by the McGuinness Institute. They have set themselves the task of drafting a new constitution for New Zealand. I have had the honour of being the MP hosting them in this building. I am bound to say that I am not entirely convinced that we need a new constitution—in fact I am not convinced at all. I am proud of the constitutional arrangements that we have in New Zealand at the moment. I think they have served us well. We have inherited them from centuries of tradition in the UK and we have got a good balance of liberty and simplicity around our arrangements without too many checks and balances. But I am very glad that these young kids are all there. 
It is amazing the enthusiasm that they are showing in getting into the job. They are a brilliant bunch—mainly law students too many law students perhaps but law students nevertheless—wrestling with those difficult issues that we have and the conflicting rights and trying to ask “Well if we were to construct a constitution from the start where would we begin?”. It is interesting that when they are dealing with questions of rights and how you balance economic rights of course there is no right to create money necessarily and the right to live a life where you can enjoy all the things that life has to give does not give you the right to live off the work of somebody else. So there is all these balances that these young people are trying to work out at the moment. They have been at it for a day and a half and tonight we are going to have a dinner where they are going to present the results of their efforts. So anyway good luck to them congratulations to the McGuinness Institute for putting that on and best wishes to those young people. 
When we turn to this question that is relevant today though about poverty I just want to quote from  
Hansard 
 a speech from Metiria Turei in the adjournment debate just before Christmas when she talked about the: “… National Government’s attacks on beneficiaries and to hear the Prime Minister in his address today restate the myth that work is a path out of poverty.” The myth—the myth—she said: “that work is a path out of poverty. The truth is that it is not.” I am quoting here from  
Hansard 
 Metiria Turei. It is true what I am saying here. She said that she did not like hearing the Prime Minister talk about “the myth that work is a path out of poverty. The truth is that it is not. For the two in every five children who live in poverty whose parents work work is not the pathway out of poverty. Work is the trap because work is not properly paid.” Heaven preserve this country if the Greens do get the opportunity to have control of the purse strings and if Russel Norman is finance Minister and Metiria Turei is social welfare Minister because that is the sort of attitude that drives them that work is not the path out of poverty; it is a trap. I am mindful though—on Saturday I went along to a community lunch organised by the good people of the Remuera community lunch club and one or two of them were pointing to an article from Anne Salmond a couple of weeks saying that parliamentarians were too combative and— 
Hon Anne Tolley 
: We should all hold hands. 
PAUL GOLDSMITH 
: —that is right—we should hold hands and agree with everything and we should not talk in slogans at each other and we should not be critical of each other; we should be focusing on the united path. So I do not want to be unduly critical of Metiria Turei and the Greens for their philosophy but I am amazed that we still have such people spouting such a simplistic view of the world as if working is not a good thing and taking responsibility for yourself and your family is not something that is important to the community. So the question I ask them is—you know we all agree across all sides of this House that poverty and child poverty in particular is a concern. Nobody wants to live in a society where there are children who are struggling—genuinely struggling—and we have spent a great percentage of the Government activity that we are a part of taking money off some people and giving it to other people in order to try and alleviate that problem. We have not been all that successful in the last 70 years that social welfare organisations in New Zealand have been redistributing a huge amount of money and you ask yourself “Well why hasn’t it been that successful? Why do we continue to have poverty in New Zealand?”. There are a whole lot of reasons for that but part of it is about addressing those fundamentals of restating that important element of responsibility—people taking responsibility for their families and for their own lives. I suppose when you are in Government the question is what do you actually do about it? This Government which I am proud to be part of has done a number of things in that area.