Luxton JoJO LUXTON (Labour—Rangitata): Thank you Mr Speaker. It's a pleasure to stand and take a call in this general debate. I just wanted to note that I'm pretty sure that the Minister responsible for the GCSB is Minister Little not Minister Clark.Melissa Lee: No I said digital economy and communications".JO LUXTON: Oh fair enough—fair enough. Well thank you for that. Tomorrow is Budget day—Budget 2021. Now it would be remiss of me as a former early childhood teacher and an early childhood centre owner not to mention the pre-Budget announcement that Minister Hipkins made very recently with a $170 million package for the early childhood education (ECE) sector increase in their funding in order for centres to be able to pay their ECE teachers who are not kindergarten teachers on a collective agreement in order to pay them to be able to reach pay parity. We know that many of our early childhood teachers are paid around $16000 less. So this is going to mean so much to so many in our early childhood sector and it is something I am so proud to be able to stand here and talk about.Mr Seymour mentioned that the COVID response here in New Zealand has been nothing special. Well I wonder if he's been watching television and seeing what's happening overseas to see just how successful to date our response has been. We have so many more freedoms than people overseas have. When I was recently sitting in ICU with my mum on life support and I was holding her hand I was thinking this has been pretty damned special—pretty damned special that we as a country can do this when so many people overseas are not able to be with the ones that they love when they desperately desperately want to. So I think that our response has been very very special.But on to the Budget. This Budget is all about—well we know that we are dealing with the pandemic still. As I said you only have to see overseas that it is rife but we do need to focus on securing our economy and continuing to invest in the wellbeing of New Zealanders. We are doing many many things in order for that to happen. And one of the things that I did want to make mention of was what Minister Parker mentioned around the success in our trades apprenticeships. Well I just wanted to mention the fact that Venture Timaru in my electorate was successful in securing $4 million worth of funding for the regional apprenticeship scheme. Now they anticipated that over a hundred apprenticeships would be available over a 12-month period. Well that has been so successful that all those spaces for apprenticeships—100—have been filled within five months. That is a real success story in my mind.Now we know that there are many regions who have suffered more so than others throughout COVID and that could be dependent on where they are and what their local economies are made up of. My electorate I have to say has been one of the very lucky electorates whereby we are largely a primary producing electorate and during the height of our lockdown etc. over 70 percent of our workforce were able to continue working. So we have fared better than many of the other areas around the country. So I think it's really important to acknowledge our rural sector and the work that they were able to continue to do to ensure our economy kept going in the way that it did. But that's also not to take away from the fact that there were many many other people working in essential roles throughout our lockdown. It would be remiss of me not to acknowledge them as well.So I am looking forward to tomorrow: Budget 2021."