Craig LizDr LIZ CRAIG (Labour): Tēnā koe Mr Speaker. Let me begin by congratulating you on your new role. It wasn't so long ago that you were visiting us in Invercargill but so much has changed since then—not only for everybody here in this House but also for our country.Maiden speeches are often times when we tell that story of our journey to Parliament and what we hope to achieve here. But today I actually want to tell a different story: it's the story of our country. Not the official history but rather the story seen by me as a child as a doctor and later as a kind of statistical undertaker for our country's children and young people.At times it's a dark story but it's also a story of hope because with the election of a Labour-led Government we can now start to make some changes on all the things I'll be talking about today.My story starts back in 1873 when my great-grandparents William and Rachel Marsden arrived in New Zealand. William was a carpenter and he bought and then subdivided some land in Dunedin and was very soon mortgage-free. But 17 years later William became seriously ill and a few months later the family ended up in rental accommodation. William was in hospital and the family had come under the care of the Otago Benevolent Institution.A few months later William died leaving Rachel a widow with nine children under the age of 15 years. Back then there weren't many social safety nets. There were a few benevolent societies providing aid to the deserving poor. My own father managed to track down our family's case records for that time.All of the Otago Benevolent Institution's visiting records had a similar format where the rent was up on the right-hand side and the children's ages and wages were on the left. The first entry reads girl 14: 3 shillings a week; girl 13: 3 shillings" and then the non-earning children: "girl 10; boy 8; girl 5; boy 4; boy 3; boy 14 months". Then in the margins the case worker would make their assessment of our family's needs. The initial entry read "They have nothing coming in apart from earnings of the two girls and I think some relief necessary."Over the next seven years the files chart my family's progress and the aid rising and falling in relation to the case worker's whim. For example June 1891 when it was mid-winter in Dunedin and my recently widowed great-grandmother had still four children under the age of six: "Mrs M has had a mangle provided by the Church and she says she earns 2-3 shillings per week. This woman might do a great deal more to help herself than she does if she tried. I think the relief given … too much".My grandfather's memory of this time was that he was always hungry. He once told a story of getting a job as an assistant to a gardener and being so hungry he picked an apple off a tree only to return the next morning to find the head gardener had been sacked because the elderly lady owner always counted her apples and she'd found one to be missing. The toll on the rest of the family was also significant. Four years after my great-grandfather died Annie who was then 17 was admitted to hospital with nephritis dying seven weeks later. Then Harry aged 14 was admitted with malignant endocarditis and died within days. Both conditions we now know are associated with substandard living conditions.We fast-forward to the Great Depression when my own father was born. With widespread unemployment it became just too inefficient to assess the moral fibre of every welfare recipient. So the incoming 1935 Labour Government decided that they would put an end to the stigma associated with social assistance and they would make an end to poverty and in doing so they established our modern welfare State. They brought in the support provided to widows without children to orphans and to the sick. They introduced free healthcare and education and they improved wages and working conditions. This led to a prolonged economic recovery with the welfare State remaining essentially intact for the next 40 years.However things started to go wrong in the 1970s with a global economic downturn. Our growth declined unemployment rose and large deficits emerged. While the 1980s were turbulent and we remember them it wasn't until the 1991 "mother of all Budgets" that our social safety nets started to unravel. We had benefit cuts market rates for State houses and the Employment Contracts Act which decimated the unions and child poverty soared from a maximum of 16 percent in the 1980s to 33 percent by 1992.The year 1991 was also a significant year in my own life because it was the year I graduated from medical school and started work as a house surgeon at Taranaki Base Hospital. I decided I wanted to be a doctor very early on. Our family had lived in New Guinea for a few years and we'd often visited hospitals and clinics where the suffering was starkly visible. So 15 years later I was working in the hospital where my brothers and I were born. I think my first few weeks as a doctor were much like my first few weeks as a politician—everything's unfamiliar you don't know how anything works and all the stuff you deal with day to day is never in the training manual. But somehow you just wing it and over time you get steadier on your feet.Except for me there was an additional factor in that Taranaki Base Hospital was also the place where my brother Peter had died. Peter was born by caesarean section and was what we would call "flat" at birth and so the on-call doctor had been called to resuscitate him. But just as he entered the resuscitation room he got a call about another emergency and so he quickly got in and got my brother breathing and then rushed off. Some time later my brother Peter was found unresponsive in his cot. A code was called and after a prolonged resuscitation they managed to bring him back. But his brain damage was so severe he never really recovered and he died of seizures about nine months later.As a child I didn't fully understand Peter's death although at times I felt a profound sense of grief as perhaps as a child you absorb the emotions of those around you. But once I was a doctor it was with me every time I entered that delivery suite to do a newborn resuscitation—not only the grief of his loss but also how it must have been for that doctor who had done the initial resuscitation.But