Logie JanJAN LOGIE (Green): Thank you Madam Speaker. It's a pleasure to rise on behalf of the Green Party to talk to the annual review of the Ministry of Social Development and follow up some of the themes of the Minister and respond to the previous speaker from the ACT Party.I want to start with that because there was a question raised about how this country in the best of times 300000 people could be in receipt of a benefit and suggesting that there's a massive failure of the people of this country. I would point out that this is a feature of our labour market that was created by policies put in place in the 1980s and 1990s—we did not have that percentage of our population unemployed before there was a change in Government policies—and that we have seen and the Welfare Expert Advisory Group report told us really clearly that there's been a massive decline in Government investment in active labour market policies in the last 25 years. It goes like this [Points downwards] if you're looking at the graph and where we spend one of the least amounts in the OECD on supporting people in training and into jobs and this Government is about changing that.There's a sense in some of our positions that punitive policies in welfare will be the trigger to get people into paid work. That is not borne out by any evidence anywhere in the world. If we look at the last Government's policies where—it's just not. What we know is that actually even removing toilets from income support which is what the last Government did to make the environment so uncomfortable we still had that number of people receiving income support.I would point out that over half of the people receiving income support are doing it because they have a disability or health condition that prevents them from working. We have a lot of conversations in this Chamber about the mental health crisis. I think everyone acknowledges that. We often talk about the crisis in relation to domestic violence and sexual violence and everyone seems on board with that. But if you don't recognise that those people in those situations—many of them will not be able to be in paid work and if you think creating punitive policies that force them into poverty or choosing between being safe or being poor is going to help us as a country resolve and address our mental health crisis or our domestic violence crisis then there is a disconnect with the evidence and the reality.I also just want to talk about too that New Zealand the way our labour market has been structured has one of the highest rates of turnover between paid work and unemployment in the OECD. There's only two countries with a higher rate of turnover than us and those countries have put in place strong social security systems to acknowledge that it is not the individual's fault and that actually the system needs if they're building that process to support people with the impacts of it. We urgently need to change our welfare system. The Welfare Expert Advisory Group—which comprises business leaders community leaders economists and people who'd had experience of the system—told us that we needed to do that urgently that the current system is putting people in the level of financial support that is now so low that too many New Zealanders are living in desperate situations. Urgent and fundamental change is needed.I really hope and I get a sense that in the crisis that we're in at the moment that New Zealanders are becoming more and more aware of how connected we are that actually we need strong whānau we need strong communities to be able to thrive and that we need money circulating in our economy to be able to keep it going. That requires policies that support people to be able to look after themselves and the people that they care for. Our social welfare system is central to that. So we are really encouraged with the progress; we just want to see a lot more and for things to move to that next step to restore dignity for everyone in Aotearoa.