Menéndez March RicardoRICARDO MENÉNDEZ MARCH (Green): Thank you Mr Speaker. I rise reflecting and thankful about the collective effort so many people in the community have undergone to protect us from the pandemic. I'm also thankful for my parliamentary colleagues from Labour Te Paati Māori and the Greens who resisted the consistent right-wing let it rip" approach to managing the pandemic which would have seen a devastating loss of life. But it is not about saying there were no faults in the response to the pandemic. The pandemic should have been an opportunity to address those inequities that have existed for generations which have made it challenging for people to respond and to stay safe. Ending poverty should have been part of our public health response; making sure that those responses we saw in the welfare system that supported people temporarily—for example doubling the winter energy payment—should have been permanent measures that lifted people out of poverty. So I also see the recent approach as a missed opportunity to ensure that our communities are not just surviving but rather thriving. The Greens have always been clear since the pandemic started that we should seize the moment and ensure that everyone has a safe home to live in has enough income to stock up when they need to in order to self-isolate and that we end the punitive approaches in our welfare system that mean people still feel scared to reach out for support when they need to.I'm a little bit tired of hearing the discourse back and forth on the lowest unemployment figures as though that tells us the whole picture of the inequalities that we face in Aotearoa. The truth is that the figure we should be looking at how many people are living in poverty. Does everyone feel like they have enough to thrive like they can reach out to Work and Income? Why haven't we fully individualised our income support system so that when people need to shift jobs they're well supported? We know the Government realised that benefit levels were not good enough and that benefits should have been individualised as we responded to the pandemic. They put in those temporary measures that saw people actually having enough. Why not make them permanent?I also want to reflect on another group that has been impacted by the inequities in our response. I think of our migrant communities who have often been left out without adequate income support. I note the Prime Minister thanked our healthcare workers for their mahi in helping us keep people safe and I echo that gratitude but the truth is that many of those healthcare workers are migrant workers who continue to have no pathway to residency. And in fact many migrant workers who were at the front lines of our pandemic—whether they're supermarket workers or managed isolation and quarantine workers—who just simply happened to be on the wrong visa are missing out on a one-off residency opportunity that would have granted them the security and certainty that they deserve. I'm thinking as well to the many split migrant families who continue to be affected by an inequitable response to our border reopening plan. We had an opportunity to ensure that we do not entrench global inequities that may mean we start seeing tourists from the UK arriving before people from places like India are able to be reunited.It is never too late to look at the streets to look at the communities we're supposed to serve and to put in place solutions that will ensure that everyone is supported. In our migrant communities we continue seeing discrimination towards disabled people. Even though I'm heartened by the mahi that has been done in Parliament through the petition of Juliana Carvalho to put in really solid recommendations to review the current discrimination that disabled migrants face—one of the groups that are most at risk from the pandemic—policies haven't changed. We haven't seen changes to the way partnership visas operate to make them culturally appropriate despite this being a Labour Party campaign manifesto promise.So I think about the Prime Minister's words and I encourage her to be a lot bolder to look at those transformative solutions not incremental change so that we can reach an Aotearoa where everyone thrives not just survives. Kia ora."