Craig LizDr LIZ CRAIG (Labour): Thank you Mr Speaker. In life there are some moments that when they happen you know you're going to remember them for the rest of your life. I think for me three of those moments have happened here in this House. I just want to take you back by way of explanation to my previous role monitoring child health and I guess also the time of year we're in the middle of winter. Down South in winter it's a beautiful time of the year. We've got those beautiful crisp mornings you've got those amazing frost patterns that you scrape off your car windscreen and we've got people flocking to Wānaka and Queenstown so they can ski in our beautiful southern landscapes.But I think for my colleagues on the children's ward winter used to be a different time of the year and what used to happen is that collision of cold draughty rental houses low incomes and not being able to turn the heater on ended up with huge winter peaks in children coming to hospitals with respiratory and infectious diseases. And so basically in my previous role one of my jobs used to be to teach medical students about the links between child poverty and the thousands of sick kids we were seeing every year coming into hospital for poverty related diseases. What I used to talk to them about was the fact that if you took them back to the mother of all Budgets" back in 1991 when we saw benefits slashed across the board and a whole lot of other policy changes within two years what we saw is we saw child poverty rates spiking and then they never really came back down.So then as the global financial crisis hit a number of us working in child health started to get really concerned because what we were worried about was if we see these big rises in unemployment—and we knew our benefit rates were inadequate—we'd see a big spillover in child poverty. So we developed up this thing called the Child Poverty Monitor which is still with us today. We went to a Paediatric Society conference back in 2019 and we lit a candle and we said "We commit to monitoring the wellbeing of New Zealand's children until the economic position improves." And so every year we updated the monitor and every year it was exactly the same. So we'd say "Look there's thousands of sick kids coming into hospital for poverty related conditions and our child poverty rates persist." And every year I used to ask for the same three things. I used to ask for measures to improve family incomes and reduced child poverty I used to ask for rental standards for houses and I used to ask for measures to improve affordability of GP access particularly after hours. So for me having spent nearly a decade asking for the same three things basically one of the reasons I entered Parliament was to escape my own personal groundhog day where every year I stood up and said the same.And so the first moment for me that I will remember and I still remember was sitting in this debating chamber just before Christmas in 2017 and the Families Package passed into law. It was incredible after almost nine years of advocating for the same thing within two months of coming in we had the Best Start payment of $60 a week for newborn babies. We basically had something that we weren't actually as advocates for child poverty asking for which was the winter energy payment and we also had increases to Working for Families.And then the second moment was also just before that Christmas when the Healthy Homes Guarantee Act passed into law. And again within a couple months of coming in that paved the way for those rental standards we'd been asking for for so long. And I think between that moment and the next one we put a range of other things in. So basically we've increased the minimum wage progressively so now there's a lot narrower gap between the minimum wage and the living wage; we've indexed benefits to the average wage instead of the Consumers Price Index that will make a huge difference over time; we've removed some of those punitive benefit sanctions; we've got low-cost doctors' visits for community services card holders; and we also increased the benefits by $25 a week as part of the COVID-19 response.But for me from a historical perspective it was actually sitting in the House—just back over there—a couple of months ago with the Budget debate when Grant Robertson announced that we would be increasing benefits by up to $55 a week with that first $20 coming in on 1 July this year. I think after three decades of those—you know the "mother of all Budgets" impacting our children and young people in this country seeing that huge transformational shift saying "We have now moved to address what had underpinned so much of everything I was seeing in terms of child poverty in those hospital admissions."—So for me we've got a long way still to go but I think the changes that we've made over the past four years have been incredible. And I'm looking forward to looking ahead into the next few years when we see many many fewer children coming into hospital with poverty-related diseases. Thank you Mr Speaker."