Shearer David: General Debate 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Shearer David: General Debate 
[Sitting date: 12 September 2012. Volume:683;Page:5145. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
DAVID SHEARER (Leader of the Opposition) 
: 
 I just want to say thank you and pass on my gratitude to the last speaker Jonathan Coleman for helping me to get elected into the Mt Albert seat. His ongoing and persistent efforts were certainly missed in the last election but I certainly did appreciate those during the by-election. 
Today we have been confronted with a $78 billion figure from the Minister for Social Development. Nobody quite knows exactly what that means. It is a meaningless figure. The last figure that we heard along those lines was from the Ministry of Social Development. It was a $45 billion figure and nobody quite knew what that meant either. What her figure is supposed to say or what she is claiming it is saying is the cost of our social welfare spend in this country. 
What this Government is really good at doing is measuring not very much and doing very very little. So we actually do not know how we are going to move past those numbers to actual real improvement. But let me give you some other numbers. These are the costs to this country of kids growing up in poverty. It is $8.8 billion a year. That $8.8 billion a year is what it is costing this country because of kids growing up in poverty: lost productivity $2 billion; crime $2.2 billion; health costs between $3 billion and $4.5 billion; and social welfare $1.4 billion. That is $400 billion over a lifetime. That is nearly 10 times what that Minister was talking about in terms of social welfare. If she actually solved the real problems in this country—the real problem is about child poverty. 
This week we put on the table some proactive positive steps forward in terms of changing the way that we do something about the choices that kids have in their schools. You go to schools across this country and you look at those kids at those schools. They look up at you and they are eager. They are ready to learn and are willing. Then you look a little bit harder and you notice that many of them do not have shoes. They have got no jumpers on. They are cold and many of them according to their teachers come to school without lunches. We can argue about whether that is the parents’ responsibility or not—of course it is the parents’ responsibility for the kids to come along to school well fed and with lunch but the reality is that they are not. More than 80000 kids are coming to school without those things. Without lunch and without having something to eat before school of course they are not going to do well in the classroom—either for themselves or as a distraction to others. 
We are proposing to put food into schools to ensure that those kids get the best start. What does that mean? What does that actually mean? That means that when those kids get a good start they do not come out the other end and fall into the unemployment queue or form part of our health statistics or our crime statistics. 
What else are we proposing to do? Actually what we are proposing to do is something that we only just discovered that Bill English was proposing just a few years ago and that is to make sure that every kid has access to Reading Recovery. One in five children in this country has problems with reading. Reading Recovery has an 80 percent success rate—80 percent. It is the gold standard across the world. Yet Reading Recovery is not available in every one of our schools. 
So what we are proposing is making sure that every kid has access to Reading Recovery making sure kids have food in their stomachs when they go to school and making sure that they get picked up if they are having reading difficulties. This will mean that they come out the other end and contribute to our society and the meaningless statistics that the social development Minister came up with today will not need to be pandered around this Parliament. They are ridiculous. They are ridiculous because all they do is throw out a number when what we are really looking for is solutions. This Government has no solutions. If it did have solutions it would have come up with them and we would not be in this situation.