Shaw JamesHon JAMES SHAW (Minister for Climate Change): E Te Māngai o Te Whare tēnā koe. Ki a koutou ōku hoa Pāremata huri noa i Te Whare ngā mihi o Te Tau Hou ki a koutou katoa.[Greetings Mr Speaker. To my parliamentary colleagues throughout the House greetings of the New Year to you all.]Mr Peters says that it's not easy being him but can I just say it's not easy being me either because I have to follow him. One of my regrets—and there weren't many—about the 2017 election campaign is ending up with one fewer MP than him and therefore I have to follow him every single time. It's not an easy act to follow. In fact I could sell tickets to this. I could fund the next election campaign off the back of it.For many many years the Green Party and our predecessor the Values Party—and Mr Peters will remember this—have advocated for an approach to economics that delivers human prosperity within ecological limits. A growing gross domestic product does not by itself deliver a fair society or a healthy environment. Our economy here in New Zealand has grown even while homelessness increased dramatically and our waterways became too polluted to swim in; but GDP growth has been treated as if it was the ultimate goal for decades. Members of this House who have been around for a while will remember my predecessor Dr Russel Norman talking about a smart green economy that works for everyone. There's a saying: First they ignore you then they laugh at you then they fight you and then you win." We are winning. New Zealand is winning. New Zealanders are winning because fundamentally the way the Wellbeing Budget has been put together is at its heart what the Greens have been talking about all this time.What gets measured gets managed—what gets measured gets managed. This Wellbeing Budget starts to change how we think about our economy. Every single bid considered for this Budget had to pass the usual business case but it also had to stack up against a set of environmental and social and economic indicators as outlined in the Green Party's confidence and supply agreement. The Green approach to sustainable economics is finally starting to take shape through this Wellbeing Budget. I want to acknowledge and thank the Minister of Finance Grant Robertson for his leadership in bringing this thinking to this and to future Budgets. It is a sign of how things are changing and how they have changed over the years that this thinking is becoming mainstream. The Crown has a duty of care to all New Zealanders and a responsibility to tangata whenua under Te Tiriti o Waitangi to deliver on policies that deliver wellbeing and enable us all to thrive. Now I have to say we are still a long way off from a genuinely holistic approach that places the wellbeing of our environment of our communities and our culture at the heart of decision making. But this Budget the Wellbeing Budget 2019 is a critical first step on the journey and we are delighted to be part of the Government that is delivering it.Earlier this month the United Nations published a report telling us that there are a million species at risk of extinction around the world as a result of human activity. Humans are the source of the single greatest mass extinction event since an asteroid wiped out three quarters of all life on Earth 66 million years ago. It's extraordinary to be living in this time. Our growing horror at this ecocide has actually sparked its own movement—the extinction rebellion. Here in New Zealand even here in New Zealand there are 4000 species threatened or at risk of extinction. Yet the Department of Conservation (DOC) has to look after a third of the country's landmass and all our marine protected areas off our shores with one percent of the Government's Budget. So last year we increased Vote Conservation by $180 million over four years. That was the single biggest increase in DOC funding in 16 years. This year we estimate we will be able to double that commitment with an additional $180 million dollars in conservation funding through the international visitor conservation and tourism levy—$180 million over four years in last year's Budget and another $180 million over four years in this year's Budget. The Green Party campaigned in Opposition for a tourism levy to help protect the natural heritage that people come here all this way to see and I have immense pride that now that we are in Government we are delivering it. You add in a new marine protection area the size of Auckland on the south coast of the South Island add in to that the biggest addition to a national park in New Zealand's history the 64000 hectare Mōkihinui addition to the Kahurangi National Park and we're starting to make some progress.Now there's also been an extraordinary showing of commitment to climate action by the school strike for climate. Tens of thousands of our own teenagers have taken to the streets to protest years of dithering over climate change by the very adults who should have exercised a duty of care over those teenagers' futures. It is time for the dithering to stop and the doing to start. By the end of this year New Zealand will have in primary legislation for the first time a commitment to living within 1.5 degrees of global warming.In today's Budget—Budget 2019 provides $107 million to transition our economy—Hon Gerry Brownlee: Property boom in Invercargill coming.Hon JAMES SHAW: —towards a low-carbon future. We will have independent expert institutions to help guide Gerry Brownlee on the way there. There's $42.7 million for the climate change commission to provide the advice the guidance and monitoring that New Zealand needs to reduce our emissions.Since I got into this job 18 months ago I have been to farms all over this country. Everywhere I have been farmers have told me that they dearly want to help to clean up our rivers and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions but they don't feel that they have the information that they need and the tools that they can use to get the job done. Now our confidence and supply agreement says that we will provide assistance to the agricultural sector to reduce biological emissions improve water quality and shift to more diverse and sustainable land use including more forestry—lots more forestry. Now over half of the $229 million sustainable land use package will fund exactly the kind of support that farmers and councils have been asking for. It includes on-the-ground advice and tools to support farmers making the change to more environmentally sustainable and higher value production. Once again the Wellbeing Budget delivers. There's over a third of a billion dollars in fact on climate change clean water sustainable agriculture—the Wellbeing Budget delivers.Now on the campaign trail in 2017 I was struck by the breadth and the depth of feeling right across the country about mental health. The phrase "mental health crisis" kept coming up over and over in a way that it hadn't in any of the campaigns that I'd been involved in before. The Prime Minister has devoted almost