Calder Cam: General Debate 
Calder Cam: General Debate 
[Volume:678;Page:1399] 
Dr CAM CALDER (National) 
: 
 Before I start I would just like to acknowledge Sir Paul Callaghan a very able New Zealander and a man who faced his imminent demise with huge courage.  
This is a strong and stable Government that has produced strong and stable government in difficult times and continues to do so. It is a compassionate Government. I am actually proud to be a member of this Government and a member of Parliament based in Manurewa. It is a privilege to be based in that community. At a quarter to 6 in the morning last Sunday as I was walking to the Totara Hospice sunrise charity walk with 1200 residents of our community and the wider community of the south of Auckland I mused upon what a vibrant and diverse community it is with people of all ages all sizes and all ethnicities. It is a vibrant diverse community of hard-working people who are ambitious for themselves and their children with a few who lack a sense of purpose and a feeling of belonging. But this Government will never be accused of turning its back on the vulnerable. We believe that we and our society are judged by how we treat our most vulnerable citizens. Very often those vulnerable citizens are children. Fifty percent of families in our South Auckland - Manurewa community have only one parent—only one parent. Many of those parents do an outstanding job for their children—an outstanding job. But we realise and any person in this House who is a parent will realise how difficult it is to raise children even when you have two parents at home. We realise that if there is one person at home then obviously those families need more help.  
We are approaching this issue in a number of areas. One of the areas I would like to talk about is the Social Workers in Schools programme. I have been to many of the schools in Manurewa and I must say the teachers there do an outstanding job. Many of them do pastoral work far beyond what you would expect any teacher to do—taking children home and taking them to medical appointments. We want the child to have the benefit of the teacher’s expertise and education. We realise that in certain schools social workers play a huge role helping the children helping the families and helping the teachers. As a result of that we have announced funding to increase the number of social workers in schools who can help the teachers—up to 673 social workers in schools nationally. Many of those will be deployed into the decile 1 to decile 3 schools in the area that I am privileged to work in—Manurewa Manukau and Mangere—to help those children unlock the potential that lies within each of them. It is that potential that this country needs and that those children need and that potential being unlocked will be to the benefit of all New Zealanders. We have got schools like Homai Primary School Manurewa South School Manurewa West Primary School Puhinui School and Leabank School. Schools like that which hitherto have not had social workers will have social workers.  
Towards the end of last year I walked into Wiri Central School and met the headmistress. She was telling me about the programme that we are rolling out and are continuing to roll out in South Auckland to deal with the unacceptably high levels of rheumatic fever in our South Auckland communities. It not just South Auckland; there are hot spots around the country but this Government is doing something about it. The way it works is that school nurses are deployed within schools where there are a high number of at-risk children. They do throat swabs on kids with sore throats and thereby reduce significantly the chances of that child going on to develop rheumatic fever. Of course if they find a positive swab they treat the child with the appropriate antibiotics and thereby avoid the terrible sequelae of the strep throat which can occur in some cases. Obviously our Pasifika and Maori people are grossly overrepresented in these statistics. We have a high proportion of those in Manurewa. Our other strategies such as improving their homes—making them better insulated warmer and drier—will help this as well. Our anti-smoking strategies will also reduce the incidence of this appalling disease—a disease that is a blight on our country. How do we do this? Well we have to grow the economy. That is another part of this Government’s strategy. We have seen how we have managed to do this very very successfully particularly in export-led growth.