Sepuloni CarmelCARMEL SEPULONI (Labour—Kelston): Talofa lava Mr Assistant Speaker. I am a proud Samoan Tongan and New Zealand - European New Zealander but I have to say as the days as the weeks as the months and as the years go by under that National Government I feel more and more dismay. I feel more and more like a stranger in a different country and more and more concerned for what this country is looking like under that Government.At the beginning of the year I remember reading an opinion piece that was in the New Zealand Herald. It was an opinion piece written by a man who said that more and more as he went to his local shops he was confronted with the homelessness that is increasing and he was confronted with higher levels of poverty. This man said that all he wanted to know was that his taxes were taking care of this. All he wanted was to know that he could pay his taxes and he would not have to see these sights on a daily basis. But has that happened? No. Those problems have increased and instead what we see is that Government coming into the election year with a bribe for New Zealanders saying: We can't make your public services better. We're not going to do anything about the poor state of the education system. We're not going to make the health system more accessible. We're not going to do anything about the housing crisis. But we are going to give you a tax cut which means that we can't fix any of those problems that we know you want us to deal with." It is an election bribe and it is irresponsible.All we want to know as New Zealanders is that those issues will be taken care of by whoever is governing the country and let us face it they are not being taken care of. I listened to the Minister of Education Nikki Kaye talk today about her so-called investments into education. I have heard her talk on a number of occasions about how she thinks her National Government is putting more into property than ever before. But when we look at the Budget what we actually see is that in real terms there has been an $80 million cut in what is going into education in terms of education spend. It is not acceptable.I recently heard through some west Auckland principals that the Minister of Education took some international guests to one of our newer schools—I think it might have been a Hobsonville school—to show them what New Zealand schools look like what the properties look like and what kind of facilities we offer to our kids. Well actually what I would like the Minister to do is take some of those international guests to some of my Kelston schools and then see how proud she is when she takes them through those schools which have had very very little investment. In fact they have gone backwards under this National Government.I am so ashamed about the fact that schools like the ones I have in my electorate are treated like poor cousins in this country yet we have schools like the one in Hobsonville which the Government is so happy to show off to international visitors. The growing inequality under that Government is disgusting and you can see it so clearly in our education system. The Government should be ashamed of the fact that it is doing nothing to address that. Instead what it has done is it has gone out and said: "Here's a few tax cuts. Vote for us because some of you will have a few extra dollars in your pocket." Never mind the fact that so many New Zealanders will have to send their kids to rundown schools or that so many of them will not be able to rely on the health system when they need to.One of the biggest issues that I have in my electorate like so many other electorates in the country is housing. What did we see in the Budget to address it? Do I have any confidence that this Budget is going to deliver something different to families who have been forced to live under makeshift tents to families who have been living in cars or to the tetraplegic woman who was living in her modified van? Do I have any confidence that this Budget is going to deliver something different for those families? Absolutely not. I have no confidence whatsoever and what I am really scared of—and hopefully this will not happen—is that if that Government is given any more time after 23 September we will continue to see this country spiral downward. I am scared that we will continue to see homelessness get out of control; that we will see more and more families not being able to afford to buy their own homes; and that we will see more and more children living in damp mouldy cold houses and having to be admitted into emergency wards in the middle of the night in hospitals that do not even have the capacity to be able to deal with them. That is what I am really scared of. It is really important that New Zealanders know that that is what they would be set up for if they decided to vote for this Government.We have heard the Government members talking about these tax cuts and trying to make out that families will be better off. The reality is that 800000 of the poorest New Zealanders even from their tax cuts will get nothing. We have got 500000 low-income working Kiwis who will get a net of $1 a week extra. That is why we have termed this Budget the "One Dollar Bill Budget". It is the "One Dollar Bill Budget" and unfortunately the vast majority of the tax cuts that the Government has offered—and I do not know why anyone would be surprised because this is the National Government and this is what it does—will be going to the highest 50 percent of income earners in this country not to those families who really need it. And we MPs fall into that category. I think it is embarrassing that the Government thinks it is appropriate that MPs along with other people who are earning similar salaries should get a tax cut and be better off from this Budget when there are so many families who simply will not be better off from what it is offering.Things have got so bad with regard to the housing crisis that it is not just about families not being able to buy their first homes and it is not just about families not being able to afford their rentals but the fact that because of the situation we find ourselves in we have a whole lot of dodgy people out there exploiting the desperation of New Zealanders.I see that in my own electorate. I saw that recently with a family who could not get a house were in emergency accommodation and finally got a rental and were paying $550 a week for something that was completely inadequate. It had sewage spilling out on to their carport two times in the first 4 weeks that they were there. They had a landlord who refused to do anything about it and no tenancy agreement signed up to but these people continued to stay there—a grandmother her daughter her daughter's partner and two children under the age of 5—because they had nowhere else to go. The moves that we see in this Budget in terms of the tax cuts and in terms of increasing the accommodation supplement are not going to change this family's situation. Nothing is going to encourage less dodgy practice from this landlord. In fact it is that landlord who is going to be better off with the increase in accommodation supplement that that Government has put out there.I have seen it time and time again. I do not know whether the National Government members are just deliberately closing their eyes and being blind to the reality of what goes on or whether they are genuinely naive. I have seen it time and time again with landlords who know exactly what their tenants are entitled to particularly with caravan parks—particularly with one caravan park I can think of in west Auckland—and boarding houses. They know exactly what their tenants will be entitled to and they charge them to the hilt knowing how much they can exploit from them including the accommodation supplement. So when that Government celebrates the increase in accommodation supplement we sit over here shrugging our shoulders and looking at them rolling our eyes thinking: "This is not a good move. This is an admission of the fact that that Government has failed in respect of providing housing for New Zealanders and so now instead what it has to do—all it can do—is throw a few extra dollars out to what really is the landlord not the tenant who is going to benefit."I have talked about the health system I have talked about the education system and I have talked about the housing situation that we face as a country and I do want to just spend the last moments talking about social development. I am so sick of the Government talking about how it just needs to be about a reduction in beneficiaries because actually the real aspiration should be making sure that when families go off a benefit they are actually better off—not just saying that getting people off benefits is the win and trying to claim it as a win. We are seeing more and more people leaving benefits for prison—hardly social investment if you ask me—and we are seeing fewer and fewer New Zealanders leaving the benefit to go on to study. Where is the aspiration for those people? We are seeing a larger number of people going off a benefit and the Government having no idea where they have gone on to.This Budget is irresponsible and on 23 September we need to vote this Government out."