Menéndez March RicardoRICARDO MENÉNDEZ MARCH (Green): Tēnā koe. Thank you Madam Speaker. I want to start by acknowledging the legacy and the shoulders that we stand on of all the people who have built our movement the Green Party. That has enabled us to return as incumbent MPs and to bring our biggest caucus ever and I want to say just how exciting it is to be working with some of the best organisers and campaigners in this country to work towards a fairer future. Today we're here to discuss the Government's agenda and what was said in the Speech from the Throne. I think there is as much being said when there is a speech where something is omitted and something that was not said in the Speech from the Throne was anything in relationship explicitly to poverty. In fact the words poverty" and "inequality" did not get a single mention in today's speech. We are talking about the communities who have been underserved by successive Governments who have been kept in poverty by political decisions from politicians in this House—from people who have said that countless families deserve to live below the poverty line. The myth that has been spoken for far too long in this place is that all it takes is hard work to get ahead. What has been said by Christopher Luxon in referencing someone else's maiden speech in his speech which was that all it takes is to have good parents is a myth because actually we have designed a House that is designed to keep those families in poverty and that has been designed to keep disabled people living below the breadline—and I see that people are going "No" and nodding and rejecting what I am saying but look at the numbers. Look at the evidence. Look at how much someone earns when they're on a benefit and then match it up with the median rents across the country. Tell me that the incomes that we've decided to give to people who deserve support are livable—they are not. These are decisions and it doesn't have to be that way and yet while there was talk about reducing red tape and subsidies for landlords there was nothing in today's speech about how we're going to eliminate poverty let alone continue meeting our child poverty reduction targets which were—yeah—a first of a kind but were not even ambitious enough to actually commit to eliminating poverty. They simply were there to reduce poverty and it didn't even get a single mention. The Green Party has a proud legacy of working and fighting to end poverty. It has been our mahi in this place from previous MPs that secured those child poverty reduction targets and that secured increases to benefits and the removal of some of the punitive sanctions and yet despite poverty not getting a mention in today's speech if we trawl through the coalition documents we can find what's in this Government's agenda. We can find that this Government intends to introduce punitive sanctions—sanctions that have no evidence of working. I think back to 2017 when we were finally having a more sensible public discussion on sanctions on sole mothers. We were talking about 17000 mothers who were being sanctioned at that time for not naming the father of their children. The Government at the time was unable to produce evidence that those sanctions were working towards supporting whānau or towards supporting people to actually have a relationship with their partner or the father or mother or caregiver of the children. There was no evidence that punishing beneficiaries or that leading them further into poverty was working towards the benefit of anyone in our society and all it was doing was criminalising the same people that were being scapegoated. So all the talk about getting tough on crime is simply a scapegoat. It's a dog whistle that hides the fact that this Government will be criminalising people because when you strip people of their only legal source of surviving you put people in a position where their only way to survive is to commit a crime and so this Government is actually working against the goal of reducing crime by creating a generation of people who will have no means of surviving. When they say that they want to get tough on people on the benefit by putting those obligations on jobseeker beneficiaries they should spend some time talking to those people who attend those work seminars. Do they even actually support people into meaningful employment? No. The Ministry of Social Development (MSD) in Wellington has been unable to even keep track for example of the number of people that attend those seminars. MSD has been unable to actually quantify the wages that those people go on to and yet successive Governments have been eager to punish people who are not deemed to go into the types of jobs that policies from Governments have chosen to push people into. By sanctioning those people who you deem to not meet those obligations you will be leaving them without any source of income or any ability to pay their rent. Shame on this Government and their agenda to wage a war on the poor. The Green Party will be working to eliminate poverty not to continue to increase it as this Government is intending to do. For all the talk of this Government about personal responsibility and people needing to learn to make good decisions it's quite frankly insulting when the goal of this Government on those on the lowest incomes is to monitor their expenses more closely and to give people less agency and less opportunity to make those decisions in life. Forcing people to go to Work and Income to queue at Work and Income to prove every single expense in order to get a food grant—a measly food grant that has not even been properly increased in countless terms—is insulting. It's both a waste of time for the person sitting at the Work and Income office and it's degrading for the families that have to queue up just to survive. This is a Government that by omitting the words "poverty" and "inequality" from the Speech from the Throne and from its opportunity to set an agenda has told the whole country that its interests lie in protecting landlords' ability to evict people without any reason and to give them more money. I also want to reflect as a migrant to Aotearoa on the fact that for far too long the Government parties—all of them—have chosen to pit our communities against each other. I don't want to hear any celebration of the new migrant members of the Government's caucus who are complicit—who are completely complicit—in driving a divide between our migrant communities and Māori. What many of us know is that our struggles for liberation are absolutely connected and that the only people—the only people—who have something to lose from our migrant communities by strengthening the ability for people to recover their reo and to actually have a partnership approach in the way that we do things are the people who have gained from the direct exploitation of those communities. As migrants we should be working towards supporting our companions and their struggles for liberation whether it's in Aotearoa whether it's in Palestine or whether it's in West Papua. By standing together towards the common cause of taking climate action ending poverty and having a true Te Tiriti partnership we'll be able to actually create the society that this Government proposes to represent and to aspire towards. In pre-colonial times immigration policy was not based on the exploitation of workers and I did want to quote Professor Khylee Quince the dean of law at Auckland University of Technology who spoke at length about how in pre-colonial times immigration policy was actually led by concepts around manaaki aroha and utu—policies that we actually have a lot to learn on and actually it could be time for the Crown to think more about devolving power and resources so that those values can be restored. I'll end with a whakatuakī which I think represents the solidarity and the connection that we can build with one another rather than the division that this Government wants to create with one another.Mā whero mā pango ka oti ai te mahi. [With unity the task can be achieved.]Kia ora."