Delahunty Catherine: General Debate 
Delahunty Catherine: General Debate 
[Volume:663;Page:10978] 
CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Speaker. Tena koutou katoa. There are 216000 children living in poverty in this country. To add to that shame we have a Prime Minister who says that the poor should not envy the wealthy. I ask the Prime Minister what they should do. Should they be grateful that the wealthy may let them mow the lawn or clean the house for the minimum wage? I ask whether the Prime Minister has heard the expression “eat the rich” because eating properly is certainly an issue for those 216000 children. 
Tomorrow is another moment of truth for the Government. We do not know all the details yet but some directions have already been heralded and they will not do a single thing for the children who are living in that kind of poverty. The tax cuts for the rich have been constantly justified by saying that much of the tax take comes from the rich. It is not rocket science to understand that when a person earns a huge amount of money paying lots of tax does not affect that person’s standard of living in the same way that it affects people on the minimum wage. Some people who have lots of everything seem incapable of grasping the simple fact that there is in this country a huge and growing gap that rewarding the rich will not fix. The rich—and I include myself right now—do not need a tax cut. 
John Key’s Government has already initiated or signalled some very big spending including $10.7 billion on new motorways in the next 10 years an estimated $500 million per year from cutting the top tax rate from 38c to 33c and potentially hundreds of millions of dollars on taxpayer subsidies to protect businesses from the emissions trading scheme. It is a question of priorities. A Green Government would make reducing inequality in this country one of its highest and most urgent priorities. We need a safe and fairer society where no one feels the need to build barbed wire fences between the haves and the have-nots—hence the Green Party’s Mind the Gap policy which we launched this week. This Green New Deal on inequality was launched because we have an analysis of the problems and we have some solutions. We do not just stand up in this House and blame each other. We believe that a Government could take actions that would help to close the gap between those who earn the top 10 percent of income in this country and the 20000 children who currently need to be fed food in school from one of the groups that came to our Mind the Gap launch—a group called KidsCan. 
We are not just wringing our hands about poverty; we are proposing some costed items that we could afford as a country if we were to stop building ridiculous motorways to nowhere. Our package believes inequality could be reduced by a series of practical interventions. The total cost would be $4.46 billion and in the long term it would save us paying for more new prisons paying more benefits and paying for more hospital beds to mention just a few of the benefits of a far more equal society. 
Specifically we are proposing that the first $10000 of income should be tax-free that a capital gains tax should be put on property but not on the family home that an in-work tax credit be extended to families on the benefit with dependent children and that the special benefit should be reinstated. We should have progressive electricity pricing to address fuel poverty; secure housing which would mean 6000 new State houses; and investment in community housing and we should make changes to create some long-term rental tenure security. 
I will not outline the whole package but I will talk about one issue which is the extension of the in-work tax credit to all low-income families including people on the benefit. This single act would help 145000 of the poorest families to meet the essential needs of their children. It was mean-spirited of Labour to have excluded those families and it is absurd of National to ignore and punish them through the Future Focus package. It would cost another $300 million per annum which could be partially offset by the reduction of the supplementary assistance that would be required from the Ministry of Social Development. It would help the families that are in the greatest need. Maybe talking about the children of beneficiaries is not popular and maybe it is not sexy to talk about the people who are really poor; maybe we should just talk about those who are in work. But we need to face up to the issue of who is suffering and who is poor and that extra $60 a week would make a huge difference to those people. 
I will talk about one story in particular from my experience as an advocate for the poor in Tai Rawhiti—Gisborne—when I was working there from 2004 to 2008. The story is about fuel poverty a term that people in this House may not be familiar with because we are kept nice and warm here. Fuel poverty is a reality for many people.