Turei Metiria: Budget Statement —Text is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTurei Metiria: Budget Statement —[Sitting date: 21 May 2015. Volume:705;Page:3531. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]METIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green): Today John Key could have kept his promise to reduce child poverty. He could have kept his promise. Today John Key could have backed all of those young New Zealanders out there who are doing it tough. Today children in povertyin this country needed a game-changer but instead the Prime Minister chose to do the barest minimum for the poorest children and to abandon the hopes of our younger generations.In a classic display of smoke and mirrors John Key gave to our poorest children with one hand and took away with the other. An increase to benefits—desperately needed and woefully overdue—is eroded in many cases by reduced accommodation and emergency payments. Meanwhile instead of the Government fixing Working for Families it remains broken and even more unfair with only those on the lowest incomes set for an increase which in most cases will be the price of a block of cheese. Perhaps the cruellest reveal today was John Key’s plan to force young mums of toddlers—parents of just 3-year-old babies—into work. Forcing the parents of toddlers into work is not a solution to child poverty. Those parents will be earning something like $2.28 an hour in the hand as a result of this change yet will be significantly increasing their costs. Denying young New Zealanders the $1000 KiwiSaver kick-starter which older generations got is not going to help them make their way in the world either.This Budget is not for our kids and it is not for those under 40—the abandoned generation. This is the Budget of a Government that has abandoned those under 40. John Key boasts that he is building a stronger economy but I want to know who he is building it for because unless the economy is working for everyone it is not working. When a young couple is trying to save for a deposit on a home and the price of a house is increasing by $1000 a day do not tell them that the economy is working. When Kiwis in their 20s spend 4 or 5 years at university but the only job they can find at graduation is in a call centre do not tell them that the economy is working. When nurses and teachers are getting a 1 or 2 percent pay rise this year but the chief executive officer of ANZ is pocketing more than $4 million it is clear who in John Key’s economy is working for. And when thousands of our children show up to school hungry every day it cannot be right to say that the economy is working. An economy that delivers so much for so few while abandoning the rest is broken.But there is an alternative: a strong good economy one that works for all of us. And “all of us” includes our kids. The worst of this Budget is the broken promise—the promise that John Key gave to our kids—because despite all the Prime Minister’s promises about tackling child poverty in his third term today we see the barest acknowledgment of the drivers of poverty: low income and low wealth. A quarter of all New Zealand kids now live in families where there is not enough income to provide the basics. An additional 35000 children are living in severe poverty since National came to power and John Key took the role of Prime Minister. Those kids deserve family incomes that are sufficient for them to thrive now and they need the chance of a good life in the future. I am sorry but a $25 benefit increase which could be eroded to less than half of that by cuts in the parents’ accommodation supplement and hardship grants will not go far for a single mum with three kids—it just will not. Four or five dollars a week each for those kids is not enough to lift those children out of child poverty and the Government knows this. Children needed a game-changer today and they did not get it.The Green Party’s plan for a saving scheme for every child is an example of an inequality circuit-breaker. It is an example of the game-changer. Our Kids’ KiwiSaver policy would offer all newborns a kick-start deposit of $1000—a kick-start deposit that this Government has just ripped away from children from future generations—and matching savings contributions would help families save for their children’s future. Under this policy most kids could reasonably expect to build a nest egg of around $12900 by the time they get to 18 years old which they could then use to help fund a good education to invest in an adult KiwiSaver for long-term savings or use as a deposit on a home.Maintaining this gap as National is between those with a lot and the rest of the country is bad economics. The OECD warned late last year that inequality had inflicted more damage on the New Zealand economy than on any other developed country wiping 10 percent off our potential economic growth. Poverty is dangerous for children—it is dangerous for children—but it is also clear evidence of an economy that is broken an economy that is not working for everyone.Young New Zealanders were promised a brighter future by National some elections ago but in reality the future is looking darker for most New Zealanders under 40. People under 40 have been abandoned by John Key. They are the abandoned generation. New Zealanders aged under 40 have never been less likely to own their own home never been more burdened with student debt never been more likely to be underemployed and in the case of children never been more likely to be sick from a disease of poverty or to turn up to school hungry. What amazes me actually