Salesa Jenny: Annual Review Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSalesa Jenny: Annual Review Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 03 May 2016. Volume:713;Page:10696. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JENNY SALESA (Labour—Manukau East): Tēnā koe Mr Chair. May I take this opportunity to acknowledge a legend. New Zealand has claimed him but he is originally from the Kingdom of Tonga. Bill Sevesi who is a musical legend passed away and we laid him to rest a few days ago.My comments today are going to be focused on the Ministry for Pacific Peoples. This ministry has an important role to play and the Minister for Pacific Peoples earlier on in his comments spoke extensively about how we have improved educational outcomes especially for early childhood education. When we are talking about participation the Minister stated that we now have a 90 percent participation rate for kids. That is actually a wonderful statistic. However what about the quality of the kind of experience that our children are having in those early childhood education centres?What the Education Review Office has told us in its report is that over 50 percent of these early childhood education centres are not unfortunately currently providing services that are of great quality which is a big issue for me particularly for those of our kids out in South Auckland. When we read in the New Zealand Herald today that under this current Government the money that has been invested in early childhood education has been tripled to $1.5 billion one just has to question whether that investment in early childhood education is actually really monitored and whether we are getting the best investment out of our taxpayers’ funds.When we look at the priorities that the Ministry for Pacific Peoples has it has education employment entrepreneurship and improved living conditions including housing. I would like to focus on that last point. Are Pacific people in Aotearoa New Zealand today experiencing improved living conditions especially when we are talking about housing? I have got to say that from where I sit and from where the people whom I serve in South Auckland sit the answer to that is absolutely not. We are seeing so many people come through our offices not even having a house that they can live in with their children.Just last night I went around with a couple of people. We went because we had been informed by other folks in our community in Manukau East that there are so many more people now living in cars and we wanted to see for ourselves these locations whether it is indeed true that there are so many people now living in cars. I am sad to say that we did see just this. There are so many families out there living in cars. Some of them are Pacific and some of them are Māori but I was actually surprised to see that some of these people are Pākehā—Pākehā who have full-time jobs; Pākehā who have a degree—and they are living in cars.To get back to the Ministry for Pacific Peoples can I also acknowledge another person who unfortunately has just passed away. The Chief Executive Officer of the Pacific Business Trust Mr Rob Neru passed away just a couple of weeks ago—very untimely at 46 years of age. I saw Mr Neru here in Parliament just 1½ weeks before his untimely death and one of the conversations that we had was focused around what we should do in terms of policies to ensure that our young Pacific people are equipped that they are skilled and that they do have the correct training now.When the report that the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research gave us a few months ago projected that here in Aotearoa New Zealand we are going to lose 46 percent of all of the current jobs that we have we had this discussion. One of the things that Mr Neru said to me was that it is really really important particularly for Pacific people who are featuring too highly in the unemployment statistics and who are featuring too high in not actually getting trained that we ensure that they are getting skilled and they are getting trained now so that they do not miss out even more in the future. I would just like to acknowledge Mr Neru this afternoon.The Pacific Business Trust is a not-for-profit organisation that was established in 1985. It was set up to provide economic development services for Pacific businesses and for Pacific people here in New Zealand. But I would like to ask this of the Minister for Pacific Peoples: why is it that this Pacific Business Trust a lifeline for Pacific communities is being ripped apart and sold off without—Reports noted.