SpeechJAN LOGIE (Green): This is a split call Mr Speaker. SPEAKER: Jan Logie. JAN LOGIE: Thank you Mr Speaker. This afternoon I'd like to speak primarily to one sentence in the Prime Minister's speech—the only sentence where she mentioned child poverty—and that sentence was: Climate change is a challenge we cannot and will not postpone"—yay! Just like child poverty housing and mental health it sits firmly on this Government's agenda just as it did before and during this pandemic. Now I've got concerns about this sentence because as a country and as a world we need more climate action than what we've seen on child poverty housing and mental health. Four years on from putting those things on the Government's agenda we still have thousands of children in poverty: 25 percent of Pasifika children about 20 percent of Māori tamariki and disabled children. Basic needs are not being met in this country. The demand for food parcels recently has just skyrocketed and this needs to be understood when we hear too that poor nutrition plays a role in two out of five deaths in this country.It's been acknowledged today from the Salvation Army that we have a housing catastrophe and an entrenched if not building mental health crisis. This situation can on some measures as we hear sometimes from the Government be still technically described as progress—and how grim is that?—and the Government points proudly to all the actions they've taken to increase benefits. Yes that is so much better than nothing—100 percent—and the stop of the sale of State homes and the start of the rebuild of our housing stock—yes yes yes. But this is not a world in balance. This is surely not what success looks like and I am genuinely frustrated that this pace and this impact that we're seeing at the moment could represent the extent of the Government's ambition for our children. So we really need to do better on climate action than we are doing on this point but we also need to do better on child poverty and the deeply interconnected issues of housing and mental health. When Dame Cindy Kiro our now Governor-General and then chair of the Welfare Expert Advisory Group (WEAG) said on the launch of the WEAG report "We can't just tinker with the so-called welfare system. It's just not going to cut the mustard." child advocates agreed and they still continue to express real frustration that they're not yet seeing anything that could be described as much more than tinkering.Now reportedly only eight out of the 42 WEAG agreements have been partially implemented. Four years on or however long it has been none of them have been fully implemented and the most recent changes to Working for Families being possibly the worst example between the gap between possibility and this Government's action is that the Government increased Working for Families by a small amount for the lowest-income earners but paid for it by taking that money away from middle-income earners. The Prime Minister didn't mention any new initiatives to step this up and I hope that she's just holding her powder dry and this is going to be a focus because we need action and we need it urgently.The last Budget injection did not finish the job. At the time Max Rashbrooke commented that meeting the child poverty targets over seven years would require "new spending on child poverty that is over a billion dollars a year on top of previous spending". Last year's Budget announcement didn't even meet that threshold. We need more and now is the time to act because this is part of the COVID response this is part of COVID response recovery and this is part of climate justice. We need the WEAG items ticked off. We need guaranteed adequate incomes and fair pay agreements. We need rent control and we need more State housing and we need it now."