Turei MetiriaMETIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green): Poverty is not a weapon to be used against the poor. [Interruption]Mr SPEAKER: Order! The member can start her speech again. She does not need to be interrupted by those interjections.METIRIA TUREI: Thank you Mr Speaker. Poverty is not a weapon to be used against the poor. No Government should ever use poverty as a weapon against its own people. The safety net has become a poverty trap but the Green Party will fix it because everybody deserves a fair go in this country. It is the Kiwi way to look after each other but our welfare system—the safety net that our grandparents weaved together for us—has been torn to shreds in the last two decades.It is not right that a kid does not have a shot at a healthy future. That is an injustice that we all should be upset about. So the Greens will end poverty in New Zealand. Everyone who receives a benefit every student on a student allowance every person working minimum wage and every family doing it tough is going to have more money in their back pocket from our mending the safety net package: more money to pay the rent more money to put food on the table and more money to pay the power bill for 350000 New Zealanders and their children. With this 350000 New Zealanders and their 179000 children will be lifted out of poverty. These kids will wake up in a bed not in the backseat of a car. They will go to school with bellies full of breakfast and lunchboxes full of lunch. They will spend their weekends playing sport and not in hospital with respiratory illness.Our plan to mend the safety net makes sweeping changes to benefits to Working for Families to wages and to taxes to transform the poverty track that we have now into a genuine safety net. We will increase benefits and make it easier for people to earn more money and to secure more stable work. We will fix Working for Families get rid of the discriminatory in-work tax credit and create a children's credit that will be available to beneficiary families student families and grandparents taking care of their grandbabies. We will raise the minimum wage so that by 2020 it will be over $20 an hour. We will remove the sexism and the discrimination from Work and Income New Zealand that allows it to hound and to persecute solo mums who are just trying to do the best for them and for their kids.In the last week I have been told so many heart-breaking stories about life on the benefit and many are from the children of beneficiaries who are now grown. They thank me for speaking out in defence of their mums and their dads. Many are disabled people who talk about how impossible it is to get their entitlement let alone live with a disability on a benefit and with no clear pathway out.So I am asking those of us here—those of us who have a stable home who have a secure income who have a decent life who believe that every New Zealander should have the same no matter what their circumstances—let us all reject any notion that poverty is acceptable at all in our country. Let us commit to ending poverty in New Zealand and let us commit to creating a Government that has at its heart that same purpose: to end poverty in our country. Poverty should never be used as a weapon against the poor and a Government of which the Greens are a part will never ever use poverty as a weapon against our people. Thank you.