Woodhouse Michael; Rurawhe AdrianHon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National): Thank you Mr Speaker and I'd like to add my congratulations to you and your fellow presiding officers on your election. A welcome to all new MPs arriving into the 53rd Parliament and my congratulations to the Government for the very strong mandate that they have.I was reflecting on the comments from the Hon Carmel Sepuloni who also on last Thursday in this debate talked about the departing MPs and in particular those that weren't planning to depart. It was a very empathetic comment—she has been there before—but I was quite connected I think to her comment that there was no time for sad faces."She also rebuked David Seymour for his comments—criticisms I guess of the Prime Minister for what he called "slogans" and she said "Well I don't call kindness a slogan actually I think that we should be proud that as a country as a party that kindness is part of people's everyday language now." I kind of agree with that but I've got a different definition of "kindness" because she was talking about words of kindness but for me kindness is a verb; it's an act. We talk about acts of kindness. The opposite of an act is inaction and sadly we have seen too much inaction—lots of words but too much inaction. Promises made but not delivered on. When a Government talks about child poverty but doesn't actually take the steps to alleviate it when it implements policies around employment and housing that actually make things worse that's not kindness. When it talks about housing prices as a crisis but actually throws fuel on the fire of runaway house price inflation that's not kindness. And when it talks about—for nine years it bagged the previous National Government for its actions in the health sector and then spends three years overseeing dramatically reducing elective surgery lowering immunisation rates longer elective surgery waiting times and cancer treatment that is a disgrace. That is not kindness.I accept as the Government says—Hon Willie Jackson: No one likes you.Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: —that it cannot do everything—oh Mr Jackson come up with a better retort than that. When it cannot do everything in three years I accept that. But one would've expected at least a holding pattern not the backsliding that we have seen in some key statistics. The fact that 4100 more children are living in material hardship the fact that there are 12000 emergency housing special needs grants now being pushed out every month that the State house waiting list is now over 20000—a fourfold increase on what they inherited.The Minister of Finance has just told us what they've spent three years telling and what I would've thought after three years and a significantly increased mandate they would stop doing. They were saying: "It's the National Party's fault." Well guess what? With the mandate they've got the time they've had the promises they've made—to be kind—it's time for this Government to step up—Dr Shane Reti: Own it.Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: —and either fix it or own absolutely right Dr Reti.There's another group that we need to be kind to and it's our future generations because we are saddling them with an eye-watering amount of debt that needs to be repaid. I'll be long gone—certainly from this House and probably from this Earth—before we even start to make inroads into that. Why? Because this Government does what it does best; it spends. It has a policy of spending more in the good times because we've got more to spend. It has a policy of spending in the tough times because we have to pump-prime the economy. It is the world champion Government of spending. It prints money so it can spend it. But what wasn't in the Speech from the Throne was anything like a plan for earning it. Governments don't earn money they take it off the people who do and there is an absolute dearth of plans in here to encourage the innovation the entrepreneurialism and the sheer hard work of Kiwis to go out and earn the income that the Government then taxes and that's the biggest disappointment. So much talk—so much talk about kindness—but very little action.DEPUTY SPEAKER: This is a split call. I call Willow-Jean Prime—five minutes."