Moroney Sue: Address in ReplyText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMoroney Sue: Address in Reply[Sitting date: 21 October 2014. Volume:701;Page:63. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]SUE MORONEY (Labour):At the outset can I congratulate you Mr Deputy Speaker on your new appointment and the entire team in the office of Speaker. I think that we will have a very well-run Parliament with the people who have been elected to those positions. So I congratulate each one of you. I also want to congratulate John Key and his National Government on their election as the returning Government. It is a third term.Hon David Cunliffe: That’s generous.SUE MORONEY: Yes well we are generous on this side of the House because that is a bit what we are like.Hon David Cunliffe: That’s out of your system.SUE MORONEY: Yes I have got that out of my system now. So there we go. I also want to congratulate all new and returning members to this House. It is a great honour to be one of the 121 people who get the opportunity to be in this Chamber and debate all the issues the very many serious issues that we have in front of us. Can I also place on record my condolences to the Whitlam family and to the nation of Australia for the loss of Gough Whitlam. He had a pretty good innings. Not only did he make those most remarkable amazing changes to the society in Australia but he lived to the grand age of 98. On both of those counts if any of us are lucky to do either of those things I think we would be very pleased with our contribution.I do want to place on record my concern that we have reduced the proportion of women in our Parliament after the result of the 2014 election. The 51st Parliament has 31 percent women and that has come down from the height of female representation in our Parliament the 49th Parliament—not that many parliaments ago—which comprised 34 percent women. The slide going backwards is something that I think should concern every single member. But it should particularly concern the Minister for Women who was on her feet not that long ago talking about how important it is to have women in leadership positions but not actually wanting to mention what has happened in our very own Parliament. I think it is important because if we are truly to be a House of Representatives then it is incumbent on all the parties—all the parties—in this Parliament to take that seriously. I do find it distressing in terms of the incoming Government the new Government and the opportunity it had. I thought that National was actually creating for itself an opportunity when it had so many retiring from its caucus. I think that about 10 or 12 people retired from its caucus at the end of the last term. I felt certain that National would use that as an opportunity to bring more women into Parliament. But sadly it failed. National now has a lesser proportion of women in its caucus than it had before. Now it has only two women in its top 10 positions. That has gone backwards as well. As I recall National during the 50th Parliament had three women in its top 10 but now only two. So I think that tells us a bit about where the National Party is heading.Before the ink was dry on the ballot papers we learnt that the National Party had an agenda and some things to say straight after the election that we did not learn before the election—before the ink was dry on the ballot papers. Within the first couple of days of the election being held we learnt that the Prime Minister wants to go to war. He wants to take this country to war. There may be some valid reasons for that but why was that not debated through the election campaign?Hon Member: Why didn’t he campaign on it?SUE MORONEY: Well that is what I am asking. Why did the Prime Minister not campaign on it? It has come from his own benches. He should have campaigned on it. I know from my time in this House that if you mention that within a day or two of the election there is no way on earth that there were not a lot of official briefings leading up to that. But there was not a lot of preparatory work done so the advice and the briefings would have taken place but did the Prime Minister mention it on the election campaign trail? They are shaking their heads because they know that not once did he mention it.We also learnt within days of the election that the Government has a plan to sell off State houses—another asset sale stripping of this country. Did National members mention that once on the election trail? Well I certainly never heard it. I think they were at pains to make sure they did not mention it on the election campaign trail. Actually as I said just before in order for them to be making those noises now they would have had to have the preparatory work done by officials months ago. They would have already had that information in front of them. Is that not right Mr Joyce? He is pretending he is not listening. He is probably reading the papers which were already in front of them well before Parliament rose for the election about the sell-off of State houses.What else have we learnt since the election? Well we learnt actually within the next couple of days that dairy prices were bottoming out. The Fonterra forecast payout I think was announced within 2 days of the election. That was very interesting timing. We have learnt that $6 billion will be coming out of our economy as a result of that and the Government has no plan to address it. I listened very carefully to the Speech from the Throne today. Not once was there an acknowledgment that there is even going to be a problem from the low dairy payout. Not once in that speech was an idea put forward about how that $6 billion hole in our economy is going to be addressed.One thing that Government members did actually put out a lot of hype about before the Speech from the Throne was that they were going to make announcements about addressing child poverty. Again I listened very carefully to that speech today and although the words “child poverty” were uttered there was not one proposal to address child poverty in that speech. So it was all hype. It was all hype and spin. What I want to say to John Key is this: children cannot fill their hungry tummies on your spin. They cannot fill their hungry tummies on your spin. If the Government is going to be serious about addressing child poverty then I back up the call from Annette King earlier today that it will put targets in place it will make it one of its public service targets it will have a plan and it will have targets and measurements along the way to see how it is doing in addressing child poverty. Today I read the document Our Children Our Choice: Priorities for Policy. It is from the Child Poverty Action Group. If the Prime Minister had read this before his speech that was going to address child poverty I am sure he could have come out with some great ideas because in this document there are several recommendations that ought to be put in place.I just want to return briefly to the issue about the wholesale sell-off of State housing. We have seen it before. In fact the first time that I campaigned in an election campaign back in 1996 I joined people in Waharoa to form a human ring around State houses in that very very poor community to stop those houses from being picked up in the middle of the night shipped up to Auckland and sold off at a profit by the National Government. We have seen this all before. We have seen the same old thing happening. National is reverting to type. We have seen it before. We have seen the situation where assets like rest homes have been sold to well-meaning organisations like Presbyterian Support and like the Salvation Army only to find that within the matter of a few short years they have been sold on to private corporate interests because those well-meaning organisations have found that they have not got the resources to actually do it properly. I predict that that is exactly what is going to happen with housing as well. If those non-governmental organisations want to be involved in providing social housing they should be but they should be adding to the social housing stock not just simply replacing the Government’s responsibility for it. There are going to be many many issues on which I look forward to holding that Government to account for the next 3 years.