Menéndez March RicardoRICARDO MENÉNDEZ MARCH (Green): Thank you Madam Speaker. If this Budget has shown us anything it's that this is a Government for mega-landlords for mining CEOs and the grifters undermining Te Tiriti o Waitangi. The papers make it extremely clear that—despite whatever rhetoric the members opposite to me on the Government side may choose to say—this is a Government that has chosen to give massive handouts effectively to those who are already the wealthiest at the expense of those doing it the toughest.Hon Member: Property owners.RICARDO MENÉNDEZ MARCH: And their heckles ignore the fact that their own officials warned them when they were designing the Budget that for example changes to how benefit increases would result in about 13000 more children in poverty.I'm really glad actually that I've got the Minister for Social Development in the Chamber with me today because she told us at the time when Opposition members were questioning her about this that we could not take those figures in isolation. By those figures" I'm talking about the cuts to benefit increases that the Government chose to put in place to "save" almost $700 million over 4 years to pay for the tax cuts. They told us that we shouldn't look at that in isolation that this was going to be basically counterbalanced by a bunch of other things. But so far all that we have seen is rent prices continuing to go up at a much faster rate than inflation. We have continued to see more people getting into debt just to make ends meet.To add salt to the wound this Government is now choosing to punish young people on the benefit and at the same time they seem to have no regard about the type of work that people go into. They don't care if disabled workers are earning $2-odd an hour just to survive because this Government has this weird and completely out of touch agenda that any work is better than no work. But if somebody's getting paid $2 an hour if somebody is having to work multiple jobs just to make ends meet that is not a life that we should be aspiring to work towards. In fact it speaks of a Government that has prioritised the wealthiest mates as opposed to the many. And I think the end to the wage supplement that would have replaced the minimum wage extensions just speaks so obviously to this—that this Government chose in order to desperately find the money for tax cuts to cut a wage supplement that would have allowed for workers to receive at least the minimum wage. This is about 900 disabled workers that at the moment earn less than minimum wage and as I said before there are some that earn close to $2 an hour.The Government could have gone ahead with this wage supplement. It would have allowed those workers to earn the minimum wage. This would have been effectively a subsidy for employers. The Government under the guise of concerns chose to cut it when clearly the papers state that this is part of a savings programme to pay for tax cuts that would ultimately benefit those on the supported living payment—which is the benefit that many of those disabled workers are on—the least. So those same workers that the Government chose to not afford the dignity of earning at least the minimum wage are going to be some of the people that benefit least from those tax cuts. Talk to me about upside down priorities.I know many of us have talked about how the system is broken but the system is working exactly as it was intended to. This Government has shown us that the system is working because the system was designed and this House was designed to enable the accumulation of wealth by the very very powerful few while many go without. We're yet to see despite the changes to benefit indexations that will see more people in poverty how the Government is supposedly going to counterbalance that. Because it's definitely not going to happen by implementing more benefit sanctions on those young people because benefit sanctions have not been shown to work to support people into employment. There has been basically mountains of evidence here and overseas that those benefit sanctions do not work. Effectively the Government is sending a message to young people that the Government is quite comfortable with them living in absolute poverty just so that the Government can pay for those tax cuts that they will benefit least from.But it doesn't matter for the members on the other side because ultimately they'll get away with what they intended to which was to open their path to mega-landlords to coal mine CEOs to wreak havoc and increase inequality in Aotearoa and to make the climate crisis worse. This is neoliberalism at its clearest. The Greens will continue fighting for a completely different type of system that treats everyone with dignity and that takes the climate crisis as seriously as it should. The time for pretending that the system is fixable has come to an end. People in the streets are demanding for a complete type of system. The Greens are here to hear those demands and to fight for them."