Roche Denise: Budget DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRoche Denise: Budget Debate[Sitting date: 22 May 2014. Volume:699;Page:18263. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DENISE ROCHE (Green):Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker. This is a split call between me and my colleague Holly Walker. I was disappointed last week to be in the House on Thursday and Friday to speak on the first bill that the Government passedunder urgency. I was disappointed because although we voted for the bill to extend the parental tax credit to the parents of newborns to 10 weeks and raise it from $150 to $220 and to extend paid parental leave a bit it was a bill that did not go any way towards addressing the poverty of the babies born to our poorest families. It is estimated that about 15000 families and their babies will be discriminated against in the coming year with this tax credit. Although the extension to paid parental leave is a step—a little step—in the right direction the Child Poverty Action Group’s Susan St John says that the $64 million per year that it will cost would have been better spent on giving those families whom this Government has ignored—the sole parents the students those on ACC those people on the very lowest incomes—the parental tax credit.The latest census information highlights that the gap between the very wealthy and the very poor continues to grow in this country. The deprivation index shows the differences in incomes in all themeshblocks in New Zealand. InŌtara north the median income decreased between 2006 and 2013 by 17.8 percent. Meanwhile in the nearby suburb of St Heliers the median income grew by 25 percent over the same period. We all pay the price for inequality. The research shows that adults suffering serious financial hardship are nine times more likely to experience psychological distress and six times more likely to have experienced an unmet need for a general practitioner in the past 12 months. They are more likely to smoke and suffer from a range of diseases including obesity and obesity-related diseases like type 2 diabetes and rates of childhood obesity in deprived areas are 19 percent compared with 3 percent for those in the least deprived areas. Although the introduction of the free general practitioners visits for children under the age of 13 is great some families cannot even afford the bus fare to get to the doctor. That is why the Greens have a policy and a suite of initiatives that we would like to introduce that would bring health care to the primary schools to where those kids are and save those families from more expense.We see this Budget as a missed opportunity. We could take an investment approach to our people. One of the best ways to do that is to ensure that there are decent jobs for people and decent wages so that people can live on what they earn. But what we see are no measures to do that. In fact the Government’s own forecast suggests a real wage growth of only 0.8 percent and its forecast for GDP is 2.8 percent which means that wages will continue to fall behind and there is no plan for a fairer sharing of that wealth. Meanwhile the cost of living continues to increase and last year 46 percent of wage earners did not get a pay increase to keep up.When we look at the appropriations it is clear that with a bit of political will we could make real meaningful changes that would benefit our lowest paid. Take the parliamentary cleaners for example. They earn less than $15 an hour and it would take a measly $210000 per year for all 30 of them to earn a living wage of $18.80 per hour. If you compare that with the budget for MPs’ IT and the $7 million for maintenance you can see that we are looking at buildings and not at people. We believe that we can do better. We believe in a fair future where people can have good lives and with that we need a smart Green economy that works for everyone. Thank you.Debate interrupted.