Wall Louisa: Address in ReplyText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWall Louisa: Address in Reply[Sitting date: 21 October 2014. Volume:701;Page:80. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]LOUISA WALL (Labour—Manurewa):Kia ora Mr Assistant Speaker. E ngā mana e ngā reo e ngā rangatira mā tēnā koutou tēnā koutou tēnā tātou katoa. I would like to take this opportunity to firstly congratulate you on your reselection as Assistant Speaker in this House of Parliament. I find that you have always been very fair and I look forward to working with you and your colleagues the Rt Hon David Carter the Hon Chester Borrows—and I want to acknowledge that this is a new role for him—and also my colleague the Hon Trevor Mallard.I would also like to congratulate all members across the House but particularly new members. This is an opportunity that you cannot pay for. It is an opportunity that you earn through hard work and connection with your communities—those of you who are electorate MPs.I also want to take the opportunity to congratulate all the political parties on what was a pretty intense campaign. National has worked hard and has secured a mandate. I respect that the people of New Zealand have spoken and I wish you all very well in the role in terms of governing our country.I also want to acknowledge all the new Ministers and all the new select committee chairs because we want to be constructive in terms of the work that this House does. I would also like to specifically acknowledge the Hon Te Ururoa Flavell in his role as Minister for Māori Development and acknowledge a new tikanga that he established which was to have a karakia on Monday morning with Te Ātiawa in Matangireia and it was a privilege to actually be part of what is a new tikanga. And I also want to acknowledge and thank the House for its agreement to my colleague Su’a William Sio taking the Oath of Allegiance in his heritage language in addition to taking the Oath in English because whether or not we realise it we have changed and created a tikanga that I hope will enable in the future any New Zealander who has a heritage language to be able to take the Oath in either Māori or English and also in their heritage language. So I am really proud of what this House has managed to achieve already.I want to focus on what the Government’s agenda is within the next 3 years and its relevance to my electorate of Manurewa. I want to thank the people of Manurewa for empowering me with the responsibility to be their spokesperson and in doing so I want to acknowledge all the other people who put their hands up to be the spokesperson for Manurewa. I am incredibly privileged to be in this position. So for me when I look at the agenda that the Government has set out for the country of course I am going to think about what it means for the people of my electorate.One of the policies that the Government has signalled that it will prioritise is extending flexible working arrangements. I guess that as a member of the Service and Food Workers Union—a proud member of the Service and Food Workers Union which represents the lowest-paid people in our country—I obviously want to understand what the implications for flexible working arrangements may mean. For me a flexible working arrangement means decreasing the power of the unions and obviously unions collaborate with workers to make sure that the conditions of workers enable them to get a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work. What does that pay do? It pays for their power. It pays for their rent. Hopefully it pays for their mortgages for some of them. But what it does is enable people to live independent lives. So when we look at equality of opportunity obviously the equality of opportunity does not happen within a vacuum. It happens within a context. What I am hoping is that those flexible working arrangements are going to enable working New Zealanders to be able to put a roof over their heads and food on the table and enable their children to have a good quality of life whether it be in sports or the arts or whatever.What I do not want to see in terms of the consequences of the legislation that this Government has prioritised is an erosion of the value of wages because if we see an erosion of the value of wages what does it mean in electorates like mine? Actually it means people living in cars people living in tents people living on the streets and people living in circumstances where 18 people in a two-bedroom home or a three-bedroom home has actually become normal. It means children living in garages. That context for the people of my electorate in Manurewa is something that I am incredibly focused on because I cannot do my job unless the Government does its job and I am sure that the Government has not got a deliberate intention to put families and children on the streets living in cars and living in garages.The other thing that I do not want to see through the extension of flexible working arrangements is an expansion of the low-paid service sector. We want to see people being paid enough and not having to work 60-hour 70-hour 80-hour or 90-hour weeks to be able to live the New Zealand dream which is actually about working hard and then having a quality of life that means that you can then play sport and you can take your kids to the beach. You know you should not have to work 6 or 7 days a week. The other thing I do not want to see is that it increases temporary and part-time employment. Again what does that erode? It erodes the ability of families and parents to provide the basics for their children.My focus on homelessness is timely because the Parliamentary Library research unit put out a paper in July and it is entitled Homelessness in New Zealand—the reality of homelessness in New Zealand—and I am going to outline the people who are homeless in New Zealand. The University of Otago did some research and basically people who are homeless in New Zealand are new migrants Pasifika or north Asian. More than half of them are people younger than 25 years old. Half of them are children under the age of 15 years and most of them are Māori and Pasifika. The relevance of these statistics to my electorate is that there I have 32 percent Pasifika I have 28 percent Māori and I have 23.4 percent Indian. So for me I live in an electorate where I have high concentrations of specific ethnic groups who do not own their own homes and actually the State and the social housing providers and the landlords who are going to provide accommodation to my constituents are incredibly important.Homeownership rates in New Zealand are now at less than 50 percent but if you are Māori they are 28 percent and if you are Pasifika they are 18.5 percent. So one of the concerns I have—and this is another priority for this Government—is that we are going to sell 22000 State houses. We currently have 68000 State houses. The mandate of Housing New Zealand is to provide rental housing for those who need it most. I guess that when I look at the definition of those who need it most I would have thought that that included people living in cars people living in tents people living on the streets and people living in two and three-bedroom houses where there are three four or five families living together in crowded conditions.When I look at my electorate I see that we have houses sitting empty at the moment so what Iain Lees-Galloway is experiencing in Palmerston North what Carmel Sepuloni is experiencing in Kelston what Megan Woods is experiencing in Wigram and what I would contend quite a few other electorate MPs across this House are experiencing is that they are meeting people who are in need of what I would say is the basic necessity of life—that is to be able go to work for kids to be able to go to school and for our children to have the aspirations and the dreams that we all want them to have. So when I look at a priority of selling 22000 State houses within a context of underprovision it makes no sense to me—it makes no sense to me.So I want to call this Government to account. There will be some houses in some places where actually selling the house and using that money more effectively makes sense but I call for a moratorium on the selling of State houses in areas like Manurewa South Auckland Christchurch and west Auckland where we have people who are living in cars and living on the streets. They have nowhere to live. So if the Government is true to what it said in terms of addressing child poverty one of the things I would like it to do is to tell us—tell New Zealand—where these 22000 houses are and to guarantee that in areas where we do not have the provision the Government will not sell them. I think that if this Government wants to work constructively and meet the needs of New Zealanders it would do that. Thank you.