SpeechGARETH HUGHES (Green): Kia ora Mr Speaker. Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou kia ora. I think the most important question members should ask themselves in the Budget Debate is: how does it help regular real people in New Zealand? Now it was Sir Geoffrey Palmer who once said about being a member of Parliament that it's the best education you can have into your country. Now I don't think he meant about sitting in this Chamber. I think what he meant was actually getting out and talking to people in their factories their workplaces and their offices and for me the greatest privilege of my decade here is literally being invited into people's homes and getting to have those conversations. For years when I've gone into people's homes I've been talking about the Green Party's work to insulate them to set better rental standards and to have better-quality housing and it would shock you what I've seen in Kiwi's houses. I've seen black mould on the roof as if it was painted on with black paint. I've seen houses with holes in the walls. I've seen houses with plants and mushrooms growing out of the walls. I've seen in Dunedin—where I got to judge the worst rental flat competition as part of the city council's campaign to clean up their rental standards—super unsafe staircases almost falling over. I've seen window panes that you can literally peel the wood like it was a Cadbury Flake because it was so damp and rotten. So that's why when I'm thinking about real people I'm so proud of this Budget because we're making a huge difference for real families' lives. Now we've seen the more than $1 billion for more than 11000 jobs in nature but it's the 9000 extra homes which are going to be insulated as a result of this Budget that I'm incredibly proud of because it's those homes that are going to make a difference. Now the Government's come in and made sure that it can fund 90 percent of the cost of insulation. In some regions that's up to the total cost that's covered. There's new grants of $2500 for clean-heating devices including efficient woodburners and heat pumps. That's thousands and thousands and thousands of Kiwi families that are going to be warmer drier and healthier as a result and then their power bill is going to be less too because we've doubled the winter energy payment. But we know we have to go further and faster because 9000 is great but there are still 600000 substandard homes in New Zealand that are making our kids sick and even worse that are making them miss school and even worse that are seeing them in hospital. Tragically we are seeing Kiwis die at a rate greater than the road toll because of their houses. Our houses are more dangerous than the road toll. So that's why we need to set a goal to insulate every single house in New Zealand to make sure it's of a warm dry healthy standard. We need to bulk up the building code because while London and Christchurch have similar heating demands in the UK it's two times the wall insulation standards and five times the underfloor standards that we have in New Zealand. We need smart sustainable buildings and offices. So while we've admirably got through one health crisis we also need to make sure we flatten the emissions curve to tackle the much much deadlier looming climate crisis. As Christiana Figueres from the UN pointed out this week the investments we make as part of this Budget in the COVID response fund are going to lock in the emissions for the decades to come. All those decisions and those investments could give us the tools to reduce our emissions and to build a prosperous low-carbon economy to help Kiwi families. So while we're warming up homes with insulation on the roof let's also make sure we're putting a solar panel on it as well. Let's make sure we're putting solar panels and batteries in every single State house and running it as a clean virtual network. Let's stop burning fossil fuels for electricity and for milk dehydration. Let's save people money by replacing their old inefficient light bulbs with new free efficient LED light bulbs. Let's invest in energy-efficient advisers and good smart technology. Let's strengthen our grid so we can get to 100 percent renewable electricity. Let's support community groups who want to do it themselves and produce their own clean cheap wind and solar power. To reach our transport and electricity goals and to get to our Paris carbon goals we need to electrify transport as an industry. This is the great challenge facing us as a country. If we're going to meet those goals we may have to double our electricity production in the next decade. Our great challenge is we have to do what's taken us 100 years to get to this point in only 10 years and do it cleaner and cheaper than ever before. This is our mission. This is our generation's great movement our great moment. With the economic stimulus it's how we can grow those clean sustainable jobs and grow a richer more prosperous economy. Meanwhile on the other side of the benches we see a party which is looking to the past. It wants to bring back oil and gas exploration. It wants to see more mining. It wants to see more cars cows and coal. That's a recipe for disaster that's a recipe for poverty and that's a recipe for death. The Green Party is pushing forward the ideas to take us further and faster to build on the great work that we've delivered in Government and to make sure that we're building that low-carbon prosperous economy for the future.