Logie JanJAN LOGIE (Green): E Te Tiamana tēnā koe ki a koutou huri noa i Te Whare tēnā koutou katoa. Ka tū au mō ngā Kākāriki ki te kōrero i roto i te tautohetohe mō ngā whakatau tata e pā ana ki ngā take o Te Manatū Whakahiato Ora.[Greetings to you Mr Chairman and to all of you throughout the Chamber. I stand on behalf of the Green Party to speak in the Estimates debate about matters relating to the Ministry of Social Development.]I rise to take a call on the Estimates for the Ministry of Social Development. This is one of the largest ministries with the largest budgets overall. I would say most people in this House would recognise that this is the ministry that is critically important for our demonstration of how much we care or do not care about our fellow New Zealanders. This is the ministry that is responsible for ensuring that people are housed and have access to warm dry homes. This is the ministry that is responsible for funding our community organisations that have developed over so many years in response to community needs. This is the ministry that is responsible for protecting and looking after people who are unable to be in paid work people who are caring for people who need 24-hour care people who are caring for family members who have disabilities people who have disabilities themselves who are unable to get into the paid workforce people who are sick and unable to work people with cancer parents who are leaving violent relationships and who are trying to establish themselves and their children in a safe environment and people who have been made redundant. These are some of the functions of this ministry. So it is incredibly important that this Committee spends the proper time looking at the Government's performance because it matters. These people who are in the care of us all—their lives matter. I would particularly like to just touch on a few things. There are so many things to cover but I will briefly touch on housing. I recognise that although there has been much discussion about homelessness and a huge amount of public concern—and we have heard that the Government has put out a video titled Comprehensive Plan" to prove that it has a comprehensive plan—what we have seen of this Government in this Budget is that there is still money in this Budget to sell State houses while we have people sleeping on our streets all around this country. We have one in 100 New Zealanders without a secure home of their own. We know our hospitals are clogged up with our children and particularly our elderly who are sick and dying from the over-crowding in this country and the standard or lack of standards in our housing. Then we have the Government—in response to the absolute public outrage over the situation of homelessness in this country—saying: "Oh OK. Well we're going to give people 7 days in a motel that we'll pay for. We can only give them 7 days because actually there are so many people in need that we can't cover more than that. So we'll only be responsible for 7 days." Even though as a Government it should take responsibility for the lack of housing it is going to take responsibility only as far as 7 days. Then we have just heard conflicting numbers from this Government. It cannot even come into this Chamber and give us one figure of how long it takes people to get into housing. We have heard 7 days we have heard 10 days and we have heard 155 days coming from this Government. Those are the basics of responsible governance and it cannot step up and meet those basic standards. I believe that there is actually a point to that because it makes it more confusing for the public and it makes it easier for the Government to refuse to take responsibility. It is shameful. I asked the Minister in the Social Services Committee hearing why the policy that the Government has instituted is only now going forward when it knows there is a significant number of people who have extraordinary amounts of debt who are out of work at the moment and who have already racked up for some people over $100000 worth of debt to Work and Income to be able to put a roof over their head. The Minister's response was: "The Government is not interested in knowing. It is looking forward not back." The Government is not interested in knowing how many people have racked up debt that they are going to be left with for their lives because of this Government's failure. I will just remind this Committee that after the Christchurch earthquake the Green Party stood in this House and said that we needed to actually train people and start a State house building programme in Auckland so that we could have the people in the country ready to build in Christchurch when they came online. The country would be in a different position now if we had a Government that was proactive rather than one that is continually expecting the market to deliver when there is clear market failure. I would also like now to touch on my deep concern around another aspect of social development funding in this Budget. It is in more detail that I would like to talk about this very small but significant issue which is that this Budget shows no increase in funding for women's refuges. We have heard from the Government that family violence domestic violence is a priority for it but it has put no more money in this Budget for our women's refuges. When I asked the Minister for Social Development about why there was no new money she said that funding had not increased for refuges because the Government wants more information on their effectiveness. The Minister told us about an alternative idea which we have got to assume is an alternative idea to refuges of taking perpetrators out of the family home rather than women and children. I really want to put on record in this House that those things are not one or the other. We need both of them in our society. The only reason that we have legislation on domestic violence is that women in our communities came together and set up women's refuges in the belief that women had the right to be physically safe and emotionally safe. The understanding of domestic violence in this country comes entirely from women's refuges. They do much much more than just put a roof over people's heads. They are there on the phones and in person with women to talk through the safety in their relationships—whether they leave or not. They are there doing the healing work between the mothers and the children which we know is actually the heart of what enables them to move forward in life and stop the cycle of violence. For the Minister to say that she is even questioning their effectiveness shows to me a complete ignorance of the role of women's refuges particularly when I have surveyed 20 of them and most of those refuges—the majority—had not had a funding increase in 8 years. The Government has been cutting services and cutting staff because their funding is currently inadequate. We have heard of an area where there were 1500 police reports going to a refuge and it had $17000 a year that was supposedly expected to cover it in following up on those 1500 police reports. If there is any question of the effectiveness of women's refuges it is only because the Government has run down their funding to an extent that they are not able to fully function. That is putting the safety of our women children and communities absolutely at risk. It should not be allowed and the Minister needs to review her entire thinking on this issue and step up and put some funding into the safety protective factors in our communities and refuge is very much one of those. There are so many things to talk about. I would like to just in this short period of time talk about another very very important issue which is the social investment approach and funding for people who are unable to work and to recognise that—"