Swarbrick ChlöeCHLÖE SWARBRICK (Green—Auckland Central): E te Māngai tēnā koutou; tēnā koutou e te Whare. In a flood you could have 10 people working together to build a boat that would house all of them through that crisis or you could have one person hoarding nine-tenths of the materials necessary to make that boat scolding the others for not working hard enough. The boat would not be built. Those rising waters wouldn't care about who held the most status or the most money. In moments of crises we tend to realise we've got to cast aside the dead-weight ideas that hold us back. Psychologists call the exhaustion and the brain fade that many of us are experiencing two years into this global pandemic moral fatigue". It is when things keep shifting and changing when you're not quite sure what others are doing when it feels as though you're having to think really in-depth about every single step or decision that you make and the potential impacts or consequences of those decisions when you feel as though you are fighting just to survive. This brain fuzz is related to the ever-increasing onus that politicians are putting on what we call "personal responsibility" making excuses for what we have traditionally called "collective or social responsibility" in our politics. This exhaustion has a lot of people rightfully asking what are we doing all of this for? What are we aiming for? Where are we going and why? For some reason or another this has some—particularly some in this House—yearning for what they call "business as usual" because when everything feels as though it is in crisis when everything feels as though it is on fire perhaps it's better the devil we know right?But the devil we know business as usual isn't our future; it simply cannot be and we heard that in the many submissions to the Finance and Expenditure Committee. "Business as usual" is not our future because it is those very settings that drove the greatest wealth inequality in this country on record. It gave us the housing crisis. In "business as usual" Aotearoa New Zealand produces four times the amount of climate change emissions than the limit required to keep our planet under 1.5 degrees of warming. Everybody deserves security and hope to be free from this exhaustion but we will not get there by focusing on individualistic short-term ideas such as those that have been floated by the Opposition. It is that kind of thinking that has created this exhaustion in the first place. It is only by working as a collective—the infamous team of 5 million—that we will create security and hope and a better future for all of us it is in realising our strength and working together and pooling our resources to do bigger and greater things than any one of us could do by ourselves.We hear a lot about the economy but we don't tend to hear a lot about what the economy actually is. We're told that we've got to sacrifice for this economy to get our economy back on track. That basic boring story neglects that the economy is all of us—our relationships with each other the things that we create our planet and its resources—Simeon Brown: Oh!CHLÖE SWARBRICK: —the time we spend at work unpaid labour—such as parenting Mr Simeon Brown—the skills that we learn the problems that we have and the ways that we decide to fix them. It's about how we work together to achieve our communities' and our country's goals and aspirations. It is supposed to serve us not the other way around. The late great Jeanette Fitzsimons said in her 2006 state of the planet speech "If the task of government is to promote the well-being of all people how could it do that? I suggest to you that it has everything to do with offering a vision for a better way of life rather than more growth; it has to do with inclusiveness with justice and with protecting our commons—our common environment and resources our common culture our public health and our education systems." Jeanette's challenge was to question what we call the economy. What are our goals and who do they serve? What is economic growth really working towards? Is it protecting our planet? Is it protecting all of our people? She suggested that those most in need were not the benefactors of economic growth and unfortunately the data proves her correct. Since roughly the time of that speech in the early 2000s we have seen the price of basic necessities skyrocket faster than overall inflation. We've seen soaring house prices yawning wealth inequality and as the Child Poverty Action Group submitted to the Finance and Expenditure Committee persistent levels of child poverty. It is clear who the economy and its rules are currently working for.So when we hear the words "the cost of living crisis" we need to question like I hope we question all political rhetoric what that statement actually means. At what point are we willing to call inflation a cost of living crisis? Is it 4 percent 5 percent 6 percent? Statistics New Zealand's household living-costs index shows that those with the least wealth in Aotearoa have experienced roughly double the rate of inflation as those with the most for many years. It is an inequality crisis. The lowest-income New Zealanders the half of New Zealand who own just 2 percent of the wealth in this country—this is a "business as usual" crisis. So what causes this inflation and what does it suggest about our policy response? Well the Treasury told our committee that it's a complicated story including COVID-related disruptions to supply chains rising oil prices elevated wages and cost pressures. As with all stories however there is a long and important part that is left out cultural norms that are assumed because hidden within that story of inflation is one of economic power and growing inequality. Just yesterday the Commerce Commission report into supermarkets plainly describes the sector's excess profits. KPMG's annual review of the financial sector showed pouring fuel on the fire of the housing crisis helped commercial banks in this country rake in the highest profits that they have ever seen. Economists have suggested that as a result of the choice to heavily rely on unconventional monetary policy over the last two years and high trust supports only for the big end of town we've seen an acceleration of a nearly trillion-dollar wealth transfer to the wealthiest in this country.In response to this cost of living crisis the Opposition have revived their old faithful trickle-down economics floating tax cuts cuts to spending cuts to workers' and renters' and beneficiaries' rights—straight out of the 1980s tax book—playbook rather. These aren't solutions; they are once again declaring a war on the poor which is why I implore the other side of the House Labour to stop playing by this tired neo-liberal playbook. The Nats will always be able to argue that they will tighten up the books. It's because they don't care about the people and the planet that they have to sacrifice to get there. So about that—planets—which has been on the back-burner literally back-burning while too many politicians and commentators pretended as though after we got through this recent pandemic we'd just go back to business as usual. The House finally declared a climate emergency just after the 2020 election. As the member who initially almost got kicked out of the House in 2019 for trying to press that motion I am fundamentally dedicated to ensuring that the Government is accountable to that symbolic declaration. But unfortunately at the end of last year in the name of the COVID-19 crisis this House passed a law which delayed the introduction of the inaugural emissions reduction plan. As I said in the Finance and Expenditure Committee reports back then and I'll repeat today the Government has given itself time to get its plan right and must use that time to work with submitters and others to make sure that the emissions reduction plan is the best it can be. Anything less than a Budget that delivers on the necessary investment to implement the emissions reduction plan will not be enough.So here we are eight years away from a point at which scientists said global emissions had to be half of what they were in 2005 and a little over two months away from the emissions reduction plan and the climate budget we were assured would help get us to that point of action. The Greens have used every ounce of leverage and power to enable necessary transformation to happen. The emissions reduction plan is itself a product of the change that we brought to Government in the last term born of the grassroots-inspired zero carbon Act every dollar of the Climate Emergency Response Fund as a result of the changes that we have made to ensure that the biggest polluters start to pay for the harm that they have caused to our planet. Is it enough? No. It will never ever be enough until we have curbed emissions below 1.5 degrees necessary for our survival. Responsibility now rests however for better or for worse with Labour Ministers sitting around the Cabinet table finalising what happens within their sectors. Past leaders have as Paul Hawken said "stolen the future sold in the present and called it GDP". Nearly 100 years ago in the wake of traumatic world wars this Parliament decided to do something radical: it built the social safety net. In the subsequent decades we have seen successive Governments at their worst tear holes out of that and at their best only make minor repairs. This Budget must be a Budget for an economy that serves both people and the planet. We cannot afford anything less because people and the planet are frankly exhausted and we're organising."