Fenton Darien: Budget DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeFenton Darien: Budget Debate[Sitting date: 20 May 2014. Volume:699;Page:18156. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DARIEN FENTON (Labour): Thank you very much to the previous speaker Tau Henare. I wish him well in his retirement but may I say do not go looking for a job in the union movement because I do not think there is going to be a vacancy any time soon. I want to talk about the real problems the underlying problems that are facing our country—that is the growing inequality gap. It is the crisis of the 21st century. It is the 1 percent by the 1 percent for the 1 percent. The widening gap between rich and poor is having a deadly impact on our society and its democratic institutions. We have no idea of the impact this is having in this century.This is the crisis that the Government has committed to entrenching with this Budget—the domination of a few in the interests of the many. The tragedy for me is that the Government cannot see it or if it can it chooses to ignore it and not own it. I cannot see how it can continue to ignore income inequality when there are huge salaries for those at the big end of town and nothing much at the other end. We even have chief executive officers like Mr Powell Chief Executive Officer of The Warehouse saying that his $1.7 million pay packet is ridiculous. Good on him for saying that. He is not the first business leader to speak out. There are other ongoing examples of obscene payments. Take for example the $4.1 million paid toANZ’s top boss DavidHisco and the $3.5 million - plus received byFonterra’s Chief Executive TheoSpierings. But going back to Mr Powell what is concerning him particularly is that although he gets this massive chief executive officer’s salary is it being paid to his staff on the shop floor within his company? His total pay packet is around 50 times that of his average staff member and 31 times the average wage. What has gone wrong in the last 6 years under this Government? What has gone wrong? There is something deadly deadly obscene about that.Good on The Warehouse. It has signed on to a living wage—a miserly $18.80 an hour which Tau Henare and his mates on the other side object to. They object to it. Organisations like The Warehouse have a little way to go but good on it for owning up to the debate that needs to happen. Where is the Government in this debate? Where is the Government in this debate? What does Bill English really think about this? We do not know. He said nothing about it in the Budget. What we do know is that Bill English pays the cleaners who clean his home a lot more than the cleaners who clean his office in this place. What we do know is that 46 percent of wage earners have had no wage increase in the last year yet to listen to this Government they should just be grateful to have a job. Minimum wage workers are supposed to live on a pittance. The minimum wage has actually gone backwards under this Government in real terms particularly for young workers. The dream of a family home is on the back-burner for future generations and those leading this Government have no regard it seems to me for the struggles of ordinary people and particularly the younger generations. No wonder many of them are choosing other options like living in other countries.The other thing about inequality is the 285000 children living in poverty. That figure is undeniable. The impact on them and their families is that future generations will be entrenched into a level of poverty that the wealthy cannot even imagine and there are consequences for all of us in the longer term. If we think about that if we think about what we are rearing today in the 21st century we are rearing the generations of children who grew up under the impact of structural adjustment under the National Government of the 1990s. That is what we are rearing and that is why we have inequality today.It is also inequality for the workers in this Parliament who are on their way to work right now as we speak from Porirua. They are on the bus after having paid a fare that they probably cannot afford. They will come here to work tonight for the minimum wage plus a tiny little bit. The tiny little bit extra they get is only down to their union which this Government would like to see completely removed which bargains on the margins of a cutthroat competitive tendering process. Once those workers have finished at Parliament tonight sometime around 3 o’clock in the morning they will go on to their next job somewhere else in this city. Somewhere else in this city they will have to find transport and they will go on to that other minimum wage job somewhere across the city.I want to talk about inequality for workers like those at Hutt Valley High School. The cleaners there have just had their work taken over by another contractor and have already been notified within 1 week of that takeover that 18 staff who do the cleaningwill be cut down to 12 staff and their hours will be cut down by 61 a week. Imagine that. The cleaners have been doing that job at Hutt Valley High School keeping the toilets clean keeping the place immaculate so that the children of Hutt Valley High School are protected and somehow they are expected to do this job under a new contract from a new contractor. I wonder whether members on the other side of the House have any idea what it means for those people apart from the fact that they are going to have to do more with less. They are going to have to clean for many more hours.I do wonder about the Minister of Education and whether she takes any notice of the cleaning services in our schools. I have to say that probably the Government does not because it wants to weaken the only protection the cleaners have under the Employment Relations Act. That is Part 6A of the Employment Relations Act—Part 6A—which would take away the only protection those workers have. It means that when they go home every week at the end of the week they will have their minimum income their minimum wage plus a little bit of income reduced. It means that those who survive the wage cuts will have to work harder than ever to keep the school clean for our kids because they care. We should never underestimate how much they care about the work they do. They are diligent about their work and they will keep on regardless.When I am talking about inequality I am talking about New Zealand today. The top 10 percent own 50 percent of our wealth—the top 10 percent own 50 percent of our wealth—and the bottom 5 percent own just 5 percent of it. The gap has been growing over the last 20 years. Between 1984 and 2011 the income of the top 1 percent rose nearly 10 times faster than that of the bottom 10 percent. How did that happen? What sort of country have we become where we allow this to happen? To be fair it is a worldwide trend. Governments and communities are facing the new phenomenon of extremes of wealth and those left behind and it is a conversation taking place right throughout the world. In fact we have had that conversation taking place this week with Wilkinson and Pickett who wrote the book about income inequality and pointed out that New Zealand has one of the fastest rates of growth in inequality. But it is indefensible. It is indefensible internationally and it is indefensible in this country.I grew up in a country where I believed that we thought there was a fair go for all. I grew up in a country where I thought that Jack or Jill was as good as his or her master. I grew up in a country where we would reach down and give a hand up to those who were worse off than us rather than blame them. What has happened to that? Instead we seemed to have vilified and blamed those worse off than us and the Government does not even accept that there is a problem. Yes there is a grudging increase in this Budget for paid parental leave really grudging—let us face it the Government was forced to—and the extension of free doctors visits for under-13-year-olds. But where is the plan to improve housing inequality? The Government’s only plan is to force poor people to live in far-flung newly built suburbs where the cost of houses may be lower but there will be no transport so affordable living is just a dream.Under this Government things have gone backwards. Under a Labour Government things will change. We will address the issue of income inequality. We will address the issue of wages. So before Christmas if Labour is elected many many minimum wage workers will have a pay rise.Debate interrupted.