Sepuloni CarmelCARMEL SEPULONI (Labour—Kelston): Those words social investment" they sound so good and social investment could be so good but not so much under that Government. The problem with that Government is it is about reducing liabilities. In fact it refers to people as potential liabilities. It is about short-term cost-saving rather than investing in people. There will be repercussions including cost repercussions down the track because of the short-term vision of that Government. Its social investment approach is a farce. We hear from the Minister regularly that benefit numbers are reducing. Well actually the job-seeker support numbers recently were up. And she cannot tell us that the majority of those people are going on to employment—that is the problem. All that the Government is focused on with its Better Public Services target is reducing long-term welfare dependency rather than the outcomes for those actual families.I want to refer to some of the Prime Minister's pre-Budget comments today on social investment. Mr Bill English has said "We are supporting businesses and investment that will deliver more jobs and higher wages for New Zealand families." but the reality is that the cost of living is on the rise and more and more people are struggling to make ends meet. That Minister for Social Development cannot say that is not the case when we have seen an increase of 74000 in the number of people accessing hardship grants with most of those hardship grants being for food and educational costs. The Minister cannot say that the cost of living is not rising and that people are not struggling to make ends meet when we see a $20 million increase in the amount of money being accessed in terms of emergency accommodation. The Government has got a problem. Its social investment is not working.Bill English said "We've cut [some] taxes …" and now our public services I just want to say are really struggling with the rising demand. We see it in our own electorates. I just want to use one example. A family contacted me the other day. Their family member passed away. It took 15 hours to get a doctor to that house to make the assessment and that body had to stay in that house for that whole time. What is that about? That is the strain that our health system is under thanks to that Government's failed social investment approach. We have Bill English today also saying "Over 50000 fewer people are now on … benefit than in 2011." But as I said we see through the quarterly benefit statistics that actually less than 50 percent of those people going off benefit are actually going into employment. So how better off are those families? They are not at all. That is not social investment.We also heard from Mr Bill English that "One particular focus of the Government's work on Social Investment is ensuring all New Zealand children have a good start to life." Yet under this Government there are more children living in poverty. In fact that Government still does not want to measure the problem properly so how can we possibly actually address it? It talks about social investment and yet we have a Prime Minister who talks about young people in a derogatory way referring to the young people in this country as "pretty damned hopeless". So how can we have an effective social investment approach when it is underpinned by attitudes like we have from the Prime Minister who thinks that rather than training up New Zealanders rather than training our young people and supporting them into getting into sustainable and meaningful employment we should actually make the immigration system more permissive to make up for the fact that he says many of our young people are "pretty damned hopeless".We still have 90000 young people who are not in employment or education. How successful has the Government's social investment approach been when we still have 90000 young people who are not in employment or education? Despite some of the criticism despite some of the valuable critique of what it is trying to do that Government continues to ignore that advice. We had the Privacy Commissioner come out and criticise the data-sharing approach that that Government wants to take as part of its social investment approach saying that it was not necessary it was dangerous and it would deter people from accessing support. I hear today that that Minister is going to ignore that advice and soldier on regardless. The Government does have "three-term-itis". It is arrogant and it needs to be voted out."