White Helen; Salesa JennyHELEN WHITE (Labour) (remote): It was an interesting submission process and it was an absolute pleasure to listen to the submissions but at the end of it what I was left with was a very strong respect for our finance Minister and the leadership we have. The Budget priorities were ones that were utterly grounded and they were grounded in the lessons learnt in the pandemic and in the values of the Labour Party. One of the things that will get money is heath and it will get quite a lot of money. And it needs it. It needs it because it was ground down and ground down and ground down and then we faced a pandemic. It was a very serious thing.I used to work as an employment lawyer and at one point I was negotiating out at the Canterbury DHB and I was shocked to hear that that DHB received less funding per patient than anywhere in the country. It was our poorest people and they were not getting the same service and funding that other people were and that's really quite despicable. I'd ask the Māori Party that complained that this hasn't been a responsive Government to think about that because that's exactly the kind of thing that this Government's done which that party did not do when it was in coalition with the National Party. That National Party eroded the benefit. It eroded wages. It didn't agree with the kinds of things that we've done in terms of the minimum wage. The minimum wage has gone up and that is a wonderful thing because those are the workers that I used to work for and they need it desperately.I find it very rich when I hear from the National Party the claim that they are actually looking after low and middle income New Zealand. Look at the suggestion they've made as a counter-proposal—it would deliver to our richest people thousands and thousands of dollars and hundreds of dollars perhaps to our poorest. That is nothing in comparison to what this Government is actually delivering to low-income New Zealanders. They actually find it bad taste to have people who are talking about that as a way of dealing with a cost of living surge because this at the present time needs things that are targeted. What the National Party is suggesting we do is highly inflationary. It would hurt a lot of people. It pours money in an untargeted way and it gives it to people who don't need any more and it doesn't give it to the things that are needed.What the finance Minister is prioritising are things like paying back the debt of our DHBs. That isn't inflationary. That's a very different thing. It's actually putting money aside for the climate change response. It's being long term in its thinking and studious and those are things that need to be done. I would ask the party that tends to chip away and suggest that there is something they might do better I ask them to think about that. This is a Government that has actually backed our working families. It has made 346 families better off by an average of $20 a week. And that's just one of the many things it's done. It has implemented many of the Welfare Expert Advisory Group recommendations. It is not something where you can just say it hasn't because it's just not true—it has done that. And it will continue to be committed to those people.I'd like to talk for a minute about the interview I heard this morning with Christopher Luxon on Radio New Zealand National. He was blaming inflation on Government spending and the interviewer asked Well give us an example of this." and the example he gave was light rail and the interviewer rather politely pointed out that that hadn't happened yet so it couldn't really be responsible. Then the argument he gave was "Oh it's all the bureaucrats that have been employed." I thought it was very disrespectful thing to say because Mr Luxon works in an environment where he sees the impact of the people that are in the Public Service and that Public Service delivered a whole range of things in a crisis and they work very hard.We had the Auditor-General in and he was talking about how well the Public Service had coped with the crisis and how hard people had worked. I agree. They worked on things like the wage subsidy in the Ministry of Social Development and—ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): Order! The member's time is up."