Harawira Hone: Budget Statement — Budget DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHarawira Hone: Budget Statement — Budget Debate[Sitting date: 15 May 2014. Volume:698;Page:17924. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]HONE HARAWIRA (Leader—Mana): Kia ora Mr Assistant Speaker. On behalf of the Mana movement I rise to speak to what I call a “more or less Budget” presentedby the National - Māori Party - ACT - United Future Government. When I say “more” I mean things like more unemployment than we had when this Government took office in 2008 with official figures showing that the unemployment rate is now higher across all ages for nearly all New Zealanders—Māori Pacific Island and Pākehā included. The Māori unemployment rate alone is up by 8500 to more than 40000. More young people are out of work and not in school training or higher education with Māori youth unemployment unacceptably high at 22 percent nearly four times higher than the latest population-wide unemployment rate despite all the pūru tūtae about opportunities and all the rūkahu about trade training and cadetships.There are more people earning unsustainable wages with statistics confirming that nearly three-quarters of our entire workforce are now earning less than the average wage. There is more of a wage gap between here and Australia. In fact the wage gap between the two countries has increased by a full 36 percent over that time. There is more income inequality between the rich and the poor with National’s policies creating an environment where the richest 1 percent of New Zealanders own 16 percent of the country’s wealth while 50 percent of New Zealanders own less than 5 percent and where the income of the top 1 percent has risen nearly 10 times faster than that of the bottom 10 percent. There are more children living in poverty—up from 270000 to 285000 in 2014. There are more kids going to school without breakfast and although KidsCan andKickStart Breakfast are helping more than 100000 New Zealand children are still going to school hungry every day.There are more evictions of State housing tenants to help private developers buy up Crown land to build high-end housing for wealthy families and foreign investors driving prices up and driving low-income families out. There are more families being made homeless through the Government imposing unrealistic criteria on poor people needing a home and using reviewable tenancies to push State tenants out of their homes and into the private rental market and increasingly because they cannot afford to pay those rents into homelessness. There are more children hospitalised with rheumatic fever and other diseases thatThe New Zealand Children’s Social Health Monitor report says are caused through poverty living in cold damp houses not going to the doctor because they cannot afford to and when they do not picking up their prescriptions because they cannot afford to pay for them. There is more of a gap between the achievement levels of kids in low and high-decile schools with Ministry of Education figures showing that the gap has risen now to where fully 52 percent of kids in decile 1 schools leave without any qualification compared with only 10 percent of kids in decile 10 schools. And there are more people in prison and on home detention especially Māori with prison rates up for both Māori men and Māori women and Māori now making up 50 percent of those in prison and 40 percent of those on home detention.That is where the “less” comes into it because all of these problems arise as a direct result of less spending and less funding being spent where it is needed most—on creating jobs with decent wages building good-quality homes for low-income whānau and making the health and education of our young people an absolute priority. The Government makes a big deal about having to cut spending to get the books back in the black but all we have seen are massive cuts to core public services like housing health and education and increasing inequities between rich and poor as a direct result of those cuts. What we are seeing is financial racism imposed upon the poor to feed the wealthy—more to the rich and less to the poor. There is less funding for housing with Housing New Zealand shutting up shop offering people an 0800 number that nobody answers and offloading tenancies to Work and Income and the Government stripping $400 million out of the purchase and upgrade of State houses and providing limited funds for social housing providers which are expected to develop their own capacityprovide new homes repair old homes maintain homes on an ongoing basis and then cop the flak when the money runs out.There is less funding for education leading to cuts in quality poor results in international tests the dropping of tertiary courses the axing of Māori research funding and an increase in course costs and student loan debt. There is less funding for health leading to higher doctors fees and prescription charges; worse health outcomes for those in low-income families especially Māori and Pacific Island kids; and greater costs for society down the track. And there is less funding for those health providers that work in the poorest communities addressing the most acute health needs every year for the past 5 years.So what do we get from this Budget? Well what we get are massive cuts to primary and preventative health care and the ridiculous sight of National and Māori Party MPs crowing about spending money on rheumatic fever. Although that is great because rheumatic fever is a killer in poor Māori and Pacific families all over Aotearoa it is also important to note that rheumatic fever is a Third World disease and we are supposed to be living in a First World country. Spending money on rheumatic fever is not something to crow about; it is an embarrassment that we should be cringing about. What we get is a social development allocation whose signature policy initiative for 2014 is—wait for this—a $1 million kutu chair. How is that for innovative targeted spending? A kutu chair for God’s sake. Oh yeah and some money for budgeting services to cope with the growing queue of beneficiaries struggling to get by.All we are getting is the same old National - Māori Party - ACT - United Future Budget that we got in 2009 2010 2011 2012 and 2013—Budgets with neither strategy nor funding for the eradication of child poverty no plan for low-cost housing no community jobs programme and no plan to raise the minimum wage or to introduce a living wage. Even though the Māori Party talks about being at the table the cold hard reality is that in all the key social areas of health education housing justice welfare and employment on Budget day 2014 Māori are worse off than they were when the Māori Party first signed up with National in 2008. On Budget day 2014 the only places where Māori continue to soar are in unemployment low wages homelessness hospitalisations educational underachievement inequality child poverty and prison numbers.If a Budget is about how we set our priorities and outline the financial strategy to achieve those priorities then we must be strong enough to identify the important ones courageous enough to allocate the money needed to achieve them and then unwavering in our determination to realise them. Those priorities define what kind of a society it is that we want and the resources we dedicate to them in a Budget are an expression of our commitment to achieving them. For Mana those priorities are simple because they speak of a society we would want to leave for the next generation: a commitment to feeding the kids building homes for every family—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): Order! Courtesy is contagious.HONE HARAWIRA: —providing jobs for everyone and paying for it all by taxing those who can afford to pay for it. We have the means and we have the capability; all we need is the political will. That political will can only come when enough people in this country—Māori Pākehā Pasifika tauiwi all those in genuine need in Aotearoa—are determined enough to want to change the Government strong enough to demand that we change the priorities and committed enough to the view that we must always put people before profits. Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker. Kia ora tātou katoa.