Delahunty Catherine: Taxation (Budget Measures) Bill Student Loan Scheme (Budget Measures) Amendment Bill — Third Readings 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Delahunty Catherine: Taxation (Budget Measures) Bill Student Loan Scheme (Budget Measures) Amendment Bill — Third Readings 
[Sitting date: 24 May 2012. Volume:680;Page:2495. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Speaker. Tena koutou e te Whare. I am pleased to take a call on these bills the Taxation (Budget Measures) Bill and the Student Loan Scheme (Budget Measures) Amendment Bill because I would like to continue the debate on the issue around poverty. I have just come from the Child Poverty Action Group breakfast. If you want to talk about urgency let us talk about what is actually urgent and it is not this legislation. We are in urgency while people are making really urgent decisions like: “Which medicine shall I be able to purchase this week out of the 12 life-supporting medicines that I need because I can’t pay the prescription charges?”. Or: “Shall I have breakfast or shall my children have breakfast?”. Yesterday as she walked to the House I heard the Minister for Social Development say: “Oh it’s just so boring.” Well I will tell you what is boring. It is boring to have to make a choice between whether you eat or your children eat and then to turn on the television and see Parliament acting as if this was urgency and ignoring the really urgent issues—and it does actually make me feel quite ashamed. 
However as they say in  
Star Trek 
: “Beam me up Scotty.” I have just come from the real world where people treat each other with respect. I do understand what the member Kris Faafoi was saying about behaviour in the House. The Green Party does not always keep its cool either. But we do not celebrate personal abuse and what Dr Graham was trying to say was that the community has higher standards than we do and that is a fact. The community has higher standards of behaviour than we do. At the Child Poverty Action Group breakfast this morning when we talked about the Taxation (Budget Measures) Bill people were astonished that the bill that we were debating was about attacking some of the most vulnerable minors—as in younger people—through this bill. They were astonished that that was the kind of urgency we had gone into. I heard people speak about the real issues that are urgent in this country this morning about the attack on welfare beneficiaries and the rhetoric which acts as if there are thousands of jobs out there when we know that there is no job creation plan so we are going to punish and scapegoat people who cannot get the work that they are supposed to be looking for. 
I heard students talking about what is going on and they were amused by this legislation because students opposed this measure when it came before the Education and Science Committee to change this measure. They knew it was not going to work except to try to reward wealthy students. I am not going to attack the Government for making a mistake. I am glad that it humbly acknowledges that it was a mistake and I am glad that it is changing that mistake. It is OK to get it wrong as the Government does but it is not OK to get it wrong on the big issues. What it has done in the Budget as well as in one aspect of this legislation is to get it very very wrong. It has got it very very wrong to say that selling assets will benefit the families and whanau of Aotearoa. This morning I listened to people from the social sciences from the university from the student community and from the front-line community services dealing with poverty and they are very distressed because they are unpicking the Budget inch by inch going through the rhetoric and finding the cuts. So if you look at education and health wherever there has been a gain there has been a loss. They were calling this Budget the “smoke and mirrors Budget”.  
But in terms of this bill I would call it the “Fiddling while Rome Burns Bill” or the “Emperors with No Clothes and Being Deliberately Urgent about Non-urgent Matters Bill” because that is what we are doing. We are talking under urgency about issues that are minor while the rest of the country is out there trying to unpick the rhetoric about what is actually going to happen to our access to food access to rent and access to medicine. The fact that people think this is a minor matter and that we can focus on a minor matter is an example of how privileged we are in this House. People with white gloves open doors for us. We earn good money and we have forgotten—at least the Government has; some of the rest of us have not—that the Budget and the very first bill we debate after the Budget should be about what really matters which is whether our kids get to eat or not. That is the measure of a civilised community and it is not supported in this bill and it is not supported in the Budget. 
The Green Party supports the changes to the rural rorting system for cows. Good on you. Great. We are pleased to see that you admit that you have made a mistake but I am afraid that this legislation is fiddling while Rome burns and people out there are burning. Kia ora.