Shaw JamesJAMES SHAW (Co-Leader—Green): The year 2016 has been one of those years that many people I think are actually pretty happy to see the back end of. We have seen the sad demise of David Bowie Prince Leonard Cohen British common sense American democracy the media and the truth itself. The last flickering hopes of young New Zealanders that they will ever own their own homes have also been extinguished this year—along with National's re-election chances so it is not all that bad.During the bleaker moments this year I have found myself returning to one of those famous quotes from Dr Martin Luther King Jnr. Dr King said: The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice." It is a hopeful message on which to end a long and strange year. It is comforting to think that things are going to change and that they are going to get better. It is nice to think that the universe bends towards justice. But if you read Dr King's speech it actually gets a little less optimistic. He talks about evil shaping events. He talks about the truth being crushed to earth. The speech is 50 years old but actually it is just as true today.Yesterday there were two reports about life in New Zealand in 2016 one of which was the Child Poverty Monitor and I think that it is worth mentioning today. It revealed that between 80000 and 90000 children in New Zealand are living in severe profound and deep poverty. For the past 8 years we have heard a lot of talk about social investment and equality of opportunity and yet nothing has changed. The dial has not shifted except for a deepening housing crisis that actually makes the child poverty crisis worse.The second report that was released yesterday was from the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research which announced that this will be New Zealand's hottest year on record. Our climate is changing and the rate of that change is accelerating. An existential threat is staring us in the face and our Government has spent the last 8 years pretending that it does not exist and that everything is going to be fine. It is all just going to work out somehow. For the children who are born into poverty who die because they live in cold damp homes that are unfit for habitation or because they are one of the Kiwi children murdered every 5 weeks on average by their own families history does not get better. For them it does not bend towards justice; it bends the other way and then it stops. It is easy for us to be complacent if we tell ourselves that things are just going to get better and that history will work itself out. There is a temptation to do whatever is easiest for each of us in the short term rather than what is best for all of us in the long term.Climate change polluted rivers the housing crisis and child poverty—these are hard problems. But the purpose of Government is to fix things that are hard to fix. That is our job. We are not here to pretend that everything is fine. We are here to accept that it is not and to make things better.Next year is an election year. We are going to have a chance to talk about these problems and about what we are going to do together to solve them. Unfortunately it is also going to be a chance for some people to spread misinformation and fear and to try to get New Zealanders angry with each other and to use that anger for political gain to make things better for themselves and worse for the rest of us. My hope at the end of this year is that that is not going to happen and that the members of this House and those who hope to be elected to it will realise that the reason we are free to stand here and speak today is that previous generations of political leaders chose to do the right thing not the easy thing.If we want a brighter future we have to work for it. If we want a better world we cannot just hope for it; we have to build it ourselves. If the arc of history does bend towards justice it is because we choose to believe in justice and bend it ourselves. Make it bend because if we do not it will not. Thank you."