Robertson Grant: General Debate 
Robertson Grant: General Debate 
[Volume:670;Page:17268] 
GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central) 
: 
 I too join with other colleagues to express my thoughts and sympathies to the people of Japan who are facing the aftermath of the earthquake the tsunami and now the nuclear fallout from the explosions at the power plants and the resulting radiation. It is a time when people across the world are looking to provide support to the people of Japan as they deal with a crisis that I fear will be playing out for many many years. Obviously all members in the House will provide our support to whatever New Zealand can do. 
I will add also to other colleagues’ comments about our ongoing support for the people of Christchurch and Canterbury. It is indeed very sad to learn this afternoon that the Rugby World Cup games will not be played in Christchurch this year. Just to clarify some of Minister Wilkinson’s comments before I think the quarter-final games will be going to Auckland but the pool games that Christchurch was to host will be spread to other venues. I hope that venues in the South Island are considered for those pool games in terms of the overall economic benefit that will come from them. 
I note that it is a real shame that the Government which has quite clearly been aware of this decision for some time now has not been as upfront with the people of Canterbury as it may well have been. I think the performance we saw in the House today from Mr Joyce did not reflect well on the Government in terms of being upfront with the people of Canterbury who deserve given everything that they have been through for the Government to take that upfront approach with them. I think that stands as a shame in this House today. 
I refer today to a report undertaken by Regional Public Health in Wellington called  
Food Costs for Families 
. This report was produced just after the GST increase last year. Essentially the report goes through and talks about what percentage of a family’s income they need to spend to create a healthy diet for their family using the Otago University’s Food Cost Survey as the basis. Essentially the paper states that New Zealanders on average spend about 16 percent of their income on food. There is international research to say that if people are spending 25 percent or more of their disposable income on food they can be moving into food stress which is experienced by everybody who is spending more than 30 percent of their income on food. 
The survey shows that in Wellington a family with breadwinners on the minimum wage with two children will spend 34 percent of their income before rental payments or 50 percent of their income after rental payments on food. That puts them well above the international norms and well into the category of food stress. A beneficiary family with two children will be spending 52 percent of their income on food or 66 percent of their after-rent income in order to get a healthy diet. It goes up even more for a beneficiary family who is in private accommodation rather than in Housing New Zealand Corporation accommodation. 
Those are the pressures on families out there today. Rising food costs and the rising impact of the increase on the rate of GST mean that these people are spending a far greater percentage of their income to get a healthy diet than they possibly can afford. The consequences of families not being able to provide healthy food at an affordable price are long term. They are long term for the individuals and the families concerned in terms of issues like obesity and poor nutrition but they are also long term for the whole country. The economic and social costs of the outcomes for people with poor nutrition and poor health are enormous. 
That is why this Government is being irresponsible and out of touch if it does not accept that people are facing enormous increases in their cost of living. The Government is out of touch when the Prime Minister says that it is a lifestyle choice to go to a food bank—it is not. The cost of living in this country and the cost of putting healthy food on the table is getting out of hand. Beneficiary families and families on the minimum wage—working families—are struggling to make ends meet. This Government is out of touch if it thinks that that is a lifestyle choice for those people. The cost of living is impacting right across the board. If I look only in the health sector I see that general practitioner fees are up 6.5 percent and there are after-hours costs of over $100 for a child in Queenstown $129 for an older child and $139 for an adult. These kinds of costs are unacceptable. This Government is out of touch and it needs to realise that the cost of living is going up.