Harawira Hone: KiwiSaver Bill — Second Reading 
Harawira Hone: KiwiSaver Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:633;Page:4856] 
HONE HARAWIRA (Maori Party—Te Tai Tokerau) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Assistant Speaker. Tena tatou te Whare. Tena koe nga hui. In yesterday’s debate on the Westpac New Zealand Bill National MP Mr Chris Tremain pointed out how petty it seemed to be talking about technical adjustments to an Order in Council when in the space of a week we had been saying our final farewells to our queen Te Atairangikaahu welcoming our new king Te Arikinui Tuheitia and swearing into office New Zealand’s 19th Governor-General the Hon Anand Satyanand. That is kind of how I feel about the second reading of the KiwiSaver Bill. 
A couple of weeks ago during the parliamentary adjournment a report on the nation’s social well-being was quietly released—a report that confirmed that although those on one side of the seesaw are becoming heavier with wealth and profit those on the other side are teetering dangerously close to falling off. There are huge differences in wealth and income between the top earners and those who face the daily grind of poverty those we know as te pani me te rawakore. It is simply getting worse and worse. The  
Social Report 2006 
 confirmed what many people had been warning Governments about for years—that for the last 20 years while the spectacular wealth of the rich has increased the relative wealth of the nation has decreased and the income gap has widened. The report stated that a lot more people are on low incomes now than ever before with 19 percent living below the 60 percent threshold in 2004 compared with 12 percent in 1988. The report also stated that the number of poor people who spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing has more than doubled in that same time. 
So for those of us in this House who make the decisions as to how social and economic policies like those intended in the KiwiSaver Bill will affect the nation the question we must ask ourselves is whether this state of affairs is acceptable. Well if one belongs to the Ronald Reagan club one would probably say: “Yeah why not? A rising tide lifts all boats.” Well I am sorry to tell people this but Ronald Reagan was wrong. I have been to Washington DC the capital of the greatest capitalist nation in the world and have stood in the streets of the crack dealers the drunks the prostitutes and the crippling poor—and just up the road I could see the White House. Ronald Reagan’s theories are little comfort to those Maori and other people in this country who struggle every day to put food on the table and to pay the power and the rent. 
 The 2001 census stated that only 47 percent of Maori lived in their own homes compared with 71 percent of non-Maori. Today even Pakeha will tell us that it is bloody hard to scrape together the deposit for a home when the rent they pay to live in some dive is crippling them and their families. The census also noted that 61 percent of Maori shifted home compared with 49 percent of non-Maori and that the main reason for doing so was to get a job. That migration is killing rural economies. In half of the country’s regions there has been more than a 50 percent shift as people up and move. 
This ain’t no accident. This is death by design: the decimation of our home towns or as the Government now calls them “limited employment locations”. The Government now has a policy of saving millions of dollars by actively creating regions of economic desolation and blacklisting areas marked out to be deserts of deprivation. A couple of weeks back members may have seen the article about 412 beneficiaries being warned that if they did not shift quick smart they could lost their benefit. Surprise surprise! With that hanging over their heads people are moving out of the blacklisted areas. Guess what? Now all the local mayors are jumping up and down. New Plymouth’s Mayor Peter Tennent said it was unhelpful and that it undermined our smaller communities and Marlborough District’s Mayor Alistair Sowman said the region was crying out for workers and that the blacklist would put people off moving there. Combined Beneficiaries Union president Helen Chappell said that the limited employment location scheme makes little sense because what we lose on the swings we gain on the roundabouts. In other words people may shift to an area that is cheaper for rent purposes but dearer for buying food. It is hardly worth it simply to keep a benefit of $150 a week. 
How does all that affect the KiwiSaver Bill? It is really quite simple. How tough is it to ask those who are already struggling to survive to dig deeper to find the extra 4 percent of their already low incomes to put into the Government’s grand new superannuation saver scheme? The reality is that over the last few years rents and mortgages have skyrocketed and the number of people experiencing severe hardship has increased as well to the point where Family Budgeting Services coordinator Jarrod Rendall reckons that many of the people he sees simply could not afford the 4 percent required under the KiwiSaver Bill. People needing help from budgeting services are already in debt and the extra 4 percent would mean cutting out essential items like food for many who are on low incomes. That is just too big an ask. 
This House must face up to the issues of crippling poverty high mobility regional downturn and beneficiary bullying. These are our people; these are our citizens. Members should not get me wrong; the KiwiSaver Bill has a lot of merit. At its first reading I commended the Government for its commitment to establishing a workplace savings scheme and said that the Maori Party welcomed the idea of using Kiwi savings as a home deposit. The reality is that right now as we speak this Government is implementing a plan to strangle 259 limited employment locations and to no one’s surprise they are the towns that a lot of Maori people call home. They are places like Te Hapua Mitimiti Rangi Point Mokau Kawhia Port Waikato Reporoa Rotokawa Ruatoki Tokaanu Maraetai Waitahanui Wairakei Matahiwi Matawai Tikitiki Whangara and so it goes on. Those are the towns that today’s bureaucrats want to kill. 
The strange thing is that a lot of those towns are like that because yesterday’s bureaucrats put them there in the first place. Te Hapua was never a metropolis but it was a strong and thriving community with a post office and a shop and a lot of people worked in forestry and fishing. Bang no more post office so the shop closed because people could not get money any more. Bang no more forestry because some clown in Wellington decided to privatise the industry. Local contractors were undercut by the big boys and there was unemployment. Bang Maori got fishing quota and within 10 years there were fewer Maori out fishing than ever before. There was more unemployment. 
Places like Te Hapua Mitimiti and the 257 other doomed home towns are the life and soul of our whanau our hapu and our iwi. They are places that our people all around the world come back to: their turangawaewae—the places that they and no doubt many members in this House still call home. Yet with one slash of the pen this Government plans to shut those places down to push our people out the door and then to tell them not to forget to keep something aside for KiwiSaver. It is hard for the Maori Party to support this bill because we cannot see that the working poor and beneficiaries are genuinely being looked after so as to become financially secure and self-reliant into the future. 
Finally I was interested to note the comments from Investment Savings and Insurance Association chief executive Vance Arkinstall who reckons there are still some major doubts about whether the KiwiSaver Bill will be sufficiently compelling to many New Zealanders. Perhaps instead we should be learning from Ngai Tahu who have just launched the world-first Whai Rawa scheme—a long-term savings plan to support whanau independence by increasing personal wealth. Each year Ngai Tahu will make an annual distribution to the scheme. Whanau will be invited to save their own money too and where whanau are able to contribute the runanga will match their savings. That is Kiwi ingenuity; indeed that is iwi ingenuity. Ngai Tahu whanau can choose to contribute their own savings and see them matched dollar for dollar by their own iwi. The long-term plan for financial security and independence is iwi saver. That is a concept the Maori Party and everybody else can surely support. Kia ora tatou.