the entirety of her Budget speech in this Budget to this today. It is the first priority of this year's Budget. Now our confidence and supply agreement commits us to increase funding for addiction services to treat drug use as a health issue to ensure that everyone has access to timely and high quality mental health services for New Zealanders particularly 18 to 25-year-olds. I want to thank the Hon Dr David Clark for working with us to get those services such as the mental health pilot Piki off the ground. Thank you David. The Greens are proud to be part of a Government that has committed fully $1.9 billion—$1.9 billion—of operating and capital expenditure over the next four years to turn the crisis. The road will be long; it will be. It'll be hard but as of today it gets better.It also gets better for families who are affected by the plague of domestic and sexual violence that is so prevalent in our society that it's frequently referred to as "New Zealand's shame"—a plague that is closely associated with the mental health crisis. Now on top of the $1.9 billion going into mental health services is a significant programme for ending the cycle of violence in our communities. The package to break the cycle of domestic and sexual violence highlights how the Wellbeing Budget pioneers the way that Government Ministers and agencies are supposed to collaborate together to deliver social environmental outcomes. The domestic and sexual violence package is a $320 million investment in a joint venture of no fewer than eight different agencies and more than that many Ministers led by my colleague Jan Logie. It's a ground-breaking approach to joined-up Government where the focus is on the outcome—on the outcome—not on the individual Minister or budget appropriation line. We're very proud that this approach was the prototype for the rest of the Wellbeing Budget.Not long before we received the mental health report we also received the report of the welfare expert advisory group. Now the Greens negotiated the review of the welfare system in our confidence and supply agreement. We knew that the social safety net had frayed and broken over the years and the advisory group's report confirmed that. It made for heartbreaking reading. A couple of weeks ago Phil O'Reilly who was the former head of Business New Zealand said in an interview: "If you look at the evidence on benefit payments we are simply not paying people enough to survive". By his own admission if there was ever an award to the person least likely to be a secret pinko socialist it would be Phil O'Reilly. But he's right—he's absolutely right. We have become a nation with a group of people so disadvantaged and so excluded that not only do they have no hope of getting ahead they also had no hope of having a roof over their heads.The Greens are really pleased that this Budget includes over half a billion dollars for reintroducing the indexation of main benefits to the average wage for removing deductions and for changing abatement thresholds. These are three of the most important changes that we campaigned for in election 2017 and that $535 million dollar commitment builds on the $5.5 billion Families Package that this Government introduced in the post-election mini-Budget. But we know we have a long long way to go. The advisory group's report tells us that this can only be the start of a sustained campaign over the coming years and in future Budgets to ending poverty in this country. I want to thank the leadership of Carmel Sepuloni in working with us on that.The Green Party's confidence and supply agreement with the Labour Party is fundamentally different from most arrangements in most previous Governments. Previous agreements have ring-fenced a handful of priorities that are important to the support party and have given that support Party ministerial responsibilities and Budget support to deliver them.Chris Bishop: That's not different—that's the same as before.Hon JAMES SHAW: In return that support party—I wouldn't speak up too much Chris. Remember where all your support parties ended up—signed up to the major party's policy programme as the basis of Government. Our confidence and supply agreement goes much further. It outlines 20 priorities—and you have to remember that only a third of those 20 priorities are actually delivered by Green Party Ministers; the rest of them are delivered by Labour and New Zealand First Ministers. Our confidence and supply agreement is a programme of policy for the Government—Hon Phil Twyford: We're doing your work.Hon JAMES SHAW: —not just for the Green Party. Thank you Phil. In fact several priorities appear not just in our confidence and supply agreement but also in the coalition agreement of New Zealand First and in the Labour Party's manifesto.Hon Andrew Little: We're all of one mind.Hon JAMES SHAW: We are all of one mind. That includes the massive investment going into rail being led by the Hon Shane Jones a $1 billion investment in freight and commuter services all over this country. So I want to thank and acknowledge our partners in Labour and New Zealand First for working with us to deliver yes the Greens' priorities and those shared priorities of our Government through this Wellbeing Budget. Our people and our planet will be better off as a result.Now last year I think of our 20 policy priorities—seven were funded through that Budget. This year 16 of our 20 priorities are funded through Budget 2019. The Budget initiatives across the Government that deliver on our confidence and supply agreement total up to $2.7 billion of operating expenditure and $2.2 billion of capital expenditure and that is extraordinary. So if anybody had any doubts about whether the Greens would be able to make more of a difference in Government than in Opposition well I think this removes any doubt.Fundamentally the Wellbeing Budget is based on an approach to economics that delivers human prosperity within ecological limits. It has been a long time coming. There's a long way to go but this is an incredibly important first step. I've spoken today about this Budget's investments in conservation and clean water climate change sustainable agriculture mental health tackling family and sexual violence and poverty. But this Wellbeing Budget goes much further than that.Members of this House who have been around a little bit longer—perhaps like yourself Mr Speaker—may remember Jeanette Fitzsimons calling for our success to be counted not by the size of our GDP and our incomes but by the warmth of our relationships with each other and with nature by the health of our children and our elders and our rivers and our land. We want more people to share the secret of real happiness and satisfaction in life which comes not from having more but from being more and from being part of a society that values all its members that values the land the water and the other species with which we share them. Against those measures this Wellbeing Budget delivers. Nō reira tēnā koutou tēnā koutou tēnā tātou katoa."