White HelenHELEN WHITE (Labour): It's a pleasure to take a call in support of what is a bill about the appropriation of money. Now money is a very real thing and there is only a limited amount of it and there are always hard choices to be made. What I have around me is a team of people that I am incredibly proud of because I know that they come from every walk of life in this country and they are truly grounded—they are grounded people. I'd just like to mention my Pacific Island colleagues because I am particularly impressed with the crowd today and its regard—it's here to respect one of our wonderful Ministers and he comes from the Pacific Island community. Our caucus is rejuvenating the Pacific Island community in its rank. It has some wonderful Ministers and they also come from a variety of backgrounds.If I want to talk about medicine and the state of our health service I can go to Dr Anae and we can have a talk about that. He is working and has seen a lot of things happen. He has seen the terrible reality of a postcode lottery. I worked in employment law for 25 years and I remember going in to negotiate on behalf of a group of workers in Middlemore Hospital. I was told at that point that Middlemore Hospital was not given the same funding for people who were coming in to that hospital. They were given less money in Middlemore than they were given in other hospitals in Auckland. Now that's absolutely ridiculous. What we are doing now is we're replacing a system where it had been that the poorest people in our country were being given less money than everyone else when they had the highest needs because there is a direct relationship between poverty and health outcomes.There are also dots being joined and you can see it in this Budget because the dots that are being joined are the ones between health and housing and poverty. Now the reality is we had far too much chronic illness in this country and it was a result of the fact that our houses were not warm and dry; our rentals were not secure. People were living in places they never should have been with children; that was going on. And you know what? They were then going off to a hospital which had mould in its walls—mould in its walls. We were not paying our nurses enough. That was what we inherited and we inherited it at a precarious time. We inherited it when we had a situation where we were going to face a pandemic. We were just building up those services when that pandemic struck.While I have heard a lot of whinging from the Opposition I remind them that they were not clear about closing the borders because again they weren't grounded. They weren't from the class of people who would be most affected and they did not want to close those borders then they did want to close those borders then they did not want to close those borders then they did want to close those borders. They were driven by a lack of groundedness. This Government knew exactly what its priorities were: the priorities were people—they were people's health. As a result I am proud of what was accomplished but there is work to be done.There is a lot of work to be done to make sure that our health service is robust that it serves our people. There is work to be done in terms of making sure that our houses are still warm and dry and there are enough of them to put people in. There is work to be done by a Government that's not afraid to lead in this area; that's not afraid to make hard choices. I respect my colleagues in the Green Party but sometimes I struggle with the fact they continually have the advantage of being able to promise things that are not priced. The hard choices are being made in the ranks of the Labour Party. We have to make choices and those priorities have to actually respect our people and the value of our people. They have to get wages up in this country; they have to keep innovation going.So in this Budget you will see a multitude of wonderful things. There are a multitude of different things—and you've heard my colleagues list some of those things—and there's an abundance of them. That's because there are so many things that need to be done in this country. It is absolutely critical—critical—that we get a chance to do that.Now I want to contrast that with what I have been hearing because I want to bust one myth before I sit down and this is this ridiculous situation over tax cuts. Because let's just talk about those tax cuts as an alternative for a minute. They are being dangled in front of New Zealanders but they are not being explained. Let's remember that this would be an alliance—if there was a change in Government—between the ACT Party and the National Party. Now let's just take a quick look at the alternative that they are promising us. They are promising us an alternative whereby even by their stats people on $180000 get over $1000 worth of extra benefit in their tax break that year. Do you know how much somebody on a minimum wage gets? They get something like I think $2 a week—$2 a week. That's what we're dealing with. We don't value people if we're giving the top bracket that doesn't need it that kind of money and we're giving people on minimum wage so little.What would ACT do? ACT would have frozen the minimum wage for three years. I've been sitting here for three years and every time that the Labour Party has suggested that we will increase the minimum wage we have been told Not now—not now." Well I heard that all my life—I saw that all my life. As an employment lawyer I saw people hold those wages back. I saw what it did to people's families. I had a case at one point which was actually in Terisa Ngobi's area it was in Levin. It was in a meat works where people were actually paying the workers less and less because they were paying them piece rates. So what they would do is they'd just add another job to the piece rate and they ended up being on less than the minimum wage. That was the kind of sleepy approach we had because we did not prioritise people; we did not actually prioritise getting wages up in this country and paying people in a dignified way.So I'm going to finish by just talking for a second about these fair pay agreements because it's a big word and people aren't used to it and they don't know. Those fair pay agreements are about basic minimums and never going below them. They're about making sure that if one employer is paying an amount of money that is fair they're not undercut by somebody doing what I just described happened in Levin. That isn't going to happen because there'll be a floor—there'll just be a minimum. Doesn't mean you can't pay more; doesn't mean you can't do different terms and conditions but you can't pay less than your friend down the road who's trying to do the decent thing and pay New Zealanders a decent wage. That is an incredibly important thing.Now I have got a minute and a half and I'd like to just for a minute turn to my friend—this is Emily Henderson and she is about to give her valedictory. I'd just like to say first of all it's been an utter pleasure working with you. I have been so lucky to have Emily's counsel at times but I also wanted to talk about her work because I started this speech talking about how grounded this team is. Emily made a valuable contribution to this team. She was a family lawyer before she came here. Now my ex-husband was a family lawyer and I know it's a really tough gig. It's actually quite tough living with a family lawyer Emily. It's hard because the work's traumatic because people doing family law see some of the most strained families in our country. I know that she's contributed a massive amount to the work that we're doing in this area. We are working on issues like family violence. We are working on victim support. We are working on things like litigation abuse. And we're able to do that because we have people in our team like Emily who've been feeding us real grounded information.So if this country wants to look at this Budget they will find a mine of information and care that has taken place where a limited amount of money can go. And yes we haven't got everything we want in this Budget. We've got a lot more work to come and we want to be able to get on and do it and we want to make the priorities New Zealanders—make sure that they get food on their tables and have warm healthy environments and are free from violence. That's the work only a Labour Government can do. Kia ora koutou."