Logie JanJAN LOGIE (Green): Today I want to speak about the C" word. Don't worry Mr Speaker—I'm not going to be talking about my favourite "C" word. I want to talk about capitalism and how it's failing us. Capitalism I think people forget is not a given. It's not inherent in our political or economic system. It's a decision to have an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit. Free-market capitalism is an economic system that maximises supply and demand forces and minimises Government oversight regulation and intervention. Capitalism sucks. And this pandemic and our housing biodiversity and climate crises have really brought that into sharp focus for many people in this country. We know that right now there are people all around our country but particularly in Auckland who are living in really precarious and frankly desperate situations. Too many people in casualised and minimum-hour contract jobs who have locked down for the wellbeing of all of us have had to battle their bosses to try to get paid enough to keep a roof over their heads and be able to go to the supermarket. This is not an uncommon situation. Two out of five employees in this country work in jobs with hours that vary to suit their employer not them. This is common in hospitality and also in community and personal services.FIRST Union being proactive and knowing what might happen did a TikTok to reach their audience about their employment rights. They were overwhelmed—700000 people seeing and responding to that. They had to employ more than two new staff members to answer the phone calls of particularly young people in this country calling to say "You've told me my rights but I don't know how to access them." What we've heard from multiple unions around this country is examples of employers who should know better because the law is absolutely clear and they have no excuse for ignorance telling employees that they should be taking annual leave instead of being paid by their employer during lockdown. That is illegal. But the chances for the staff members to fight back against that are really to have a conversation with them worry about losing their job pissing their boss off getting fewer hours or going through the Employment Court which has a six- to 12-month resolution time frame. It's not going to pay your rent in that time frame which is what people are concerned about. Things are so out of balance and our welfare system which forces people to choose between the precariousness of that employment or a guarantee of poverty is not helping. It shows the myth of employee power as exactly that. Wages have been going up since we've had a change of Government—thank goodness—but it hasn't been keeping pace with the cost of living. This really shows and it's driven by the fact that most of our essential services like housing and electricity and transport and childcare and a lot of our food are part of the private the free market. They're driven by the drive for profit and not our shared responsibility to each other. We have to remember that while people are struggling at this time—and this is what we care about in part—there are people who are doing really really well. While our essential workers are putting their bodies on the line for minimum wage or better than that wages none of them are coming close to earning as much as an empty house just sitting there earning over $200000 a year just to feed that free market and individual wealth. These imbalances aren't just hurting our people. The free market is also hurting our environment to the point where externalising of costs through businesses has led to 4000 of our endemic species being at risk and our emissions going up. This is a global problem but the tide is turning. Over 80 percent of Britons in the UK recognise the housing crisis as a fault of capitalism. We can change it."