Turei Metiria: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Turei Metiria: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
[Volume:670;Page:16502] 
METIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 I am here for my father. I am here for my father and for the many thousands of New Zealanders just like him. My father was an ordinary guy from Palmerston North who just wanted to have an ordinary life. He wanted a decent job a decent take-home pay and he wanted a secure home where he could raise his family. What he got was a lifetime of hardship and he died of a stroke at age 48—at just a handful of years older than I am now. I dream of a world in which my dad is still alive. What would have given my father a better chance at a long and satisfying life? What would have made his story more like mine? 
Like my dad I did not do too well at school; I left school at 16 with no qualifications and few prospects. I worked here and there. I spent time on the dole. After a few years I found myself as a solo parent on the domestic purposes benefit. I had the good luck to go to university and I got my law degree. I used the training incentive allowance to help with my study costs. I shared childcare with family and friends. I sometimes had to use the special-needs grant—do members remember that—to pay my power bill and to buy food when things got really tough. I got support when I needed it. My dad did not so I am here for my father. 
I want every man woman and child in this country to have the chance of a good ordinary life. We can do so much more to help New Zealanders just like my dad. We can build a fairer society an equal society that does not require the sacrifice of our people or the sacrifice of our environment to an economic dead end. 
The Green Party is known as a champion for the environment. We love our country and we want to protect it. We are passionate about protecting our rivers our land our forests and our oceans but we also want to look after all New Zealanders and today that is my focus. How do we mind the gap between the haves and the have-nots? What can we do about inequality in Aotearoa New Zealand? The first thing we can do is make sure that everyone gets a fair go at decent work with a living wage. My dad was a labourer all his life. He worked on farms and in orchards he shot deer and he worked in a bread factory but in the 1980s the work dried up. There were 300000 people unemployed just like him. As time went on it became harder and harder for a 40-year-old working-class Maori man to find work. Poverty took everything from my dad including his home. 
Here we are just a couple of decades later with 156000 New Zealanders unemployed 100000 New Zealanders underemployed and 180000 New Zealanders working at or near the minimum wage. The economic reforms of the 1980s failed my dad and those same ideas those same plans are now failing our children and grandchildren. We have hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders struggling to survive just like my father did. 
Wage growth has kept up with the rising cost of living—John Key talked about that—but that is good news only for those who still have their jobs. John Key’s talk simply hides what is actually happening to families today: his Government is not protecting families from the rising cost of living. 
Unemployment has increased by 50 percent since John Key took office—in just a few short years. Families affected by unemployment are falling behind at the fastest rate unable to find jobs while having to meet the rising cost of fuel and food. The Government’s answer to job losses in the private sector has been to cut jobs in the public sector. That is the extent of John Key’s Government’s jobs plan. The Prime Minister took great pride in pointing out today that his Government has reduced the number of full-time staff positions in core Government administrations by 5 percent. In reality many of the workers whom John Key boasts about sacking will be driven to the wall. That will mean less spending and it will mean more job losses and John Key boasts about those job losses. 
Hon Tariana Turia 
: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. My apologies to the member for cutting in on her speech but there is somebody up behind us who is constantly shouting things and making it very difficult for us to hear. We do want to listen to this speech. 
Mr SPEAKER 
: I appreciate the honourable member’s point. In fact I particularly ask members on the Government benches to please show a little more courtesy to the House. There are so many conversations going on including one right now on my right. The member is clearly taking no notice of what the Speaker is saying whatsoever. I ask the Government whip to make sure members stop the endless quite loud conversations. To the person interjecting regularly down the back please show the House some courtesy. When members are listening and interjecting that is one thing but when they are just carrying on loud private discussions it is discourteous. I apologise to the honourable member. 
METIRIA TUREI 
: Thank you Mr Speaker. Tena koe e te whaea. John Key is boasting about job cuts. Our minimum wage in this country is so low that Kiwis who work full-time still need top-ups from the Government just to cover the basics—food and rent. The current take-home pay for a 40-hour-a-week job on the minimum wage is $409 a week and in April it will go up by about $28. Meanwhile the average rent in Auckland is $416. One simply cannot support a family on 400-odd bucks a week—one cannot. The minimum wage must go up to $15 an hour as soon as possible. The minimum wage must go up immediately to help the poorest and most vulnerable families in our community. We know that lifting the minimum wage is good for the economy. There is an increased demand for goods and services because people on low incomes spend most of their money. We know that lifting the minimum wage would also save the Government money. It would save a billion dollars in the Government’s social assistance budget. But instead of saving this money we are subsidising employers who pay low wages. Their workers will put in 40 hours a week but they will still need help to pay the rent and put food on the table. Businesses who employ the most low-wage workers are big corporates: supermarkets such as New World and fast food outlets such as Burger King. Last year Foodstuffs supermarket companies made $16 million in profit while their minimum wage workers continued to struggle. 
My dad was a kind man he was a decent man and he was a peaceful man whether he was in work or out just like the thousands of New Zealanders who now find themselves out of work. John Key’s Government suggests those people are bludgers but New Zealanders use support when they need it and they move on when they can. That is what I did that is what my dad tried to do and that is what thousands of New Zealanders are doing today. About three-quarters of those people on the dole are on it for less than a year. 