about young New Zealanders is how often they stay really positive and hopeful despite how much is stacked against them.Last week like many of you I watched the 2014 Victoria University graduates as they paraded down Lambton Quay. Among them was the younger brother of a colleague of mine who graduated this year with an architecture degree. It is quite a thing to get an architecture degree. You need a B+ average just to make it through the first year and then you have 4 years of full-on study and the all-night grafting that follows. This young man graduated at the top of his class not just in architecture but in the entire school of design. For all his hard work and his tremendous successes this brilliant creative young man has come away with a $40000 student loan and a job as a cook in a cafe. He earns just over the minimum wage. I am not denying this young man his hope or his pride or his happiness after one of the biggest weeks of his life. He quite likes his job in the cafe. He knows that there are many people who are much worse off than him. But we really need to ask whether this is actually the brighter future that John Key was promising young New Zealanders or whether it is yet another sign of a Government that has abandoned them.I am 45. I am lucky enough to have finished most of my degree before the student loan scheme came along but the average 22-year-old woman who graduates with a Bachelor’s degree today could be 50 years old before she pays off her student loan. It is a staggering thought but this is the reality for the abandoned generations. Then again if you are young and you do not have a tertiary qualification if you are a labourer or a shop assistant or a rest home carer the future looks even tougher. The National Government has abandoned young workers and young families.I want to tell you about some young New Zealanders whom this Government has abandoned. Sarah and Rob—these are not their real names because we know what happens to members of the public who critique the Government and how they get treated. These are not their real names but they are very real young people. Sarah is a young mum aged 30 who along with her husband Rob is expecting their second child any day now. Their little girl Eva is 5. Sarah volunteers for the Salvation Army helping to feed homeless people and she worked part-time in a shop before her morning sickness got to be too bad. Rob has a heart condition but he works very hard sometimes 50 or 60 hours a week just to bring home enough money for their family. But even when both of them were working they were stable but certainly not financially secure. A few weeks after Sarah had to quit her job for her baby’s sake Rob’s hours were cut from 50 to 60 hours to 38 hours. Even though Rob earns a reasonable hourly rate they earn just below the median wage. It is not enough to cover their rent in Auckland their food their petrol and crucially any unexpected expenses.Sarah told me when I talked to her about her life and what is happening with her that if Rob loses any more hours a week—and it is likely that he will—they simply will not be able to cope. “But we’re lucky” she says “because there are places to get things like the Sallies to help but this is not comfortable. I work with those who are homeless and I worry at how close our family are getting.” Sarah and Rob’s story is by no means out of the ordinary—in fact it is typical of so many New Zealanders working hard but barely getting by and whose prospects for economic security are very low. They are the abandoned generation. They got absolutely no help from this Budget.Bill English has told us about the increased numbers of New Zealanders in work. What he did not say was that among those he claimed to have a job are people who are working as little as an hour a week and who are doing unpaid work like on a family farm. A staggering 104000 New Zealanders whom the Government boasts are in work are officially considered underemployed. That means they are working but they are not earning enough to live and they want more hours. In the past 2 years alone National has overseen a 20 percent increase in the number of Kiwis who are underemployed. Most of these people are young. Disproportionate numbers are Māori and the disabled. Lots of them are parents whose children are living in poverty. Most are blue-collar workers like labourers and carers. The National Government is creating an enormous underclass of the underemployed.And it gets worse. The lowest-earning half of New Zealanders has seen no real rise in their incomes in the 6 years that John Key has been in power. Last year when the economy grew by 3.3 percent average wages increased by only half as much 1.7 percent. I think workers have every right to question where the fruits of their labour are going. The answer is that the fruits of their labour are going to someone else. The economy is not working for half of all wage earners. Half of all wage earners have been abandoned by this Government. They are prisoners of an economy that does not work for them.It would be easy to say that John Key’s Government does not care about young people—very easy to say that. But I think its greatest sin and his greatest sin is nonchalance. It is fundamentally out of touch with the real lives of New Zealanders. The National Party lives in a completely different world. This is probably news to John Key who until recently considered himself quite in touch with New Zealanders—at least those who had ponytails. But this Budget was clearly drawn up by people who have never sat at the kitchen table with a mountain of bills and