Bradford Sue: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Bradford Sue: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
[Volume:629;Page:1299] 
SUE BRADFORD (Green) 
: 
 First I would like to tautoko the words of Te Ururoa Flavell who spoke just before in the House about the need for all of us to understand and support the real meaning of Te Tiriti o Waitangi Maori version. It was a very sound coherent and deeply thought-through speech that I think everyone in this House should listen to if they were not here to hear it immediately. 
The Prime Minister in her statement to Parliament last week at the start of the 2006 session talked a lot about our nation being on a journey from an old economy to a new one about improving living standards and services and about building pride in our national identity. That is all good stuff if somewhat platitudinous but where I think the Government is fundamentally missing the boat is in having any sense of urgency about the crises that are going to confront us sooner rather than later in relation to peak oil climate change and the impacts of the increasingly insecure and war-torn external environment on our own economy and society here. 
The Values Party and later the Green Party have been trying to get their messages across in this country about the urgency of the situation since the early 1970s. All too few have believed us or have wanted to hear us. However we are now in a situation in 2006 where we are fast approaching a point of no return locally and for our planet. This Government alongside any and all Governments around the world needs to find its focus and to do everything it can to help to future-proof our country against the coming shocks. That impacts on all aspects of our society and economy not just on the most immediately visible areas like issues around Kyoto commitments biosecurity waste reduction and conservation but also in other less obvious but equally far-reaching areas. 
For example one of the two areas of closest cooperation the Green Party reached with Labour following last year’s election was with regard to the Buy Kiwi Made programme which I am now working to implement on behalf of the Government. I would like to thank Labour for its support for that initiative originally that of our late co-leader Rod Donald. Along with colleagues and many interested people in the broader community over the next 2½ years I am determined to extract the best possible outcome from our agreement. I have already been in discussion with many key stakeholder groups including businesses manufacturers and unions. There is a stunning awareness and commitment that crosses traditional political ideological and sectoral lines to try to achieve a common goal: a major culture shift in how we all think about buying goods and services produced in our own country. 
The need for that culture shift does relate strongly to the urgency with which we need to become less dependent on imports brought here by transportation the cost of which will just keep rising and to the need to maintain and develop whatever infrastructure capacity we can on our own shores in this isolated little country of ours. That is why the current imbroglio around Air New Zealand’s heavy engineering and aircraft maintenance capacity is so unfortunate. Business and Government should be doing everything they can to keep that capacity onshore without expecting employees to bear beyond reason the brunt of changing conditions. I continue to hope that a way will be found through this issue that keeps as much capacity as possible here without an unreasonable sacrifice of jobs wages and conditions. 
The Government is—having made a deliberate choice some years ago—the majority shareholder in Air New Zealand at 82 percent. I do not believe that there is some magical dividing line between its role as a majority shareholder in a business critical to our economy and its role as a Government. As I asked in the House earlier this afternoon does the Government really know what Air New Zealand’s long-term strategic plans are? Does it have any opinion on the fact that those plans for business transformation seem to revolve around cutting costs at the expense of workers’ jobs wages and conditions and at the expense of losing a big chunk of our aircraft maintenance capacity as a country? I hope that this Government will do everything it can not only to ensure the commercial viability of Air New Zealand but also to retain and develop its public-good components in terms of the need to keep jobs and infrastructure here before peak oil really hits home. 
The Green Party’s commitment to greater self-sufficiency in the face of the fact that oil is running out and of other looming environmental catastrophes means that we want to see as many jobs as possible kept in this country and we want those jobs to pay wages that people can actually live on—hence our ongoing and total support for the campaigns to raise the minimum wage to at least $12 an hour immediately abolish discriminatory youth rates and work for more secure working hours for those in insecure part-time and casual work. 
I would like to take this opportunity to commend the Unite! union in particular but also all the other unions and community organisations involved in current campaigns to improve pay and conditions for all those who work so hard for so little recompense in our low-wage economy. I look forward to the debate on my member’s bill to abolish discrimination in youth pay rates which will happen here tomorrow night and to progressing it through the House over the months ahead with the support of a number of parties here. It is high time those of us with good and even high salaries and conditions spared a legislative thought for those who are working their hearts out for wages that are way below survival levels. 
Alongside the Green commitment to try to raise the incomes of the employed workers who have the least we remain committed in this term of Parliament to achieving a welfare system in this country that actually provides a sufficiency of help to those who need it most. We need an approach to income support that means it comes in at a level that enables beneficiaries and their children to survive with dignity and with neither the further harassment and intrusions on privacy nor the reductions of actual benefit levels that I fear may happen as the result of intended Government reforms to the welfare system. The Prime Minister talked in her speech about the fact that the Government will be stepping up its work on the new benefit structure. It has been saying that for a number of years now and I look forward to hearing more sometime soon about the detail of how it will actually work. I asked the Minister the Hon. David Benson-Pope last week whether he could tell us more about those details. But as with previous questions the answer is deferred indefinitely. 
Given what has happened with regard to the changes from the special benefit to the temporary additional support system which is one aspect of the reform about which we do have some information I am quite apprehensive about what the move to the single core benefit will actually mean for beneficiaries and their families especially in what will almost inevitably be an era of rising unemployment. I just hope that Mr Benson-Pope was correct when he assured me last week in the House that no beneficiary will lose out under the new regime. We will see whether that is the case—as I believe in fact that the impact of the loss of the special benefit alone will see a lot of people lose income support that they previously would have been entitled to. 
When we in the Green Party consider the whole raft of possible ways that we might do more to future-proof our country against prospective economic and environmental collapse one of the key solutions we see is to genuinely localise the production of and access to goods and services as much as possible in the communities where we live. That brings me to conclude today with a very local issue—that of the hospital in Kaitaia where I currently live. 
I believe that the Government is making a big mistake in the health area by not re-examining its overarching policies with regard to the provision of hospital services in rural and provincial New Zealand. The people of Kaitaia continue to fight a rearguard action in a long war of attrition for the return of 24/7 surgical cover and other services to our local hospital. The Government and the Northland District Health Board continue to think it is OK that we transfer hundreds of patients a week by road at personal expense or by ambulance and helicopter at public expense from a vast area of the far north to Whangarei Hospital. This is at a time when Whangarei Hospital itself cannot cope with its patient loads and queues grow longer by the day. From a commercial as well as a public health point of view would it not be better and make a lot more sense to restore just the basic services at least to Kaitaia allowing Whangarei to do its job better for the people further south rather than hoping that somehow the problem will go away—that the health of the people in this low-income district may miraculously improve or that the population will suddenly decrease rather than increase as it is doing at the moment? 
Many people living in the far north from the Mangamukas to Te Hapua cannot afford the long trip south for basic hospital treatment. Hundreds of thousands—ultimately millions—of dollars are being wasted on helicopter and ambulance fuel and overheads. In the slightly longer term and in the face of peak oil it would make a lot more sense for the district health board and the Government to admit that they have taken a wrong turning on this issue and to join with the local community to restore basic services to one of the most far-flung districts in the country. Along with three fellow Northland MPs including my colleague Hone Harawira and John Carter from the National Party I took part in a public meeting on this issue in Kaitaia last Friday. I can assure the Minister and the district health board that the local people will not give up on this one and nor will the Green Party. In every part of the social economic and environmental life of this country the Government should be working to rebuild and develop local production and services. It is at the peril of all of us from the far north to the deep south that we ignore that imperative at this critical juncture in the history of the world.