Logie JanJAN LOGIE (Green): I too want to respond to the Minister for Social Development's rhetoric. To be honest there are times in this House when I feel as if I am living in a completely different country to that Minister. When I hear that Minister saying how much the Government has done to alleviate poverty in this country how generous it is and that it is basically just politics that we are not standing up here and congratulating it on everything I just wonder whether that Minister has ever sat across from any advocates like we did in the Social Services Committee where we heard from advocates telling us that they had worked with a mother and a baby who were living in a shed on a mouldy piece of carpet because that family was too intimidated by the culture of Work and Income to apply for a benefit. I want to hear what the Minister would say to that mother and to that advocate in response to those concerns. I want to hear from that Minister what she might have to say to the pensioner with PTSD who was kicked out of his Housing New Zealand house for the damage that he did to it during a psychotic episode. I want to hear from that Minister what she has got to say to those children who are not able to go to school because there is no food at home because they do not have shoes and because they are too embarrassed to get to school. I want to know what this Government is going to do about that. I am not going to congratulate this Minister on a $25 increase when there seems to be nothing that her Government has done that is based on listening to the needs of those families and the people working with them. There is nothing. We have had a token increase based on evidence provided by the officials who told the Minister that that $25 increase would not take one category of people out of poverty—not even one of the people in poverty—in a country that has so much and where productivity and GDP have increased so much but where 155000 kids are going without seven or more of the things that they need. These are not things that would just be nice to have but these are things that are considered the basics for getting by in this society where almost 300000 kids in this affluent society are living in significant income poverty. The Minister expects us to congratulate her and her Government on that. Well I am not going to congratulate the Minister on that. I also want to make the connection between these policies of poverty and the other failed policies around care for children who are hurt in their families and are needing to be removed—and I say needing" with some hesitation. There has been an increase in recent times in the number of children taken into Child Youth and Family care and an 8.1 percent increase in tamariki Māori in particular and I think that is particularly important to note when this Government has so comprehensively failed to work with Māori to plan the new way forward for care for tamariki Māori. While we have had this increase and we know that more children are being taken into care because the pressure on social workers means that in many cases they are not able to work with whānau or families to be able to come up with good solutions and after we had a report in 2014 that told us we needed 356 more social workers we now have fewer social workers than we did then. We have 66 fewer social workers. In a time of transition and a time of increased risk of things going wrong we have fewer social workers. We have a Commissioner for Children with a statutory role of oversight of that system who has repeatedly said they do not have the resources to be able to do that job effectively. So our children are at risk right now because of the decisions of that Government. This Government has created poverty and chaos and it should be kicked out."