agonised over whether they should pay for the power or their son’s school camp—agonised over these daily household decisions. These are people who have never had an enormous student loan who mostly got their education for free. The Budget was drawn up by a National Party caucus of people who are comfy with their bountiful portfolios and property and out of touch with the plight of young first-home buyers.It was written by people like the Minister for Social Development Anne Tolley who actually said that if your kids are hungry put some bread in the toaster—the “Let them eat toast Budget” approach to child poverty is what is prevalent in this Government. They are people who have no idea how frightening it is to lose a job and then suffer the financial double whammy of losing Working for Families payments as well. This is an out-of-touch Budget written by the out of touch for the out of touch.So let me put you in touch if you like with a real family like Sarah and Rob. Sarah and Rob are up against it every single week. Like most young families they are one large unexpected expense away from financial disaster. About the same time that Sarah had to give up her job their rental home was discovered to be full of asbestos. Their daughter’s asthma was getting worse and worse and their doctor eventually discovered it was the asbestos causing it and told them they had to leave their home practically immediately. They were forced to shift and the bottom fell out of their lives. With no savings and no job security they had no chance of buying a house. They struggled to get any recompense for the shoddy rental that caused their daughter’s illness. Sarah had to drop a legal case that she tried to take because she just did not have the money to fight. She said to me: “Ours is a common story. We spend $400 a week for a two-bedroom house. We can’t get a State house. There are no back-ups for low-income middle-class working families like ours.”So Prime Minister do not insult Rob and Sarah by telling them that the economy is working for them; do something to make it work for them. A good start would be giving Rob and Sarah the same shot at buying a house that previous generations had—previous generations like the Prime Minister’s. Here is a fact: people under 40 are much less likely to own their own home than they were before John Key came to power. Homeownership among people in their 30s has reduced by over 20 percent under National and it is dropping faster for this age group than for any other. The Kiwi dream of a home—any kind of home—has been downgraded to the nightmare of “Generation Rent”. National has abandoned the homeownership aspirations of young New Zealanders to protect the capital gains of their parents.There are about 300000 so-called mums and dads in New Zealand who own two or more homes. I am 45; I am one of them. It is a vast population of people like me and property investors—many who are my age or older—whom political parties are petrified of alienating with a comprehensive capital gains tax. But until politicians have the guts to fully stop the incentives that drive older New Zealanders to invest in property over more productive investments younger people like Rob and Sarah will never have a chance to own their home. They will never have a chance. When Rob and Sarah get old they are not expecting to own a home let alone own two or three. The dramatic decline in homeownership amongst this abandoned generation is John Key’s housing legacy—a policy welcome mat to the baby boomers and an eviction notice to Generation X and Generation Y. I call on John Key to choose to back young New Zealanders into their own home. I call on John Key to be brave and to stop abandoning young New Zealanders.I have heard commentators say how embarrassed they were when the Prime Minister made international headlines after pulling a cafe worker’s ponytail but for me the Prime Minister’s hair-pulling antics are nothing compared with the embarrassment I feel at his decision to not feed hungry kids at school—to not feed hungry kids at school. This decision more than other symbolises how much the National Government has lost touch with what really matters to New Zealanders. The Green Party’s Facebook post on this on the day that he denied kids lunch was viewed by 1.2 million people—1.2 million people. More than a million were shocked that their Government would deny hungry kids a meal. An apple a yoghurt and a Marmite sandwich can unleash the potential of a child. How hard is that to support?There is an alternative to National’s economy for the few. There is an alternative and it works better. New Zealand will succeed only if all of us are succeeding. The Green Party will back young New Zealanders women Māori—all of those who started behind on John Key’s race to the top and have never been given a chance to catch up. Because we can pay families a decent wage; we just have to choose to. We can feed children when they are hungry at school; we just have to do it. We can reduce our carbon emissions; we just need the commitment. And we can eradicate child poverty because the alternative—to keep children poor—is simply unacceptable. What this country so desperately needed today was imagination and leadership the courage to make change and hope—genuine hope—for something so much better. It is possible for our small country to be run on the principles of sustainability fairness and community; we just need leaders who are prepared to do it. This is the new alternative; it is not only possible it is proven. When our economy works for everyone we are all better off. Thank you.