Robertson GrantGRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central): Yesterday I was back in my old home town of Dunedin and as I walked along the streets and saw the familiar landmarks the wonderful historic heritage and the haunts of my youth I thought about how fortunate I am to have grown up in that city and indeed in this country blessed as we are with incredible natural resources talented and creative people and a solid foundation laid by previous generations. As a boy from South Dunedin I benefited from New Zealand at its best growing up in a home that was purchased from capitalising the family benefit going to fantastic local schools with kids of all backgrounds and enjoying the coastal environment in the hope that my life would be better in the future. I got to thinking yesterday about the kids growing up in South Dunedin or South Auckland or south Waikato and I thought to myself: Are we giving them the chances offered by New Zealand at its best?". Sadly the answer with the Government we have today is that we are not. New Zealand at its best means that no matter who you are or where you are from it is your talent and hard work that will define your success but at the moment in this country we seem to have delinked those things. Who you know is more important than what you know under this Government—the Koru Club economy where whom John Key or Steven Joyce meet at the buffet matters most rather than what they are providing in terms of productivity for New Zealand; where commercial fishers seem to get away with it and recreational fishers do not; and where Saudi sheep farms are the priority not New Zealanders working hard. New Zealand is at its best when we stand up for the marginalised or for those who are left out and not when we have a Government that makes excuses or will not measure a problem to know whether it even exists and not when we have a country where 10000 extra young people in the last year were left living with too few pairs of shoes or without a good bed to sleep in. We are at our best when we offer every New Zealander a fair share in prosperity. We have seen growth numbers this week but they hide what is really happening. Disposable income is falling. The poorest New Zealanders are shouldering the burden of the housing crisis with half of the bottom 20 percent of income earners paying 50 percent of their income in housing costs. Forty thousand New Zealanders are homeless. Wages are stagnant. That is not New Zealand at its best. We are at our best when we celebrate success and prosperity and we all do and pay our fair share when we do not give a free pass to those who fail to do this and when the Prime Minister does not stand up and say: "If you're worth more than $50 million but you're claiming to earn only $70000 it's OK because you pay a lot of GST." That is what John Key said. Hard-working New Zealanders pay a lot of GST and they pay their way. And New Zealand is at its best when we offer to every young New Zealander the opportunity to grow up in a safe warm and secure home with a world-class education at their local school and with their parents safe in the knowledge that if they get sick they will be looked after. We have built this hopeful sense of opportunity on the efforts of past generations who have been dedicated to the idea that the next generation should be better off than them. But we are facing the very real prospect that the next generation will be the first to be worse off than the one that preceded it—high levels of student debt insecure work and some of the lowest levels of homeownership that we have ever seen. New Zealand is at its best when people work hard do the right things in their communities and know that there is a Government that will back them and not be a disinterested bystander stuck in an ideological rut like this Government is.Labour wants New Zealand to be at its best again. That is why we are focusing on building opportunity for a good life—wherever you live in New Zealand—supporting high-wage industries and jobs supporting strong regions and giving people more hope and opportunity through policies like 3 years' free education post-school or training restoring health funding fixing the homelessness crisis and giving New Zealanders the chance of the security of homeownership. When I was in Dunedin yesterday I was talking about the future of work. That is what Labour is focused on—building an adaptable resilient and inclusive economy where people can have good jobs and high wages into the future. That is New Zealand at its best and with a Labour Government New Zealand will be at its best."