Davidson MaramaMARAMA DAVIDSON (Co-Leader—Green): Tēnā koutou. I think we in this House understand that we are pleased to be standing in unison to support some real measures on finally actually understanding what is going on with children and whānau living with poverty and how we are going to have a set of indicators. This is a historical day on these third readings and I think we're in unison when we stand and rise to say that we are pleased—that we are honoured—to speak on this.I think too there will be no disagreement when I say that I am not honoured to have to stand on this. I am not honoured that we have reached this situation of poverty here in Aotearoa where our tamariki and whānau have called us to account and now we are sort of doing a bit of backlog work here. Things should never have gotten this bad. There is absolutely no excuse or reason why things have gotten this bad—why we have tamariki who are being sent to hospital from poor inadequate and unhealthy housing; why incomes and household incomes are so low that tamariki do not have all they need to live healthy happy dignified lives.I think we all agree that this is not what we should be looking at today. The country as it is today—we've just had the Child Poverty Monitor report come through—is not what we would want. So yes this is an incredible step. It's a start that often frustrated former co-leader Metiria Turei in her particular work to bring a similar bill into the last Parliament while we were in Opposition. I did absolutely in these third readings want to acknowledge her and the longstanding call from the Green Party to at least commit to child poverty reduction targets and it was with frustration that many many times she stood in this House to ask the question again and again and again of at least committing to targets.So in that vein I am incredibly proud of my colleague the right honourable Prime Minister and Minister for Child Poverty Reduction for taking this leadership step and bringing us to this point today having a clear commitment a clear reduction target across a range of indicators. And I firstly wanted to offer my sincere congratulations alongside the Hon Tracey Martin who will have a particular leadership role under her ministerial portfolios in the area of child poverty reduction. I wanted to pick up on my colleagues—their leadership in this issue—because I have sat with them in the halls of Parliament and am truly satisfied and pleased with the absolute integrity and genuine commitment that they have as professionals as politicians and as human beings to this call to transform our nation to one that is fair.I think that if we go to clause 45 of the Children's Amendment Bill inserting new section 6AC I wanted to acknowledge that it stipulates that children should be viewed in the context of their families whānau hapu and iwi other culturally recognised family groups and communities." And this is particularly relevant for me as we heard this consistently through submissions firstly and always have particularly from Māori that while this is called the Child Poverty Reduction Bill we cannot separate children from their context and if we are being truly honest we are talking about children and their whānau—whatever that may look like—and community and their community's ability their family's ability to raise and nourish their children in a way that will sustain dignity well-being and happiness. And so I'm pleased to see that come through in this legislation—new section 6AC(c). So I wanted to pick that out.I wanted to pick up on Minister Martin's work to ensure that we had the lived experiences and insights of children included in the work to pull together the draft of this bill and that is important. I'm pleased that we are constantly hearing through this Government's programme of reporting reviews and inquiries a theme of: "We will do harm if we do not centre the voices of those with the lived experiences of the very problems we are trying to solve." And so I wanted to acknowledge that that expertise—it is expertise that the children offer us—needs to be continuously called on and centred throughout the rest of our ongoing work. Now we've set the targets; now is the rest of the ecosystem structural work on what we do about those.So going forward from this bill is then about the actions that we hopefully put through as a whole of House parliamentary team for the well-being of tamariki and that is going to have to include systemic and transformational change across all of the other systems and public core agencies like education health housing justice and so on and so forth. We cannot—and I think there will be agreement—look at child poverty in a narrow vacuum; it is all relative and it is all connected. And for that—I'm trying my hardest to be pleasant but I think a little bit of politics is an order—I do pick up on the term "welfare dependency". This is about people having adequate incomes. This is about the fact that we have kept incomes low that house prices and rents are incredibly high and that this is about having a social security system that ensures people live with dignity. That wealth is currently held in the arms of a few at the exploitation and on the backs of the majority and so I want to challenge that firm dependency on welfare. Our country's wealth has been dependent on low-income households and communities.I want to acknowledge that poverty does not impact on everyone in the same way and again this is why a strong truly compassionate social security system is essential. I want to acknowledge that not having enough income will not be the same if you are a child with a disability. If you are already a low-income household it will further accumulate that harm. If you are Māori Pacific refugee or in poverty we know—it's very clear—that it impacts on those different groups differently and for that reason our measurements are going to have to take that into account.Lastly I wanted to pick up on the fact that it's clear too that Māori children are disproportionately represented in struggle and hardship and in households that do not have enough. Many of the submissions picked this up as a breach of Te Tiriti—and the Greens absolutely support this—alongside the breaches of for example our human rights instruments for people with a disability. We will continue to breach a range of human rights agreements that we have actually signed up to a long time ago if we do not at least acknowledge the different effects that poverty has on different groups of people.With that I'm incredibly pleased to see these bills coming to their third readings today. I look forward in the new year to all of us working together to pick up the work to actually reduce poverty for children and their whānau. Kia ora Madam Assistant Speaker."