Moroney Sue: General Debate 
Moroney Sue: General Debate 
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SUE MORONEY (Labour) 
: 
 May I place on record along with other colleagues in this House my condolences to the family friends and colleagues of Lieutenant Timothy O’Donnell. I will spend my time focusing on the things that we can change here today in this Parliament. Sadly we cannot change what occurred to Lieutenant O’Donnell but one of the things we can change is the future of our country. What we need is a plan. We need a Government with a plan going forward so that the people in this country can have every opportunity that they need. 
This Government told us that its fundamental purpose would be to close the wage gap with Australia. That is what it would do but now we are discovering that that was just a bumper sticker slogan. That was just a brush-off because no plan underpins that ideal that bumper sticker slogan of closing the wage gap with Australia. We are finding in fact that the wage gap is increasing and it is increasing not just by a small amount but by more than $50 a week. That is how much the wage gap between Australian wages and New Zealand wages has increased since National took office. That means that either the Government has a plan that is failing or it has no plan at all. It would seem today and in the previous days this week and last week in the House that we are discovering that there is no plan. There is talk of milestones and talk of brush-offs but there is no actual plan. I think today that it was evident again when we heard the Minister of Women’s Affairs Pansy Wong going into complete denial and complete spin overdrive by saying that there is no problem with the gender pay gap in this country when clearly there is. I would like the Minister of Women’s Affairs to spend her energy and time actually creating a plan to close that gap rather than denying that it exists because that is the sort of change we need going forward. 
It is all very well to talk about the statistics and for members to have a fight in this House about whose statistics are right and whose are wrong and which series is right and about what year they start from but we are talking about real people. I will talk about a couple of real people: Paul and Bronwen Neely in Hamilton. They went to the  
Waikato Times  
last week and said that this country is not working for them and that they would have to move to a country where there is a plan. The country that they have found where there is a plan is Australia. Hobart Australia is where they are moving to because Paul Neely who is a landscape architect was made redundant 15 months ago at the height of the recession. Some 15 months later he still has not been able to find any work in New Zealand. I met him the other day. He has scoured the entire country looking for work but he has not been able to find any. He stated in the  
Waikato Times 
 that if he had found a job they would have stayed here. He said that he thought the Government has not put enough money into the economic stimulus package and that a national cycleway does not cut the mustard. 
That is just the beginning of it because the Neelys have worked out that they are currently living in a country where the Government has no plan to fix their problem. It has no plan to increase the number of jobs available. The Neelys are picking up their two young children taking their future away from New Zealand and taking that future to Australia. Because of the stage the Neelys are at in their lives they are taking their specialist skills. Mrs Neely is a registered nurse. They are taking the skills of an architect and a registered nurse and taking their two young children and they are relocating to Hobart. They will not be back for some time. That is sad because they very much want their future to be in New Zealand. That is what they told me but there is no future for them here in New Zealand. Once they take their children overseas at the age that those children are they will start school in Hobart. They will not be back until their children have completed their schooling because they want to make sure that their children have some consistency in their education. 
This Government right now has no plan. There has not been the investment in infrastructure that would have allowed Mr Neely to continue with his good work as a landscape architect. Because this Government has no plan we are losing that family and hundreds like them to Australia where that Government has a plan. I think that what is exposing this Government is that it said it would close the wage gap with Australia but clearly it has no plan. It promised New Zealanders a brighter future. It promised New Zealanders that it would deliver that. New Zealanders are finding that the brighter future is not here in New Zealand under this Government but in Australia.