Sepuloni CarmelCARMEL SEPULONI (Labour—Kelston): Let us just pretend the last speech never ever happened. Can I just say that yesterday during the Prime Minister's statement Bill English did not mention child poverty he did not mention inequality and he did not mention homelessness. When he said the Government's programme of responsible economic and fiscal management is delivering benefits for New Zealanders it is clear he did not mean all New Zealanders. Working and low-income families continue to face harsh realities while the Government continues to turn a blind eye. National has started 2017 the way that it plans to continue: by ignoring the massive issues the important issues that New Zealand is facing at this time.So today's state of the nation report released by the Salvation Army aptly titled Off the Track shows just how out of touch this Government is. The findings of this report are alarming and this House should be ashamed of what was in that report and where New Zealand is at. New Zealand has had such consistently high levels of child poverty that it has now become entrenched and normalised in our society. The lack of affordable housing has resulted in a level of homelessness not seen in New Zealand in the lifetime of most Kiwis. On top of that we have record levels of imprisonment and recidivism. This all comes despite the apparent positive economic growth and welfare reforms claiming to target those in need.In his statement the Prime Minister continues to applaud his Government's efforts at cutting social support for Kiwis in need and reducing benefit numbers yet these very policies are shown by the Salvation Army's report to be the crux of child poverty issues. The increasingly conditional nature of welfare leaves many families without any financial support. Working for Families support has been cut despite this having had a positive effect on low-income families when Labour implemented it. The Government is also making it harder for people to get on to benefits and is even making it a struggle for some to get into Work and Income offices. There is an assumption out there that the perceived group of welfare bludgers or beneficiaries who could be working or should be working are the only ones accessing support. They are a mythical fabrication invented by the National Government and in fact there are a large number of New Zealanders who have to access welfare or who have to access those Work and Income offices including people with disabilities including our solo mothers including unemployed men and including our senior citizens. So it is unfortunate that recently I have heard from a senior citizen a woman called Alexis. All she wanted to do—a 70-year-old woman—was to drop off her change in bank details to her local Work and Income office. She gets there and she gets asked for ID—not knowing why not knowing what they will do with it and not knowing what they will do when they find out she is who she is. She struggles to get through the door. She gets in the door. There is nowhere to put her change of bank details. She gets told by the security guard: If you leave them there there is no guarantee that anyone will read it." She is then yelled at by someone else behind the barrier: "If you leave it there there's no guarantee that anyone will read it." That 70-year-old woman stated on her Radio New Zealand interview that she had worked for over 50 years she had paid her taxes and now she just wants to be able to walk into a Government agency and get the respect and dignity that any New Zealander deserves. If she had not had to go there she would not have known what other New Zealanders have to put up with and she said it was unacceptable.The Government remains solely focused on reducing benefit numbers yet it still fails to collect the information on the outcomes of individuals who do go off the benefit. The current insecurity and instability in the labour market mean that stable well-paid employment is not guaranteed. The working-poor demographic in New Zealand is growing with many parents taking on multiple jobs and still struggling to make ends meet. The Salvation Army report shows that over the last 5 years despite benefit numbers going down child poverty has remained high yet this is glossed over with political rhetoric about reducing benefit dependency.By focusing only on reducing benefit numbers the wider and more entrenched issues are ignored and instead we are left with high rates of child poverty inequality and continuous benefit cycles. We also see alarmingly high rates of youth who are not in employment and training and that is despite the Minister of Education telling us how successful our young people are. In fact our "neets" figures—so our figures of young people who are not in employment education or training—have increased to 90000 now. That is an increase of 20000 from a year ago. A year ago it was 70000; now it is 90000. But what else could we expect really from a Government that has a leader who talks about young people in a demeaning way referring to them as "pretty damned hopeless"?The lack of concern for vulnerable people epitomises this Government. The social investment approach it is claiming to use is just empty rhetoric. A real investment approach would tackle child poverty to prevent the long-term damaging impacts of growing up in hardship but the Government is refusing to even measure child poverty let alone attempt to reduce it. We heard that from the Minister today. She said there were lots of different ways to measure it and she refuses to just pick one refuses to be accountable for this really important issue and refuses to work with other political parties to not only measure child poverty but actually come up with some targets so that we can actually try to start to eradicate it. A real investment approach would be focused on breaking the cycle of poverty. Instead this Government is removing support ignoring long-term outcomes and leaving more people trapped in poverty.Another area that the Government has failed to invest in—and all New Zealanders the only ones who are not aware of this is the Government—is housing. So the lack of available affordable housing has led to an unprecedented rise in homelessness. The last figures we saw were 41000 but actually Alan Johnson at the launch of the Salvation Army report this morning said that that 41000 is a mass underestimation of what the issue really is or how bad the problem really is. There is more proof that coming off a benefit does not guarantee you will get out of poverty any more. For those who find themselves living in cars in June last year it took on average 217 days for those people to be housed yet the Government seems to think that if it does not acknowledge the problem it will not exist.In fact the Deputy Prime Minister went on TV last year and said that her biggest accomplishment as the Minister for Social Housing was moving people from cars into houses. We see the statistics. It is taking 217 days to house a person who is living in a car and what makes it worse is that a year before that statistic came out it was only 108 days. So I do not know how the Deputy Prime Minister can claim that as any sort of accomplishment. In fact I think she has got nothing to be proud of at all.When I look more closely at an example in my own electorate about how this housing system is failing it is pretty apparent when we look at the case of a woman called Tracey Penny—a tetraplegic woman with a 4-year-old daughter and a husband who is her caregiver who has been on the Housing New Zealand waiting list for over a year and was homeless living in her modified van for 6 weeks. She had to come in and see her member of Parliament who happened to be an Opposition member of Parliament and then get some media attention before the Government even did anything to actually support that family. The embarrassing thing is that this woman was told that there were no modified houses available in the Housing New Zealand stock so she would just have to wait. And 2 days after she first came to my office to bring this to my attention my office ends up having to support another family who have no one in the family with a disability but are taken to a fully modified house and told: "Take this house otherwise we'll put down that you declined it." After a conversation with Housing New Zealand where we all decided this was an inappropriate option because actually this was set up for someone who needed wheelchair access that offer was withdrawn and that family ended up getting another house and then after being told there were no modified houses Tracey Penny ended up getting a house immediately.But let us not underestimate why that happened. That happened because there was media attention and she had an opposition MP involved. It should not take that for the Government to spring into action. But all of us on this side of the House have seen that happen far too often. Until the media get involved then there is very little action that that Government is undertaking.So we know what the major issues are facing the country and we are not afraid to act on them. Bill English however in his Prime Minister's statement ignored the housing crisis ignored inequality and ignored the plight of children living in poverty. That is not what a leader would have done."