Kemp Takutai TarshTAKUTAI TARSH KEMP (Te Pāti Māori—Tāmaki Makaurau): Matua Tama Wairua Tapu me ngā Anahera Pono me te Māngai āe. [Father Son Holy Spirit and the Faithful Angels and the Holy Mouthpiece amen.]Tēnā koe Madam Speaker. Tēnā tātou e te Whare. I'm taking this call as Te Pāti Māori spokesperson for social development. This bill should tell you all you need to know about the character of this Government. It should tell you who they are here to represent and who they are willing to sacrifice. Because instead of treating poverty as a matter of urgency the Government is using urgency to make people poorer. We cannot policy people out of poverty. Indexing benefits to inflation will not solve the cost of living crisis; it will contribute to it. Let's not pretend this bill is anything more than a benefit cut dressed up as a solution. It is just the beginning of this Government's agenda to gut our welfare system and throw people off the benefit on to the streets.No one should go hungry while supermarkets are making record profits. No one should be homeless when there are enough vacant houses to house everybody. Whānau should not have to choose between paying their bills on time or taking their babies to the doctor. And this Government's strategy to get people into work should not be to make life on the benefit hell. Over 100000 people are homeless in Aotearoa and 60 percent of them are Māori. Food prices are the highest they've ever been in three decades. One in 10 children and one in five tamariki Māori are living in poverty. Nearly 2 million earn less than 30000 per year. Meanwhile 2 percent control 50 percent of the wealth in Aotearoa. If you're serious about addressing the cost of living in this country those are the people you should be targeting not our most vulnerable. People with disabilities should be able to live with dignity instead of having to constantly prove their condition to this Government so they can keep their benefit. Being on a benefit should not mean living in poverty. We will no longer accept any excuses from the two major parties who are fighting to keep people poorer because it isn't this Government who set the baseline. Benefit levels have been below the poverty line for decades. Labour were also complicit in condoning our whānau to poverty. It's just that National are making it worse. The one thing I will give the previous Government credit for though is that it brought in the change that National are taking away with this bill. By indexing benefit increases to wages they brought 5000 tamariki out of poverty. However they still left the 120000 behind.We are putting our pou in the ground. Now is the time for radical change. Our tamariki are literally hungry for it. I ask this Government: have you seen whānau struggle? I have seen whānau struggle. As the previous CEO of Manurewa Marae every day I saw whānau all day every day lining up for kai. There are so many whānau that are struggling. This bill will put more of our people in need and there is more hardship to come. And we've seen it. Manurewa Marae they had no food bank. COVID came and 60000 whānau they were feeding and now in the last 12 months 12000 kai packs are going out to whānau in need every day. That doesn't include those that also come to collect a hardship entitlement through the Ministry of Social Development.Te Pāti Māori we campaigned on this and we will double our baseline benefits. We will raise the minimum wage to the living wage remove income tax for low-income whānau remove GST from kai and we will invest in our mokopuna in our tamariki. That is an Aotearoa Hou for Te Pāti Māori.