Logie JanJAN LOGIE (Green): Thank you Mr Chair. I'd like to speak in my contribution in the committee stage in Part 2 to a couple of Supplementary Order Papers (SOPs) in my name. I'll start with the first one which is seeking to delete in clause 2 section 11 which is about the increase in the abatement rate from 25 percent to 27 percent. We're putting this forward in the hope of gaining support across the committee because we believe this is consistent with the Minister's articulation of the intent of this legislation being to implement some of the recommendations of the Welfare Expert Advisory Group (WEAG) which two years ago now said that in terms of immediate steps towards income adequacy the Government needed to be increasing benefits and also making really significant changes to Working for Families including moving closer to being a universal system available to all except high-income earners. They were advocating for a reduction in the abatement rate from the 25 percent to 10 percent for those earning between $48000 and $65000 and up to 15 percent for those earning $65000 to $160000 and then for it to be 50 percent above $160000.They believed and we thought that the Government—and I do just want to just mention again that WEAG was a group of representative people. It involved voices from business. It involved health practitioners working with families. It involved people who'd had experience using the welfare system and advocating for people in the welfare system. It was a broad representation of our society and found consensus across those groups in these recommendations. So it is to me very strange to hear the Minister saying that this bill is about taking a step to implement WEAG's recommendations. And yet this increase to the abatement rate is going in the exact opposite direction from what WEAG was asking. So if the Government supports our SOP to remove that clause it doesn't actually move them further towards WEAG's recommendations but at least it stops them going the wrong way. So this is our contribution to the Government to help keep you on track in terms of implementing the recommendations of WEAG. And one of the reasons we've put this forward is because that abatement rate is a disincentive particularly for second parents working. This creates a really high effective marginal tax rate for still relatively lower to middle-income families and the regulatory impact statement tells us that there will be 91000 losers of up to $6 a week from this policy. These are families who—we know times are tough at the moment. Like people have had their hours reduced; people have lost their jobs. There's a sense of kind of insecurity even for those people who have managed to maintain their hours and their jobs and are juggling a lot and costs in terms of power etc. have gone up. We don't need to be pulling money away from those people to put towards others. Really for us that is a really particularly important point because it is unnecessary. The Government has options in terms of raising income. While we may hear from others that things are incredibly tight and there's the sense that people were overtaxed—and I heard from the ACT Party member their solution to poverty is reducing tax. The Green Party's concern with that is that we like schools we quite like hospitals we like strong communities and we really believe in good public services. Those things cost money. We want to be able to pay our nurses. We want to be able to pay our admin and clerical workers and our DHB the wages that they deserve. That has been a strangely long fight to be able to get to that point and we haven't even got there yet. And part of the reason for that is the sense of austerity of having limited options in terms of funding available of having to trade off climate action with funding our health system. The Green Party believes that we can do a lot more if we just taxed wealth at 1 percent just 1 percent which would affect 6 percent of the country—of wealth over $1 million sorry. At 1 percent that would affect 6 percent of the country and would enable this country to bring in a guaranteed minimum income. And assessed by other groups not the Green Party we could eliminate child poverty by doing that. So I believe that is an option that would serve our families and our communities because we know that when families have enough money they make good decisions. We've heard this idea that people are just kind of work-shy. I've heard that a lot over many years from that side. What people are ignoring is the fact that over 50 percent of the people receiving income support are doing so because of sickness or disability. Many of those people want to work but the truth is that as yet a Government has not done the work to remove the barriers and discrimination to ensure all those people can get the jobs that they're able to do that work for them. The Green Party believes we have a responsibility to those people to the point we've done that work to eliminate that discrimination. We should not as a country be making those people pay and restrict their lives because of the work that we have not done as a Parliament or as successive Governments. Another aspect of it and they intersect is parenting. You know it's a job and it is an incredibly important job. For some parents being able to be in paid work and parent is the best way to parent. But not every child can cope with that and if you're going to be the best parent possible you need to be led by what is best for your child. That is also when we know that a significant number—I've been hearing this in select committee—of families are not able to get their kids consistently in school because we have not removed those barriers to those kids being sent home basically every day from their schools because the schools are not able to meet their needs. We have just absolute discrimination through our school system. That is a reality and those parents have to be there when their kids are sent home. And yet again some of the views expressed from the National and ACT Party would suggest that those families should just be getting a job putting the needs of their children—Hon Member: A lot of them have a job.JAN LOGIE: Actually they're saying lots of those people have a job. Some of what we're talking about is the people who are not able to because they have to go home to be there for their kids because their kids are sent home every day. Those people who are not able to get a job because they've applied and applied and applied and nobody has even given them an interview. That is a daily lived reality for a huge number of people with disabilities that is ignored when people suggest the answer to poverty is to get a job. It sounds easy. It feeds to people's sense of anger about the struggle of managing life right? But not everyone's life is the same.