Menéndez March RicardoRICARDO MENÉNDEZ MARCH (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Speaker. I'd like to begin by paying tribute to the many communities holding us together with radical love and care. The communities who have been doing the mahi because successive Governments have left them behind. I'm talking about the volunteers at the front lines checking up on their neighbours to make sure that they're holding up OK when they've got COVID and people delivering food parcels because they know that people around them simply do not have enough to make ends meet. The right side of the House keeps talking about how the cost of living crisis is a new thing but people have told us for many years that we've been living in an inequality crisis. So it's a bit rich to suddenly talk about inflation to talk about communities struggling as if it was something new. Since before this Government came into power families were already doing it tough. Children were living in motels and the number of hardship grants were growing. This is because Governments had accepted that people should get by without livable incomes. And in the words of Brooke Stanley Pao Livable incomes are people's birth rights." I want to question my colleagues: how much are we willing to accept? Are we willing to accept children going without? Are we going to accept people being put through dehumanising processes at Work and Income having to justify every purchase to get the help that they need to survive? Are we going to recognise the toxic stress that families are experiencing as a result of this hardship that leads to ill health? Because when I hear the National Party talking about "bottom feeders" I hear them talking about dehumanising the communities that they themselves have been complicit in putting them through hardship. They were the ones who introduced those punitive sanctions that we are just starting to roll back. While I commend the Labour Government for starting to do some of that work it is clear so much more needs to be done and we shouldn't just sit with excuses that for example in April we're going to see the biggest increase to benefit. Because in the context of just how low incomes are we need to do far more. We need to do more than just pat ourselves on the back and say that we've done more than the previous Government because the bar is deeply low. What I want to see is an Aotearoa where people are not put in debt because they were seeking help from Work and Income; an Aotearoa that says that we're going to give you unconditional support no matter who you are where we're not going to question the difficult decisions that people have had to make in order to provide for their communities. The people that the National Party want to demonise are also the caregivers disabled people and actually some of the migrant communities who have been without a safety net. As we talk about going back to normal are we going to normal as in people continuing to struggle in a system where many workers continue without income support when they lose their job? Or when we say return to normal are we looking forward to an aspirational future where everybody has livable incomes?Just this week we saw amazing research by Fair Futures who were calling for far more substantive benefit increases than what we're going to see on 1 April. They recognise that some families need an additional $300 a week to simply participate in their communities. And if we do not do this what we are accepting again is that people deserve to have that toxic stress that many communities have been talking about.It's almost is as if in every electoral cycle people have to explain to politicians the hardship that exists in their communities. How many more people on the benefit will have to go on the news to explain that they do not have enough; t go to the breakfast shows to talk about their lived realities? How many more lived experiences and time are we expecting from people on the benefit so that Government finally commits to livable incomes? We're calling for Labour to scrap all benefit sanctions to lift benefit levels to allow people to thrive and to provide a high-trust model at Work and Income. That is the absolute bare minimum we should be expecting from Government and it is the bare minimum that the many communities that we're supposed to serve have been calling on for years. It's time to truly commit to the transformative change that many politicians talk about. Kia ora."