Prime Willow-JeanHon WILLOW-JEAN PRIME (Labour): Thank you Mr Speaker. We're on the eve of the Budget and for the last couple of weeks I have been asking questions of the Minister for Children about the cuts to as we have just heard the back office to redirect to the front line. But I will just say that when it comes to Oranga Tamariki the Minister of Finance promised before the election that Oranga Tamariki along with a few other agencies would be specifically excluded from this fiscal savings initiative. That was the promise before the election.But then after the election she broke her promise and she asked the Minister for Children to go and find 6.5 percent savings within Oranga Tamariki the organisation that is tasked with looking after our most vulnerable and at-risk children—Go and find 6.5 percent from your back office and redirect that to the front line."What we have seen in the Minister of Finance's requirement of the Minister for Children because of the Minister of Finance's incompetence to make her plan stack up is that they have gone through a restructuring proposal and in that proposal they are proposing to cut 447 jobs from Oranga Tamariki—jobs they believe are back-office jobs. That is 9 percent of the organisation. This is all because the Minister of Finance could not make her plan add up. She's now including an organisation she said would specifically be excluded and requiring it to find this money—this 6.5 percent; these 447 jobs. Questions I have asked in the House have demonstrated—and I agree with Chris Hipkins—that this definition of back office and front line is farcical. We are talking about the International Child Protection Unit responsible for child trafficking sexual exploitation worker exploitation and so on. It includes the records team who hold the records on behalf of those who are in State care. It includes the child safety and harm team for those who have been harmed in State care. It also includes the lawyers who the Minister recently said are not considered front-line workers despite the work they do in the courts on behalf of Oranga Tamariki.And it gets even more absurd than that. The Minister in answer to written question No. 11262 in 2024 said that the chief executive of Oranga Tamariki is not a front-line role. Anyone who thinks that a Government agency can run without a chief executive needs a 101 on how our Government works. But worse than that the chief executive of Oranga Tamariki is responsible for the 7000 children who are in care and protection under the chief executive. The chief executive is their legal guardian—essentially their parent—and to say that he is not front line is just absurd.I am worried about the impact that these cuts of 447 back-office—which I dispute—jobs are going to have on our most at-risk and vulnerable children. That number actually makes up 25 to 30 percent of the back office. It is going to bring the front-line services to their knees and what impact will that have on our most vulnerable children?In the minute that I have remaining I want to talk about what I am worried about for our children in terms of tomorrow's Budget. We have seen the cuts to the organisation and those that provide the services to them but we are going to see tomorrow the cuts to the services and the contracts that are provided to them and those services in the community. Those service providers are going to hear at the eleventh hour whether they are going to have funding beyond the end of June. They are the ones who are delivering front-line services to our tamariki in the community. How many of their contracts are going to be cut? How many of those services are going to be impacted because this Government is finding those tax savings and cost cutting here to give $2.9 billion to landlords? They are prioritising landlords over our most vulnerable children. This is about choices and this Government has got its priorities wrong."