Logie JanJAN LOGIE (Green): Thank you Madam Chair and as per advice I'd like to take this call substantively laying out the Green Party's perspective on the Estimates for 2020 and finishing with a question to the Minister. So the Estimates I guess reflect where we're at at the end of three years in terms of the Green Party's confidence and supply agreement with the Labour Party which was to overhaul the welfare system ensure access to entitlements remove excessive sanctions and review Working for Families so that everyone has a standard of living an income that enables them to live in dignity and participate in their communities and lifts children and their families out of poverty. That was our goal for this term as a Government.And at the end of three years we've seen the introduction of the Best Start payment; changes to the family tax credit; increase in the accommodation supplement; the winter energy payment; the first across-the-board increase in main benefits to my knowledge since the 1990s of $25; indexation; a slight increase around abatement rates; and finally finally getting rid of that truly repugnant policy that punished women and children primarily for not naming the father of the child. In this Budget we also see more of the provision around food in schools and financial mentoring and support for people to be able to consolidate loans so that they are able to manage their debt better. We heard today a plan to end the discriminatory policy that forced parents receiving income support back into work when their child turned one.The increase I really want to particularly point to as truly significant is the increase in main benefits and the fact that every party here I understand having supported this and committed not to overturning that is a sea change for us as a country. But I am still left with the question: have these changes ensured that everyone has a standard of living that enables them to participate in their communities? Has it lifted children and people out of poverty? And are people in the communities saying that it feels as if there's been an overhaul?From the Green Party perspective the answer is clearly no. We've been seeing increasing queues outside food banks. There were 596000 hardship payments made in the March quarter. The latest Budget child poverty data showed the rates of low incomes and material hardship hadn't declined in any statistically significant measure over that year and that in fact 4000 more children were living in material hardship compared to 2017-18. I think about 40 percent of Work and Income staff time is spent on helping people to access support or loans for the essentials that their basic benefits just don't cover and more and more money is going into funding community organisations to feed people who don't have incomes large enough to be able to feed themselves and their families. While yesterday I was really stoked to be at the Government announcement of increased financial mentoring support and loan consolidation initiatives out in Porirua it was really shocking to hear that in the last year just one budget advice service in Porirua had supported people with $2 million worth of debt in my community. They'd taken over $600000 of debt off those families but that pressure is unimaginable. And what they told me afterwards is that 60 percent of that debt is to Government because our policy settings around income are just too low and that they're really concerned that Government is spending more money compensating for the fact that we haven't given people enough to be able to support themselves. The still profound inadequacies of our social safety net are locking people out of being able to contribute and I'd really love to hear from the Minister her view on how far we've come and what the next steps are in terms of ensuring that everyone has the ability to participate and thrive in this country and that we take advantage of this opportunity now to reset to a country without these levels of inequality.