Ardern JacindaGENERAL DEBATEJACINDA ARDERN (Deputy Leader—Labour): I move That the House take note of miscellaneous business. A past Labour Prime Minister once famously said that we should stop looking at the mischief and start looking at the cause. It was a very simple notion—the idea long before social investment that if we wanted to save money for taxpayers we should invest early in order to save. It is an idea that pre-dates social investment and it is one that is simply common sense. In fact I would argue that both sides of this House have always prescribed to this notion of investing to save but Labour's motivation and the motivation of its leader Andrew Little and of past Labour Prime Ministers has always gone much further than that. For us it is not a question solely of taxpayers' money being saved but of saving waste of a different kind—saving the wasted potential of a young person not being in employment education or training; the waste and loss of dignity that comes from poverty and the lack of decent wages that would enable you to put food on the table and provide for your own family on your own terms; and the waste of a child's future from their contracting a preventable illness and being hospitalised as a result. That is what this Government has missed in its social investment approach. That is what it has missed when it comes to its Better Public Services targets. It ignores the fact that changing a number does not mean that you are changing a life or giving someone back the dignity that they so richly deserve. It also runs the risk—and we have seen this with the Better Public Services targets—of allowing people to simply game the system in order to be able to give a rough tick that the job is done and the goal is being achieved. I predict here and now that one of the areas we will be seeing gains in will be the targets around serious violent offending. Look no one is going to argue. Of course we want to see a reduction in serious crime—of course. But if you look at the target the Government has set itself today it is aiming to reduce serious violent offending by roughly 10 percent by 2021. We have no problem with that. It has set itself a baseline it has looked crudely at a number and it has used the number of 139000 which it wants to aim for to get that serious offending down. That seems like a rather arbitrary number but when you actually compare it with the existing level which in June 2016 was the number of 129000 this National Government's ambitious target to reduce violent offending is higher than the rate that we had in June of 2016. I hardly call that a message of hope for New Zealanders let alone a message of ambition. Carmel Sepuloni: Hopeless. JACINDA ARDERN: It is absolutely hopeless. But it is also troubling to see that targets are gone. You will not hear the Government today speak of the fact that rheumatic fever has suddenly gone from the 2012 targets that it set for itself as part of its Better Public Services. Is it Job done."? Waitematā Auckland Bay of Plenty MidCentral—all of those district health boards have higher levels of rheumatic fever per 100000 people than when the Government set the baseline in 2012. All of them—Waitematā Auckland Bay of Plenty MidCentral. Labour predicted that would happen because this Government continues to look at the mischief and not the cause. It tried to swab away the problem. It tried to identify where kids had strep gave them antibiotics and sent the sick child back to a home that was making them sick. The only way you would have addressed rheumatic fever in the long term was to address poor-quality substandard housing and ultimately address the housing crisis. That is what a show of leadership would have done. Not only did the Government not do that; it abandoned its attempt to do it and it has shoved under the carpet the fact that its rheumatic fever target has gone. It is about to do the same on preventable hospitalisations. I know a story of a family where the money coming in came via a father who had lost his job. He had a couple of kids living in that household. In the end their budget was so tight the hot water went off. The kids contracted an infectious skin disease and they could not get rid of it because the family could not do hot-water washes. If this Government was serious about giving those families their dignity back it would address the mischief and the cause."