Moroney Sue: Social Security Amendment Bill Education Amendment Bill Taxation (Support for Children in Hardship) Bill — Third ReadingsText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMoroney Sue: Social Security Amendment Bill Education Amendment Bill Taxation (Support for Children in Hardship) Bill — Third Readings[Sitting date: 03 December 2015. Volume:710;Page:8591. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]SUE MORONEY (Labour): It is a pleasure to rise in support of the Support for Children in Hardship Bill in its various components. But look I do want to say at the outset that this sadly is a lost opportunity for the Government. It is yet another example of this Government doing the least it thinks it can get away with to make itself feel better and make itself look as if it is doing something meaningful. With this legislation although it is marginally better than doing nothing at all it is sadly just marginally better than doing nothing at all because the truth is that this legislation is targeted at the most vulnerable children in our society—those in the hardest bracket of hardship. They are children who are living a long way below the poverty line in New Zealand and at the outset I want to put on record that it is the Labour Party’s view that that should never happen in our country.It is the Labour Party’s commitment that we have zero tolerance of child poverty. We are a country a food-producing nation where the living standards are generally pretty good compared with many other countries. We have got loads of opportunities we have got a great climate we have got all the right conditions to raise children well and to do that in a way where every child gets the best start in life and yet this is an area where we lag behind the rest of the world. Our children do not get the best start in life—and they could. This used to be known as the best little country to raise a family and sadly that has been diminished and certainly has not recovered under this Government.So the Government is doing this to try to ease its conscience about the environment that it has created which sees 305000—305000 children—living in poverty in Aotearoa New Zealand. That is a disgrace. The Government should hang its head in shame but before it does that it should actually accept and stops denying that that is a reality for far too many New Zealand children because until it accepts it and stops denying that level of poverty it will not truly address it. In this legislation what it is attempting to do for the children most in need is to give their entire family not just per child but the entire family an additional $23.10 a week maybe—maybe. For many of the families as some of the other speakers have already said when they contributed to this debate it will be significantly lower than that.I want to talk briefly about the two in five children living in poverty in New Zealand for whom the income coming into that family home is a result of paid employment. That is right—40 percent roughly of the children living in poverty in this country live in a family in a household where the parents go out to paid employment. They get paid so little for their efforts to do the best by their family that they cannot afford to feed clothe and house their children properly. Those children are living in poverty.Hon David Parker: And some of them are full-time.SUE MORONEY: And some of them are working full-time. Some of them are in full-time employment. Those are your zero-hour contracts I say to the National Government. Those are your failure to actually address having decent wages in this country. That is your failure to create the environment in which hard-working New Zealand families can actually make sure that they can look after their own and that they live in a sustainable situation where they can take care of their children and those are the issues that should be getting addressed.Twenty-five dollars is better than nothing—marginally better than nothing—but the answer is the comprehensive approach that the Labour Party has proposed with the Best Start package to make sure that all of our children truly do get the best start in life.