Turei Metiria: Crimes (Reasonable Parental Control and Correction) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Turei Metiria: Crimes (Reasonable Parental Control and Correction) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:666;Page:13825] 
METIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 I acknowledge the contribution made by Chester Borrows much of which I agree with. He gave an excellent history of the Crimes (Reasonable Parental Control and Correction) Amendment Bill. Some of the most serious threats that our kids face are violence and abuse so we must maintain and strengthen the protections in law for children including those in the Crimes Act as Sue Bradford worked incredibly hard and successfully to do. 
I will look at the broader issues and look at the status of children in Aotearoa today. How are our kids actually doing? Compared internationally they are doing very poorly indeed. New Zealand ranks 29th out of 30 countries in the OECD for child health and safety—almost at the bottom. Out of 30 OECD countries New Zealand is ranked 21st for infant mortality and 29th for measles immunisation. Fifteen percent of all children in this country live in poor households. Thirty-one percent of children in this country live in overcrowded homes. In households that suffer from food scarcity body mass index—BMI—tends to be higher and children suffer from poor nutrition and long-term health impacts. 
Hundreds of children change schools every Monday because their families live in overcrowded and insecure housing. That change of schools is undermining their education and leading to future underachievement and low incomes. On other international scores New Zealand is fourth from the bottom of all OECD countries for injury deaths amongst 1 to 4-year-olds. New Zealand has 14 times the average OECD rate of rheumatic fever. It has rates of whooping cough and pneumonia that are five to 10 times greater than those of the UK and the US. Its rate of child maltreatment death is four to six times higher than the rates of OECD countries with the best results—four to six times higher. 
The truth is that our society treats kids really badly. Too many of our kids live in miserable housing and suffer significant illness and Third World diseases. Our kids suffer terribly from accidents and worse from deliberate maltreatment at the hands of adults. Knowing all this—and it is easy to find this out—the only solution that the ACT Party proposes is to remove some of the meagre legal protections that our children have against grown-ups who hit kids. That is the ACT solution to the poverty and inequality suffered by our children and their families—to make it legal for grown-ups to hit kids. That is ACT’s solution. That kind of political leadership which invests so much effort into legislation that will increase harm to children is perhaps an indicator of why our kids are doing so badly. So much more has to be done and we are wasting time on legislation like this. 
We know that if we reduce the gap between rich and poor and address inequality we can raise the living standards and well-being of all New Zealand children. Reducing the gap between rich and poor is good for everyone in our society not just the poorest. So let us spend our time dealing with that. How about we guarantee the essentials for every New Zealand child so that we can guarantee them the opportunities they need. How about we make sure that every child has a warm dry secure home. Let us build homes for the 300000 kids who need them. That would be good use of our time. Let us eliminate the discrimination in income support that the children of beneficiary families suffer. Let us give the poorest families the extra 60 bucks a week that working families get. Those extra 60 bucks a week for the poorest families would mean that they would not have to choose between paying the rent and paying the power bill. 
Let us stop wasting our time on bills like this that seek to injure children and instead build a society that treats our kids with the respect and the dignity they deserve. Kia ora.