Swarbrick ChlöeCHLÖE SWARBRICK (Green): E Te Māngai tēnā koe. Tēnā koutou e Te Whare. I want to talk about the elephant in the room. Often it's not really an elephant. It can feel like a black dog that follows one around sucking the oxygen out of the air slowing down time or fast-forwarding the clock at such a pace that everything feels like it is going at lightning speed around your ears blurring shapes and out of grasp. It can bring paralysis self-doubt and cold sweats. You can feel it in your head but you cannot easily lift the lid and show it to other people let alone find the words.In this House we don't often talk about the breadth and depth and human face of mental health. We talk about statistics and we talk about data. Mental ill health however disproportionately affects our poorest our most vulnerable and our young people. But it directly or indirectly touches all of our lives—everybody in this country everybody in this room. We don't really talk about it though. We don't talk about the messy complexity and nuance. It makes us uncomfortable. We don't tackle it head on because we don't have all of the answers. No one does. We don't like to talk about it because it reminds us that the structures organising our society and indeed our economy are hurting our people and radical change is required to fix things. And that's scary too. This week we've received media reports of a devastating loss of six lives in Porirua. My love and deepest sympathies go out to the whānau friends community the people of Porirua and across Aotearoa New Zealand whose hearts are breaking. Today we have also heard that there has been a 25 percent increase in tertiary students accessing university counselling services in the past two years. One in four adults in New Zealand will be diagnosed with a mental health issue in their lives but many more will struggle with it and never receive a formal diagnosis. These are the people and communities whose suffering is unconscionable—people and communities who need our support.These people are not broken. It is our systems and the society of those systems that govern us that are. It's not empty political rhetoric. That's what the mounting literature and studies tell us—that the causes of mental illness are from the same thing. The majority of mental health issues are triggered by environmental causes and even those with pre-existing conditions with chemical imbalances have those conditions exacerbated by environmental factors and surprisingly those environmental factors are not as complicated as we sometimes may like to think. We know who gets sick: people who are isolated; those who are under financial pressure in insecure employment and abusive relationships; those who are living in transient or substandard housing; and people without a home; people who feel displaced who grapple for identity or who cannot see a safe and secure future in their grasp. These are the people who are most likely to experience mental illness.I said earlier that we don't often talk about mental illness in this House but the things that we do talk about—housing the economy drugs healthcare crime welfare education the corrections system—all are conversations about mental health because these are the fundamental drivers of mental ill health and the epidemic in our community. The conditions for the epidemics and the anxiety and depression have been manufactured here inside this political system because political decisions have made that environment but we don't easily acknowledge that. Usually we talk about individual resilience. Our education system removes difficult children from their classrooms. Our health system is primed to medicalise. This makes us more comfortable than confronting decades of decline in State services and community and the rise of competition and isolation and inequality.Mental illness is messy and complex. There are no simple solutions. Words cannot do justice for those who've lost a loved one. Words alone will never do justice. Action is necessary and it is urgent. In November this year this House will receive recommendations from a wide-ranging mental health and addiction inquiry. That will present us with a road map. I am calling out to colleagues across this House to work together to implement those findings to improve New Zealanders' well-being. It's our job.