Logie JanJAN LOGIE (Green): It is a quote that has been used more than once but it is one of my favourites from Nelson Mandela which is: The true character of a society is revealed in how it treats its children." It seems to me too that the true character of a Government is also revealed in how it treats children.We have had a lot of discussion in this House over the last 4 or 5 years about the well-being of our children. We have had debate after debate about trying to get school lunches in our schools so that we can feed our children and make sure that our children have enough. We have had debate after debate in this House about ensuring that families have enough money to sustain themselves to be able to make sure that their children have food that the parents can pay the rent to be able to keep the roof over their heads for them and their kids and that they have got that money there for the shoes and the school trips and for fixing the car when needed—to provide the childhood that I suspect most of us in this House took for granted.We have had debate after debate in this House about child protection about how we actually as a society create the structures to support our families to be healthy well and violence-free so that our children grow up without fear and learn to thrive in the absence of violence. We have had a lot of discussions specifically about what kinds of mechanisms are needed from the State to intervene when things go wrong and now as we are getting to that point of another election I want to reflect on how we have voted on those different topics.It seems to me that there is a very clear pattern—that the members on this side of the House and the Green Party I am proud to say have voted for feeding our kids. We have voted for increasing money for our families to be able to sustain themselves and protect their kids. We have voted consistently and spoken—I say for myself possibly too passionately—about the need for early intervention around sexual violence and domestic violence so that we get rid of those scourges on our society and bring back safety. On this side of the House we have been consistent and we have also strongly stood up for the Māori first - whānau first approach to caring for children and have resisted heavy-handed State intervention in the absence of those basic protections of enough money and support for families.So I think we need to look at what the results are at the moment from the Government's approach. Is its approach working? Well when I got up this morning and was coming in to work I was listening to the radio and one of the stories was of a child who had been left in an Oranga Tamariki office and found by the cleaners after everyone else had gone home. To me this feels emblematic. Ahead of the last election this Government was told that it needed 352 more social workers to be able to meet the need it had then in responding to crises for our tamariki and now we have 66 fewer social workers than we had then despite the number of children being taken into care being at record levels. So is it any wonder that a child is being left in an office and forgotten about while the people whose job is to protect them are so stressed out and harried that they are unable to do the job that we profess to have given them? The Green Party stands for our children being well fed our families being well supported and a society that can stand proud in our care and protection of our children.The debate having concluded the motion lapsed."