Delahunty Catherine: Address in ReplyText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDelahunty Catherine: Address in Reply[Sitting date: 22 October 2014. Volume:701;Page:138. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green):Tēnā koe Mr Deputy Speaker. He mihi nui ki te Aotearoa whānau whānui me talofa lava ngā tangata o Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa. Tēnā koe i te Whare Pāremata. I would first like to congratulate you Mr Deputy Speaker all the other new Speakers and all the other new members who have come to Parliament today. Welcome to the madness. That is often the only way I can describe it. I could not say in the affirmation ceremony without threat of punishment what I am going to say now. So I am going to say this now because I am sick of not being able to say it. I swear to uphold Te Tiriti o Waitangi as the true foundation of this nation and the double-hulled waka where we can build relationships by respecting tangata whenua me tangata Tiriti. One day Parliament will have the courage to reflect this unique taonga in our swearing-in tikanga. In the meantime ka whaiwhai tonu mātou [we will continue to pursue it].I am here speaking as myself and as an MP. It is not a contradiction. The Prime Minister has difficulty figuring out who he is; some of us are very clear. I am here to speak today about child poverty as the education spokesperson for the Greens. Child poverty has finally been acknowledged as a meme worthy of attention by our very reluctant Government. We call it child poverty because the poverty of many adults has become acceptable. The beggars on Lambton Quay are invisible. It is business as usual that people should beg in the streets of Aotearoa now to our shame. We call it child poverty because the poverty of 260000 children might have the power to prick the conscience of the comfortable. We hope that this is true or we consign another generation to much less than they need from day one.However the focus groups have spoken to the Government and cannot be ignored. Something must be measured and something must be done. Education can be a site for social justice action on child poverty but Treasury advice so far has not really made any difference. The 2007 advice to Government was that feeding children at school would not help learning or attendance. Great work Treasury team! Let us test your theory and take you off breakfast and lunch every day at work just for a month or so just to see how you go. Will it affect the number crunching? Will it undermine morale? Will Treasury and analysts become hungry and angry or distracted and weakened and fail to provide advice to the country? Will those with no food feel ashamed and want to stay at home in hiding while the rest of the world eats their lunch? Will it matter? What about the MPs? What if we went without breakfast and lunch for a month? No sushi my friends. No Lewis Road Creamery chocolate milk. No Weet-Bix. What would happen to us? It is our kids we are talking about every day.Meanwhile we have had the Prime Minister say that he will spend more on child poverty. His speech yesterday was very light on detail—so light that you could have missed that it was a priority at all. However Radio New Zealand did get the Prime Minister to expand a little bit more this morning. He was sounding pretty relaxed as usual because it is only 15 percent of children needing breakfast every day. He denies it is really a crisis. However he does not know whether they get lunch or dinner—he is just guessing. Child Poverty Action Group is not guessing. It says that it is a crisis. My own tour of decile 1 to 4 schools before the election last political term taught me that every school I visited was feeding children. In some cases a large proportion—far more than 15 percent of the roll—were being fed every single day. Principals and teachers were providing lunch out of their own pockets and what is more some schools were taking the leftovers from the breakfast programme to the mothers in the community to feed the preschoolers and the rest of the family. It is a slow grinding shameful process. We have left our children and families in a situation where those children’s ability to concentrate and to learn is not working. They are hungry and for goodness’ sake we should feed them.The Green Party has some immediate and practical solutions for this one aspect of child poverty. We are delighted that Hone Harawira who is a real loss to this Parliament has gifted his “feed the kids” bill to Metiria Turei. I echo her words that we should unite in this Parliament put aside ideology and support this bill which would provide breakfast and lunch. The charities are doing their bit but it is not reaching all children and charity is not a solution. It is also not a solution to put more of our resources into measuring individual deprivation. They can dream up the seven measures or whatever they call them but that will lead to a labelling of a child who ticks the seven boxes. Will they get lunch or a social worker? What about a child who ticks only four boxes? Will they get half a lunch half a social worker? It is not a system that is going to work. The ideological aversion to tie a universal approach to addressing poverty is doomed to failure. But I guess a whole lot of people can spend a lot of time and money working on their data-rich targeting agendas. If no one knows what that means do not worry. I do not know what it means but they talk about it all the time—a data-rich targeting agenda. Wonderful! It is meaningless and it will not feed anybody but a lot of people can spend time on it. These are what we call faux solutions. The elephants stomping across this room are decent wages and benefits affordable housing job creation and access to a quality public education.The Greens’ school hubs programme is a great part of the solution and was well received by all the schools we visited. We would pay for a school hubs coordinator to bring the people and the schools together to meet needs. We would provide resources for communities and schools to manage a lunch for all the children who need it. We would provide free out-of-school care and recreation and after-school care provide a school nurse for our kids—which was available when I was young many many years ago—and also build 20 new early childhood centres on school grounds for all decile 1 to 4 schools and others who want to opt in. We can rebuild our communities through policies of justice and strategies that actually bring people together. They are already doing that in many many schools. Teachers know that if you want kids to learn they need to not be transient and under-housed to not be hungry and to not be suffering from social dislocation. They need to be looked after. Schools and communities know how to do this. It is time for the Government and Parliament to come to the party and work with them instead of having another round of measuring another round of denial and another round of individualising structural poverty issues.I want to talk a little bit about my other portfolios as well as education. We strongly believe in the Greens that we have the solutions to addressing poverty and that we will lead in our challenges during this term of Parliament. We will work with communities to make sure that our education policies and our child poverty programmes will actually address the issues.One of the other portfolios I am going to work on is water. Water is life. There is no life without water and yet we are stripping our waterways we are polluting our waterways and we are taking away the essentials—not only the food but the water. Things are getting to an interesting dilemma in this country. I am also going to be working on issues such as human rights. Included in that will be my campaign to stand up with the people of West Papua who are experiencing genocide. It is a country not so far from here where there is no media freedom and where there is a trial of two French journalists right now. The people there are regularly locked up for raising their Morning Star flag—they can get 15 years in prison. So I am going to be standing here for human rights. I am also going to be standing here for Te Tiriti and for toxic chemicals—an interesting combination. The Treaty is not toxic but the way in which we approach is becoming toxic when we cannot even mention it properly in this House.There is a lot of work to be done and the Green Party is determined that this term we will be a positive constructive agenda-setting Opposition. We will show leadership to a Government that is in a very complacent state a very comfortable mode but that actually does not have the majority of people in this country voting for it. It does not have the support of all the nation. It does not have the answers and it does not have the plans.In the education portfolio for example there is no plan for early childhood education; there is just the market—there is just Kidicorp. In terms of schools there is no plan; there are charter schools and privatisation. We constantly see people articulating in this House and I am afraid that some of the maiden speeches did it yesterday and arguing for the ideology of free-market economics as manifest by the gentlemen who sat in the chair yesterday—we saw Roger Douglas and the others—who have brought this country to the state that it is in. They were advocating for more of the same—more poverty more inequality more child hunger more lack in terms of vision planning and programmes that can support us. We do not believe the State will finish everything; we believe that the State and communities can address these issues. We will stand up together on those issues with our communities. Kia ora tātou katoa.