Logie JanJAN LOGIE (Green): Thank you Mr Speaker. Boy the short memories on that side of the House do my head in—but never mind. I want to speak about something else today: the Green Party's commitment to ensuring that everyone in this country has enough to be able to sustain themselves.We as a party are really committed to helping create an equal society because we think we're all better off the more equality we have. When people's incomes aren't enough to enable them to confidently put food on the table or in the lunch boxes pay their bills spend enough time at home join in community events or pay money towards their retirement our society as a whole is weakened. So we've been told for successive years and I hear resonating from that side of the House that the answer to that problem is work. That's the answer to poverty and the pathway to a good life—work. Yet that ignores the reality of our mental health crisis the reality of sickness driving people out of employment at times the social construction of disability that keeps people out of employment and the in-built churn in and out of employment in this country set by Government policy which is one of the highest rates of churn in the developed world. They are the reasons we need a welfare overhaul and this Government has committed to one. We for too long have been blaming individuals for the problems of Government policies and our society. It also ignores the thousands of people in work who are living below the poverty line or close to it. People in paid employment being driven to food banks at unprecedented levels started under that last Government's policies. We're hearing recently of teachers before their pay rise having to go to food banks because their wages had been suppressed for so long of working people living in cars because they cannot afford rent during the time where we heard there was no housing crisis. We know that this is a problem for individuals and families and whānau but it's also a problem for us as a society because we are suffering as a collective because of those policies. When over 50 percent of net wealth is held by just 10 percent of the country and some CEOs in this country are earning well over a million dollars a year that reality for people at the other end becomes intolerable. The last Government's response—and I still hear echoes in the Opposition—was denial and they really told us again and again that work was the solution that the free market liberating the free market was the solution. We saw how that worked out. We're dealing with how that worked out. As we need to urgently move towards a zero-carbon economy we need innovation not a drive-down of wages and conditions to be behind and the centrepiece of our economy. Currently wage growth lags behind productivity. Wage growth for low and middle income people is significantly lower than for high-income people. People in this country are working longer hours and producing less than in comparable OECD countries. That is why this Government has committed to increasing the minimum wage delivering a living wage for the public sector ensuring that our teachers and nurses get the bump to their income too and averting an even worse crisis than was created by that Government and has significantly extended equal pay settlements across caring professions.But this we know is not enough which is one of the reasons we need fair pay agreements too. Fair pay agreements get agreement across industries on wages conditions and training and can deliver benefits for the whole society.