John Key has outlined major reforms to welfare that will severely hurt families and children. I want to describe what that means in a real life. If John Key’s reforms were in place when I had become a solo mum I would have been forced to work in an unskilled low-paid job instead of being able to care for my daughter. Because I had no school qualifications John Key would have considered me unsuited to university and I would probably never have been able to go to university let alone go to law school. Even if I had made it as far as the university door with no training incentive allowance I simply could not have made ends meet while I studied. That is the ladder of opportunity that Paula Bennett kicked out from behind her. That is the ladder of opportunity that John Key would have taken from me and my dad’s first moko. Our vulnerable families are not the enemy I say to Mr Key. They are families just like mine and they are families just like yours. 
Since the Green Party arrived in Parliament we have said that benefits must go up and we are firmly opposed to the benefit cuts that are signalled by the Prime Minister today. Instead of suggesting that we need to punish the victims of the recession and punish the victims of poverty let us talk about how we can help them. 
John Key talks about the importance of early childhood education but his cuts in that sector have already seen parents pulling their kids out of early childhood education because they cannot afford the increased fees. There is no better investment in our families and our children than in early childhood education. For every single dollar that we spend—every dollar—in early childhood education we save up to $17 in health costs justice costs and other social costs. That is a better return than a hundred roads of national significance. 
John Key talks of the 220000 children who are dependent on benefits as if that is their own fault and as if they are to blame. We can help by extending to those families the Working for Families support to help them pay rent and power bills and pay for food and warm clothes. Instead we are staring down the barrel of changes to welfare that will widen the gap between those who have the most and those who need the most. 
We will pay for John Key’s mistake in hospital bills in new prisons and in future welfare payments. We will pay for John Key’s mistake in the lives we will lose to poverty. 
Growing up one of the challenges that my parents faced was finding us a decent place to live. When my parents went out looking for a house to rent they would always send my mother. My mother is Pakeha. If my father went with her we would not get the house because he was Maori. One time when we were very small my mother had managed to find us a good house. But over the next few days the landlord came to visit and he met my dad and within the week we had an eviction notice. We moved from that house into our car. We lived in our car for a period until we could find another home. We moved out into a house in the country. My family lived in a lot of country houses because my Dad could work on the surrounding farms and those houses were very cheap. 
Housing remains a critical problem in this country. We have more than 10000 families on the waiting list for a State home. We have exceptionally high rents. We have poor-quality rental properties. We have severe overcrowding. We have Third World rates of rheumatic fever that come from that overcrowding and cost our health system some $10 million a year. Poor housing costs lives—the lives of men and women in their prime. The Green Party has long said that a comprehensive State house building programme to increase the stock of State houses by 6000 over 3 years is the right thing to do. This building programme not only would provide homes for our families but would create some 28000 jobs. This building programme would help New Zealanders who need a home help New Zealanders who need a job and help our struggling construction industry. 
I tell members that my dad would have loved a job like that—a job where he was building homes for the people and the communities he cared most about. But last year John Key cut the State house building budget by $100 million. What we have heard from the Prime Minister today suggests that he does not care enough about the 20000 New Zealand families with chronic housing problems to bother to solve the problem. John Key aims to shuffle existing housing stock around and to push people out of their homes through the reviewable tenancies process. That will do nothing for the problem. There are not enough homes for the families who need them. 
This Government’s lack of compassion and absence of solutions for our families is gutting. We can be a better country than this. There are other choices that we can make. We can help our families. 
One of those areas where we can help is with power bills. It is not just rent or food that is the problem but power bills too. One way to do that is with progressive pricing which would lock in a low electricity price for every household up to a certain threshold of around 4000 kilowatt hours a year. In many homes that would be enough to keep people warm and dry at an affordable price. In New Zealand we are unique in that we still own the majority of our electricity generation assets the big renewable projects that our grandparents built. We have the ability to look at progressive pricing schemes which would help our most vulnerable families stay healthy and warm. Ensuring fair power prices for families is just one of the reasons we must maintain full public ownership of our power companies. Selling our power companies as National is promising to do will make it harder to achieve cheaper and sustainable power for those who need it the most. 
MMP is also part of the solution. I know that my being in Parliament would have blown my dad’s mind—he did not live to see it. No one in this place ever talked about the reality of his life. No one in this place ever saw him as a person to whom they were responsible. No one in this place bothered to reflect that their decisions would determine the course of his life. That was until MMP allowed people like him to be here and to speak on his behalf. So in this year’s referendum I am voting to keep MMP and to improve it. 
The gap between rich and poor grew very rapidly here in Aotearoa between the mid-1980s and 2000. Real incomes for lower and middle income families fell while the income of wealthy households soared. Work dried up for my dad in the mid-1980s; he died in 1995. When my dad had a stroke he could not even get decent help from the hospital. He was disbelieved he was discounted and he was even dropped on the floor. This was not intentional mistreatment; it was just the same casual disregard that dogged my dad for his whole life. At the hospital in those last hours of his life he really needed to be treated with some dignity just as he deserved to be treated with dignity and respect throughout his whole working life as he sought to take care of his family. My dad was sacrificed to dead-end economic ideas. He did not live to see the shift to smart green economics. I wish he had because smart green economics does not demand the sacrifice of our environment smart green economics does not demand the sacrifice of our people and it would not have demanded his. 
Our Government plays a key role in shaping a fair society. This Parliament can help to guarantee the essentials and make sure that every New Zealand person—man woman and child—gets a fair go and a bit of respect. So I am here for my father Richard Ropata Eruera Turei and I am here for the many thousands of New Zealanders just like my dad. Kia ora.