Radhakrishnan PriyancaPRIYANCA RADHAKRISHNAN (Labour): Thank you Madam Speaker. It's with absolute pleasure that I rise to make a contribution and talk about this Government's 2019 Wellbeing Budget which we should all be incredibly proud of. But of course we wouldn't know that from the doom and gloom we've heard from Opposition members who have gotten up to speak. Either we've heard a speech like the one delivered by the member who just resumed her seat Parmjeet Parmar that manages to be arrogant nasty boring and lacking in substance all at once—quite the skill I've got to say—or we hear contributions from other members of the Opposition who talk about how there's nothing new in this Budget. I think it was the member Denise Lee who said that it was fluff marketing and then pointed to a whole host of issues that culminated under the last Government: things like traffic and the woes that Aucklanders like myself and my colleague Dr Deborah Russell for example have experienced infrastructure issues nine years of underspending and initiatives—this is a bit of a trend that we've picked up through the Estimates hearing process post-Budget at select committees of things that were promised by the previous Government that had no funding allocated for them. So given that those are all the issues that we've inherited I think it's a little bit rich that members opposite lead with those. But anyway going back to the Wellbeing Budget which is historic it is a world first for a specific reason and for that reason has actually garnered international support and has been in the spotlight since it was released a few weeks ago. Now the concept that underlies or underpins the Wellbeing Budget has actually been a concept that has been around for a while. Going back to a 2009 report that is generally known as the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission report that actually talked about the limitations of using GDP as a sole measure to measure economic performance and progress more broadly. Now that was a report that was written by a whole bunch of eminent economists and social scientists and it was one that was talking to political leaders at the time. One of the main recommendations of that report was to broaden the scope of traditional indicators that are used to measure economic societal and environmental progress from the point of view that that is integral if we're looking at the wellbeing of citizens which at the end of the day is what all of us are here to talk about. The Government is here to serve its people and integral to that is improving the wellbeing of its citizens. For that reason for the reason that it adopts that approach where it puts the wellbeing of people at the heart of decision making for the reason that it focuses on outcomes—where do we want our citizens to be? What improvements do we want to see? How do we work backwards to make sure that Budget bids actually lead to those improvements? For all those reasons this is a historic Budget. At this point I want to commend the leadership of our Prime Minister the Rt Hon Jacinda Ardern and the Minister of Finance the Hon Grant Robertson for actually taking the bold step of focusing on and tackling the long-term challenges that this country faces because although the concept is one that has been long held it's never actually been put into practice in the form of a Budget. We are the first in the Western World to actually do that—Brett Hudson: Oh what a lot of tosh. PRIYANCA RADHAKRISHNAN: —and so while members opposite might scoff it's actually the truth. In the time that I have today all we have to do is to look at a couple of initiatives that will actually outline why this is historic and the first that I'd like to focus on is mental health. Now we are making a historic investment of almost $2 billion for the first time ever into improving mental health which is a huge challenge for New Zealanders. If you look at a scale or a severity argument we will see that one in five New Zealanders is affected according to the data that we currently have. If you even want to look at it from an economic cost point of view $12 billion was the cost estimate back in 2014. Severity—all we have to do is to look at the data around youth suicides. Now in the Maungakiekie electorate alone where I am based I was talking to one of the youth providers—Flipping East—that we have there who told me that if you look at the numbers of youth suicides in just the eastern part of the electorate in the year leading up to the last election you'll find that it's in double figures. I was told by nine families over the course of the 10-month campaign that I ran on the ground there that each one of them had lost one young person in their family to suicide. That is nine youth suicides that I heard about within a 10-month period alone. There is a huge need to address this and that's what this Government has done. If you look at the universal front-line service that has been announced through this Wellbeing Budget it is so that anyone can go up to their primary healthcare provider—whether it's a GP service or an iwi healthcare service—and if their GP picks up that they have a mental health need they can literally be walked down to a mental health provider so that they get the care that they need when they need it. This will be rolled out over a five-year period. Intensive support for those who are specifically at risk which includes those who have self-harmed or those who have experienced suicidal distress and expanding access to addiction treatments—we've heard from the Minister of Corrections the Hon Kelvin Davis who told us that 91 percent of people in prisons have experienced either a mental health issue or an addictive substance use issue. I can see the care and the thought that has gone into looking at which of the populations specifically need to be prioritised in this Budget and where are they—so prisons are an example of that. Youth mental health expanding the nurses in schools programme and expanding that programme to decile 5 schools—that's what it means to put people at the heart of decision making and to focus on the outcomes that we want to see as a nation as opposed to specific Budget bids as we've seen in the past. That's what makes to my mind this Wellbeing Budget an outstanding one. Look at family and sexual violence for example: now the select committee that I'm deputy chair of the Social Services and Community Committee went to Australia last year—Anahila Kanongata'a-Suisuiki: A hard-working committee. PRIYANCA RADHAKRISHNAN: —and talked to a whole bunch of members of Parliament—and Anahila my colleague is on it as well of course—and Ministers academics and non-governmental organisations and the one thing that every one of them pointed to as a driver of issues like poverty homelessness and crime was family and sexual violence. The links between family violence mental wellbeing and addiction have been noted for years. These things exacerbate family and sexual violence. So if one were to put the victim survivor at the centre you would look at how you change behaviours and attitudes to stop violence and that's where the spending in advertising campaigns and intervention programmes comes into play. Then you'd look at what happens once violence occurs and what are the support services that need to be funded and that's where the 24/7 sexual violence crisis support funding in the Wellbeing Budget comes from. It's the funding into the Integrated Safety Response as well. Then you'd look at justice where there's a huge link between the justice system and victim/survivors of violence. I know this because one of the worst weeks in my life was when I supported a woman who had been raped and had to go through the justice process. So what are we doing there? We're looking at how we reduce retraumatisation there by looking at alternative ways in which victims of sexual violence can give evidence in court so that they're not retraumatised. We're looking at video victim statements for the same reason: to reduce trauma and to reduce time that is spent in court. We're also looking at support for male survivors of violence—an issue that's been talked about for years again—and kaupapa Māori services in terms of a response to sexual violence as well. So this is the largest single spend on family and sexual violence we've ever seen. It sits across eight portfolios and it's demonstrative of how a good Budget works. So this may not solve all the issues—this Government has never said that it will—but it's an important step in absolutely the right direction. Thank you.