Ardern JacindaJACINDA ARDERN (Deputy Leader—Labour): Can I just start by saying that John Clarke given the opportunity would have done a fine impression of Nathan Guy—an absolutely fine impression. I want to acknowledge John Clarke and I want to acknowledge Murray Ball. They were the epitome of the Kiwi psyche. But I also want to acknowledge them as progressives—as progressives. They reflected back to the New Zealand public the very epitome of the Kiwi psyche they were our conscience and I think they were absolutely brilliant at pointing out our national pride and our national shame. When it comes to the two of them we collectively did not know how lucky we were.Surely in politics the measure of political leadership is your ability to deal with the hard stuff. That is the true measure. And question time today was a reflection of the inability of this Government to deal with the hard stuff. Now I have actually heard it once said that the true measure of leadership is the ability to confront the anxiety of the people of the time. That is the measure of a leader: the ability to confront the anxiety of the people of the time.What are the anxieties of the New Zealand people right now? Well they are not too dissimilar from what we see in the international environment. We saw that when it comes to financial insecurity that is what captured the American people. Financial insecurity was what captured people in the UK. We have a choice as politicians to capture that anxiety and answer it either with a measure of hope or with a measure of disillusionment and hate.We have a choice here in New Zealand around that as well because the anxiety of our time is captured by issues like housing. If you take the effect of housing on a person's life it affects everything whether it is your sense of security of place whether or not it is your disposable income whether or not it is your ability to send your kids consistently to one school. We have the lowest homeownership rates in New Zealand since 1951.Dr David Clark: Since when?JACINDA ARDERN: Since 1951. In 8 years the cost of renting in Auckland has gone up by 40 percent and one in seven houses are sold to speculators. This is the anxiety of the New Zealand people of our time. But it is not just that. Environmental insecurity—the degradation of our environment from our waters to our drinking water to our climate—is also the anxiety of our time. What has this Government done to acknowledge either one of those anxieties? It has kicked the can down the road. It will not even acknowledge that housing is a problem let alone environmental degradation.But I want to add another anxiety—a hard one a difficult one which the Government has not even acknowledged yet let alone made gains on. Yesterday the Waitangi Tribunal released its finding that the Crown has breached its Treaty obligations by failing to address high and disproportionate reoffending rates of Māori. It went further—it said that it created a devastating situation for Māori and for the nation. That is more than collective anxiety; that is our collective shame. That is our collective shame. The Government set a key performance indicator around reducing reoffending. Not only has it failed to meet that it has failed to acknowledge the drivers of the imprisonment rate let alone the reoffending rate.I want to go back to those precursors because I know the Māori Party in coalition with the Government has not. It has not gone back and adequately addressed the economic precursors to this situation. But there is another precursor: since the 1950s a hundred thousand children have been removed from their families.Meka Whaitiri: How many?JACINDA ARDERN: A hundred thousand. And that has disproportionately affected Māori children. There is no denying it. We know what the effects of that have been. They have been manifested in our justice system. You cannot visit a prison without having a prison warden tell you the number of individuals in that prison who have been in Child Youth and Family care. It is an obvious connection that we need to make.Now we cannot change history but we can face up to it. If we had true leadership in this House we would have an inquiry into State care. We would start addressing our national shame. We would confront it head on. We would learn from the lessons of yesterday and make sure that such would never again happen to the children of tomorrow and that starts with the children whom we are now imprisoning because of the trauma that they have experienced in the past. That would be leadership.