SpeechSPECIAL DEBATESPetitions Committee Report—Petition of Citizens Advice Bureau New Zealand: Leave no-one behind – Campaign to address digital exclusionDebate resumed.JAN LOGIE (Green): Thank you Mr Speaker. It's a real pleasure to rise and speak as briefly as it is on behalf of the Green Party in this special debate. I too want to thank the Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB) for prompting this debate with a petition but before that the research and analysis that led to the petition which showed three months of client engagements that had 4379 interactions involving digital exclusion—giving us quantitative data I think for the first time around the breadth of this problem in our communities and the work that's been picked up by our community organisations because of that. Such an important conversation for our Parliament.Today I'm going to focus not on the digital aspect but the public service aspect the social inclusion aspect because I think that is crucially important. I want to note that while I really thank CAB for bringing this they're not the first organisation to have been raising concerns about disconnection from Government and people. I speak most recently having participated in an amazing meeting in Porirua led by Ngāti Toa Rangatira chief executive Helmut Modlik bringing 100 community leaders together to discuss how as a community we might help shape our services to meet the needs of people. He was saying in that meeting about how he'd been at a workshop in the Ministry of Health in 2020 to figure out how to boost vaccination rates and when they were thinking about that they were thinking Well what Government initiative in the past has reached everybody in the population?" and could not come up with one single initiative that had reached everyone. We have a one-size-fits-all approach and the digital approach across Government has been another example of that. It systematically fails significant groups of people. The CAB research has shown us that it's failing people who lack access to computers and internet or who don't have digital literacy. They're possibly the obvious groups we'd think might struggle in a digital approach as well as those with low incomes who can't afford fancy computers that go fast or can't afford the internet access; but also people with literacy challenges and people where English is not their first language and people with disabilities that make reading or processing the information and being able to communicate their own needs in a written way difficult and those who have no desire to be online—and viva those people. As an introvert I am super keen on the online approach as deeply frustrating as I find it but I want to acknowledge too that there's been nothing in the communications from CAB or anybody else that's saying we want to get rid of that. It's just saying it needs to improve to be more accessible but also we have to have options that work that are tailored for our diversity as people. The starting point for Public Service—recognising that the Government has legal obligations in its provision of public services to ensure that it does not exclude people—is to find out actually how do people engage? How do people want to engage? And how can the Government meet them where they are at rather than the starting point of what is easy for the organisation the bureaucracy. Too often that has been our starting point.I want to too just clearly put on record that this is not having a go at our public servants. I note that the Public Service Association has a charter that clearly says they want public services to be easy to use to be there when people need them and for communities to have a say in the shape of those services. People have been calling for this. Māori have been calling for this. This piece of research and this petition gives us some quantitative data to really challenge us. I'm so grateful for this Parliament to have the opportunity today to be able to have this discussion because it's absolutely core to whether anything we discuss in this House has any chance of success because if it's not for our people what is it for? So thank you CAB."