Dalziel Lianne: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Dalziel Lianne: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
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Hon LIANNE DALZIEL (Labour—Christchurch East) 
: 
 I was first elected to represent the electorate I now represent in 1999 the year that Labour became the Government. In the 9 years we were in Government I saw a change of almost unimaginable proportions in a part of my electorate that had suffered most through two decades of economic restructuring and one decade of ripping apart the social fabric that held communities together. When the renewal of Aranui began I hoped for good results but I did not for one minute really expect quite the extent of the gains that were made over that period in time. 
When the Government changed in 2008 I hoped that Aranui would be resilient enough to withstand the changes the new Government would bring and strong enough to maintain the momentum that had been built up over those years. I am pleased to say that despite the odds the people of Aranui are succeeding. But this Government is not making it easier for them. In fact it is making it much much harder for them despite the fact that the Aranui Community Trust has proven that it knows how to work in partnership with central government local government non-governmental organisations and all of the service providers that have an engagement with that community. The trust has a long-term strategic plan which it revises every 5 years and it has an annual business planning process. It has a very strict process in place. Both of those plans—the business plan annually and the strategic plan every 5 years—are based on a needs analysis that has been professionally prepared and updated in consultation with the community and all its stakeholders. 
What a great model they have there in Aranui! This is an amazing community which has given me real hope about what the future holds for an area that has been written off in the past by successive Governments and also I think by the wider Christchurch community. Even the response of the community to the tragedy of the murder of Tisha Lowry and Rebecca Somerville a candlelight vigil to remember the victims of violence and to commit to a community free of violence—that is the sort of thing that makes me really proud to represent them and my wider Christchurch East electorate here in Parliament. 
Why am I focusing on Aranui when we are addressing the Prime Minister’s statement to the House at the beginning of this calendar year? It is really because as Phil Goff says the Government must ensure that it considers the needs of the many and not just the privileged few. That is really why I want to speak in this way. I notice that the previous speaker talked about the need to grow the cake and we all agree that we should grow the cake. I think what we are concerned about on this side of the House is that we cannot for one minute allow struggling communities to be left with nothing but the crumbs. That is always the risk when someone is going to slice and dice the cake in the way that the Government has announced today. 
This Government has been chipping away at the very underpinnings of the transformation of Aranui. We did not hear that in John Key’s speech today did we? He did not draw attention to the things that his Ministers have been doing that are quietly chipping away at the foundations of a community like this. Let me run through a few of them. First the adult and community education funding cuts: in my electorate Aranui High School has completely lost all of its funding for adult and community education. That has destroyed adult and community education in Aranui and it has really set back Aranui in terms of its ambition—because I tell you what that high school is ambitious for its kids and its community. 
The cuts have set the school back about 3 years—provided we get back into Government in 2011 which I am certainly very ambitious to achieve—and its ambition to become a community college. That is what it wants to be. It does not want to be a high school. It wants to be a community college that meets the needs of its whole community and it is very well placed to do that given that it is in the middle of a rebuilding programme at the moment. I am going to the opening of the new technology block tomorrow and it will be fantastic. 
Aaron Gilmore 
: Tomorrow. It’s going to be good. It’s going to be great. 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL 
: I am pleased to hear the National list MP Aaron Gilmore. I do not know whether he will be there but I hope he will be there backing this school which is the only secondary school in Christchurch East. What the Government has really missed in terms of that whole idea about community education is the whole question of infrastructure. It was supported by a mixture of volunteer and professional staff in terms of creating a cross-fertilisation of talent I guess I would call it between schools and communities. Aranui was no exception. I am surprised that Aaron Gilmore is chipping away on this because he was one of those who mocked the names of the courses that were being run at Aranui High School that were designed to attract people to learning opportunities that might otherwise have been considered daunting or unappealing. This school had done a fantastic job of reaching out into a community and getting people who had fallen out of the education system back engaged with the education system and I would have thought that the member would think that was a good thing but obviously he does not. 
The Government just does not get it about adult and community education. When this was pointed out to the Prime Minister I thought he was a little bit like Skipper the Penguin. I do not know whether members in this House have seen a movie called  
Madagascar 
 but someone pointed it out to me and in that movie whenever anything goes wrong Skipper says “Just smile and wave boys. Just smile and wave.” That really is the attitude that we have from the Prime Minister. 
As for the community nurse who was employed by the Aranui Community Trust and who was out in the community making sure that children and their parents were fully engaged with the health care they need her funding has been cut. There is no funding for a bottom-up initiative that works. We were told that only the bureaucracy would be cut in health. We were told that it was “out of the back office and on to the front line.” Well what about the closure of one of the union and community health centres in Christchurch which has had to close because the funding has been pulled so it could go to other services? 
How about the 1 hour a week of home help that has been ripped out of the homes of so many elderly people in my electorate which is absolutely outrageous? An 85-year-old receives a phone call from a person the 85-year-old has never met. This person is ringing from the district health board just checking up. The person knows the 85-year-old had an operation a couple of years ago. The person knows all of this personal information about the 85-year-old and asks to be updated on the situation. At the end of the conversation the person says the 85-year-old does not need 2 hours a week help with cleaning the house; just 1 hour will do. They are doing that over and over again. What would the Prime Minister say about that? “Just smile and wave Tony. Smile and wave.” 
What about the training incentive allowance which enabled so many of my constituents to get a tertiary education and become a nurse teacher or social worker or to get a degree in social policy because they could not quite hack the social work course when they were responsible for a child as the Minister for Social Development and Employment would understand. The Prime Minister’s statement said 100 domestic purposes benefit recipients coming off the benefit and into work would save the welfare system over their lifetimes $10 million. Why did the Government rip that money out of the training incentive allowance which got people into a job? I bet Paula Bennett took the advice she got from the Prime Minister on that one which was just “Smile and wave boys. Smile and wave.” 
Do not get me started on accident compensation. I have had case after case in my office as the Accident Compensation Corporation has clearly been advised to knock people out of the system without any due process. 
In the area of jobs Aranui has been affected like so many other areas in my electorate but for the first time I am meeting people who have never been in a Work and Income office in their lives. This is a true story: someone was told by a Work and Income official to just “dumb down” their CV. How about that for a pearl of wisdom? My constituent asked me how they should dumb down “chief financial officer”. Maybe it would have been better if the officer had just said “Smile and wave. Just smile and wave.” 
I felt that the Prime Minister’s statement was very disappointing. It was all words and no action and not ambitious for New Zealand at all. He continues to say that he wants New Zealand to match Australia and ignores the fact that everything National did during the 1990s was what separated Australia and New Zealand from the Employment Contracts Act on. The previous Labour Government managed to get real incomes starting to track towards each other again. I think this has been a very disappointing day devoid of a plan. It is another lost opportunity from a Government that has no plan no vision and no ideas for our future.