fortunately death is an infrequent visitor to the children's wards and in my years in clinical medicine I only ever looked after a handful of children who died but I still remember to this day very many of them.Being a junior doctor you're on the wards at all hours of the day and night and you get to know your families very well and yet irrespective of the country I worked in the pattern was always the same. The child was deteriorating and the medical team were frantically working to save them and then the child would pass. And then after that there was always just this stillness and in that stillness I would often go back over it in my mind thinking about what it would have been to have been able to save that child and where we could have reached back into that child's history and made the changes. But modern medicine being what it was it was actually seldom in the hospital ward that those changes could have been made. We would have had to reach back many weeks and many months into that child's life—a bit of extra money so that the milk wasn't diluted so far or a bit of extra support to that young mum who was struggling with an unintended pregnancy.So fast-forward another decade and I'm running the research unit that monitors the health of our country's children and young people and it's my job to count the thousands of children hospitalised for poverty-related diseases and the dozens dying from preventable conditions and occasionally after the hurly-burly of getting the reports out I'd think about what those little dots on those graphs mean—the 20 children dying from pneumonia the eight beaten to death by their parents the 50 babies dying in their sleep and the fact that most of these children come from the poorest areas where their parents are already struggling to make ends meet.Fortunately our brains aren't big enough to comprehend grief on such a scale. We can grieve a lost brother or a child we've looked after on the ward but how do we grieve for a hundred children or for the thousands hospitalised each year struggling to breathe or for the harsh uncaring place that our country has become? Again I found myself going back over it in my mind trying to identify at what point our country's trajectory had changed and in this case all roads led back to the early 1990s when a single Budget doubled child poverty almost overnight resetting the baseline for future generations.I concluded that if it was in this House that the decisions were made that set us on our current path then it was in this House that the remedies must be sought. I thus joined Labour in 2010 to help write our children's policy and stood as a candidate in 2014. I'm proud to be part of Labour's 2017 intake and the policies we ran on this election which for the first time in many years will begin to turn the situation around. But what will success look like particularly for us in Invercargill where we have a strong community spirit but where many of our families are living in cold damp houses; where many are struggling on low wages and insecure jobs; and where it can take up to nine months to get an ultrasound scan?The closest analogy I can think of is my former colleague's cot death research. In the early 1990s it was found that putting babies on their backs to sleep reduced the risk of cot death and over the next few years the rates dramatically declined eventually saving about 200 babies every year. But I never recall people going up to my old boss Ed and saying "Thanks Ed. I never died as a baby as a result of your research." But nevertheless the lives saved were real.In the same way I don't expect anyone will ever walk up to Andrew Little and say "Thanks. Your Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill saved me from growing up in a crappy rental that ruined my lungs." or to Annette King and saying "That extra 60 bucks a week you gave my parents when I was little meant Mum could stay home with me longer." But instead over time as our policies are rolled out the bad stuff will just happen less and less and our young people will start to focus on their futures more and more rather than just on struggling to survive.But doing all this will take a team effort and I'm proud to be part of such a team with Jacinda taking the lead from the front on child poverty reduction; Phil Twyford making sure every child gets a warm dry home; Chris Hipkins—that every child gets a decent education; Carmel and Iain—that every family has enough to get by on; and David Clark—that they can access the health services they need. I'm also proud to be part of the "class of '17" and to enter Parliament with such incredibly talented people. The calibre of my colleagues bodes well for our country's future.I'm also incredibly lucky to have shared my journey with so many wonderful people. To my parents Bill and Dorothy and my brothers Barry and Deane who've supported me from the beginning; to my sons Nick and Jack who've always been there for me; to Dave who first got me involved in politics; and to Phil who'll see me the rest of the way; to my colleagues in child health who've taught me so much; and to the Labour team at head office and in the southern hub; and my Invercargill team the Wednesday group and all those who've worked so hard on our campaign; and to my mentor Maryan Street—we all share a common vision but none of my journey would've been possible without you so thank you.In 2009 when the global financial crisis hit a number of us in child health got together to monitor the impact of the recession on child well-being. At the monitor's launch we asked a little girl called Natalie to light a candle to symbolise our commitment to shining a light on our children until their economic position improved. At the monitor's fifth anniversary we asked Natalie to re-light the candle but instead of a timid two-year-old a confident seven-year-old strode on to the stage and in that moment I realised that in the intervening years another whole generation of New Zealand children had just spent their first five years in poverty.So wouldn't it be wonderful when Jacinda launches her child poverty targets if we ask a child to light a candle? And when they light it again in five years' time a whole generation of New Zealand children will have grown up in a better place. Thank you. [Applause]"