Genter Julie Anne; Dean JacquiHon JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green): Tēnā koe Madam Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. I'd like to talk first about what's good in this Budget. When I look at the Budget at a Glance especially on the first page—the cost of living support—I see a whole lot of initiatives that actually were first campaigned on by the Green Party or started by a Green Minister in Government. For example free public transport for kids half-price public transport for people under the age of 25—these are policies that the Green Party has been campaigning on for a long time and I as Associate Minister of Transport last term began work on the Community Connect card which sees half-price public transport for those with a community services card or with disabilities. Of course that doesn't go far enough. We'd like to see it go much further. We would have liked to see half-price public transport made permanent for everyone because we have seen a huge increase in the use of public transport despite the problems with bus cancellations. We would like to see free public transport for under-18s and much greater provisions for those with community services card and disabilities.KiwiSaver contributions for paid parental leave—again I'm very proud to say that this was an initiative that I commenced research into when I was Minister for Women. Extending 20 hours' early childhood education to two-year-olds—excellent policy. We wish it was coming into effect sooner. The Green Party put this in our manifesto and announced it nine years ago.Scrapping prescription co-payments—we can't take credit for that one but it is good and we support it.Cheaper energy bills lowering household energy bills through expanded Warmer Kiwi Homes programme—that's insulation that's new heating and that's hot water heat pumps and LED lightbulbs. Of course this was a longstanding Green Party initiative that Jeanette Fitzsimons kicked off back in 2008 and we've seen hundreds of thousands of homes made warmer drier healthier and using less energy thanks to those programmes.The Climate Emergency Response Fund is being put to good use and there are a lot of good initiatives in that space.But then we come to what is missing from this Budget. We have to say that while some steps have been taken in the right direction and we support those steps it is nowhere near the transformational changes that we need to truly tackle climate change and achieve equity within our communities here in Aotearoa.So what is missing? Let's start with the Climate Emergency Response Fund which is down more than $800 million because the Labour majority Government chose to ignore the recommendations of the Climate Commission against the advice of the Minister of Climate Change James Shaw. What else is missing from the Budget? Well I'm sorry to say we still don't see any full implementation of the recommendations of the expert advisory group on fixing our welfare system. So the Government asked last term for advice on how to fix our welfare system but they still haven't implemented the recommendations—really any of them and nowhere near fully. We also didn't see increases to Working for Families which is really needed by those working families. We don't see the massive increase to student support that's needed. My colleague Chlöe Swarbrick ran a people's inquiry into student wellbeing and found that two-thirds of students can't afford the basics on a regular basis and 91 percent of those students said they would take public transport much more if it were free. That would mean they were able to access more classes at university.We don't see paid parental leave for all parents. We don't see it at a reasonable rate—it's less than the minimum wage—and not everybody can access it. We don't see free high-quality early childhood education for all children from the end of paid parental leave. That's a gap we have to close. It just doesn't make sense: you finish your paid parental leave which is extremely inadequate by global standards and then there's a gap still of at least a year and a half before you get the support for early childhood education. And many people can't afford to return to work not to mention that in places like Wellington you can't even find a place at an early childhood centre—I mean it's extremely difficult. So we need more investment in that area.We see a gap of an ambitious programme of regional rail investment. This is something that people around the country have been calling out for. If we're going to address our climate targets and connect our communities including in rural areas we need to see a step change in our investment in regional rail and we need to see public investment in bus services. Aotearoa once had affordable high-quality frequent bus and train services right across the country connecting our communities even to very rural areas. We can have that again but we need to see the step change in investment. The 18 trains that will be purchased for the lower North Island business case—welcome investment well overdue and we were campaigning for that more than a year ago. But we need to see much more than that to achieve the real low-carbon connectivity for our communities and we need to see more public transport in our towns and cities right around the country. It's great to have the half-price public transport and free public transport for kids but it doesn't benefit those who don't have bus or train or ferry services available to them and that's where Government need to do a whole lot more.There were no e-bike or cargo bike subsidies and the high cost of those vehicles is a barrier to purchasing them. But once people have access to those vehicles they have very quick convenient mobility and that is one way we can help both reduce congestion and enable more mobility while reducing emissions and reducing the cost of living for households. Unfortunately the Government has not taken that on.What else is missing from the Budget? Future years of the public housing programme—yeah that's an interesting one. The Green Party would like to see a commitment to future years of the public housing programme.Nature and conservation—we would have liked to have seen Jobs for Nature made permanent. We need much greater investment in conservation research and that work to do the trapping and pest eradication so that we can truly achieve the goals of predator-free Aotearoa. Why are these things missing from the Budget? I don't believe it's because the majority Labour Government doesn't want to do them; it's because the Labour majority Government didn't fix the tax system when they had the opportunity this term. I mean they have a majority; they could fix the tax system. We have the research which shows that the very wealthiest New Zealanders are paying extremely low marginal tax rates on their income. So we know inequality's getting worse in New Zealand. It's just a fact: if we don't have a fair tax system wealth will become more and more concentrated in the hands of a few. That is a mathematical fact and that's why during the 20th century we had a decrease in inequality at a time when there were extremely high marginal tax rates in that post - World War II era. If we want to achieve anything like that again and if we want to have declining inequality—that is a fair society; a society where people truly have access to the things that they need and the income that they need to live good lives—then we need to tax the rich. Inequality is a political choice—it is not inevitable—and the Green Party is not shying away from the fact that it is our political priority to make sure that we have a fair tax system so that we can afford to invest in the services and infrastructure that benefit all of us as a society. We are not better off letting the rich get richer. Even the rich know this—that's a why a huge number of the super-rich wrote a letter saying that actually they would very much like to be taxed at a greater rate so that we have a fairer tax system. But we don't need their consent. The reality is that the majority of New Zealanders would be better off with a fairer tax system so I guess the message for those people is that if you want a fairer tax system—and we saw that more than 50 percent of New Zealanders would support a wealth tax—then you're going to have to put the Greens back in Government because Labour unfortunately are just tweaking around the edges. They're not willing to take on the political leadership needed to achieve the goals that we all want which is action on climate change protecting nature and achieving equality in our communities which means investing in our people and we can afford to do that. The inequality we've seen in New Zealand was the result of political choices many of which started in the 1980s but carried on in the 1990s and we still haven't done anything to address that inequality that was caused in 1991 after Ruth Richardson's mother of all Budgets". We know that in the 1990s child poverty massively increased in Aotearoa New Zealand and it really hasn't declined since then. If we want to take on the serious issues—because climate change is in part driven by inequality; those who own the most and who have the most wealth contribute far more to damaging climate emissions than people on low incomes or on median incomes—we need to make sure that every person in our country has access to the things they need to live with dignity and to live a good life. That means support when they are sick and they cannot work. That means decent healthy affordable housing that is available to all. It is not right in this country that some people can have many many houses and some have to sleep in cars. The Green Party will address this in the next Government.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): The Hon Peeni Henare—a five-minute call."