Brownlee Gerry; Swarbrick ChlöeGENERAL DEBATESPEAKER: Members who have to leave could I ask them to please leave silently. I call upon some honourable member to move that this House take notice of miscellaneous business.CHLÖE SWARBRICK (Co-Leader—Green): I move That the House take note of miscellaneous business.Times are tough but they do not have to be. I want New Zealanders out there to know that the polluted waterways the droughts across our productive farmlands that Ministers of this Government were talking about just at this question time today the gridlock that's clogging up our cities and our towns the gut-wrenching inequality which the Inland Revenue Department and Treasury demonstrated in the form of reports last year which showed us that the top 311 families in this country hold more wealth combined than the bottom 2.5 million New Zealanders—none of that is inevitable. It is a consequence—a direct consequence—of a tax system that sees those New Zealanders at the top paying an effective tax rate less than half of that of our average New Zealanders.The point that we want to make here is that these are choices—these are choices—that Governments get to make. These are choices that successive Governments have made which have given us precisely these consequences.This Government wants New Zealanders out there to think that the system that we live under is inevitable. They want New Zealanders to think that the only optional pathway in front of us is more trickle-down tax cuts straight from the playbook of 1980s and 1990s economics but we here in the Greens know that another system is not only entirely achievable but that it is possible if New Zealanders across this country realise our collective power to hold not only this Government but future Governments to account to make it happen. This exhaustion that New Zealanders feel out there across Aotearoa New Zealand but also at home in my electorate of Auckland Central that exhaustion is not inevitable. I know that it is felt largely in servitude to this exhausting system which many feel in their day-to-day lives is exploitative not only of themselves but of our planet and the natural world that we rely on for our very survival.Now we have a recent example which exposed precisely how these choices can be made and it was of course COVID-19. We saw that all of these things that Governments successively have told us are impossible whether it be rent freezes whether it's direct payments to struggling people whether it was flexible working arrangements for sole parents or people with disabilities it happened effectively overnight exposing that these things were always simply a matter of political willpower.Now this Government has made it abundantly clear where their priorities are. They are bloody-mindedly focused on delivering trickle-down tax cuts at the cost of pretty much everything else. This Government is also having the gall to tell us that they care about the climate and the environment while in their own words from their own Government Ministers they are telling us that they are passing legislation that is designed to and I quote supercharge mining". They are committed to pouring oil and gas on the climate crisis fire by reopening exploration for oil and gas in Māui dolphin habitats.Now we want New Zealanders to know and to hear from inside this place as much as they do from us the Greens out there on the streets rallying along with them that a different world is possible. You only need to look at the economic history of this country to see that every 30 or 40 years or so there is an economic transformation. In the 1930s and 1940s in the wake of world wars and the Great Depression there were decisions made by the Government of the day to implement the welfare State to create public housing public education and public health care and to pay for it by higher taxes on those who had profited during a time of hardship for many.But we saw that that social safety net—decisions were made to shred that social safety net through the 1980s and 1990s in favour of this rampant dogmatic ideology of trickle-down economics. And how's that served us? Well we are currently facing the dual crises of the greatest wealth inequality that we have ever seen on record in this country and the climate crisis. In the face of that I believe in the ingenuity the creativity and the imagination of New Zealanders. The Greens believe that in working together we can completely transform that system because another world is possible. In the words of the Hurricanes Poua team "Governments are temporary" and New Zealand is the one who gets to decide our future."