Logie JanJAN LOGIE (Green): Thank you Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of the Green Party to take a call in this—what I'm just going to loosely call the Budget debate—third reading. The Green Party as we supported it at the first reading supported this Budget and we still do. I think when the Government announced the Budget the headline was primarily around the increase to benefits and considering we've dedicated a huge amount of our political effort over many decades to raising income support levels to enable every person in this country to be able to live a decent life we would have been shooting ourselves in the foot if we had not supported this bill that does take a significant step towards increasing those baseline benefits. I'll speak a little bit more to some of the qualifications to that support on that point a little bit later. I also want to recognise though that the Budget invests over $2.1 billion in climate-related initiatives including quite significantly $300 million to quadruple the size of the Green Investment Fund to kick-start—so belatedly—low-carbon technologies while we await with bated breath at the moment the Climate Change Commission's recommendations—which we've received already actually. We're now awaiting the consultation around how we progress those recommendations as a country and that work will guide the next round of climate action from the Government. I do need to acknowledge at this point the sense of urgency and compounding anxiety that many people in our communities are feeling not just relating to the pandemic but relating to the climate change that is so much more visibly in front of us now as we look at the floods that are happening in our country and around the world when we're watching entire towns being erased off the face of this earth with wildfires. It is a real sense that we need to act with as much urgency as we possibly can and for the Greens a large reason for our presence in this House is to get us acting as quickly as we can taking the actions that will matter for us to be able to provide a future for ourselves and our young people. We're not there with that action and I want to point to the general debate speech of my colleague Julie Anne Genter today in relation to the announcement of the land transport fund. Disappointingly—and disappointing" doesn't feel like the right word when we're talking about the significance of this—only 25 percent of that funding is actually going to climate-friendly transport initiatives. At a time when the world is literally burning around us that more money is being put into new motorways that will just help and speed up the burning of our planet is to say the least a shocking thing and I do hope that people will react and engage in the conversations we will be having over the next few months to urge for a turn-around and more urgent action consistent with our duty to save the planet.To speak back to some of the points around this Budget and there's been quite a bit of discussion around the Government's fiscal responsibility I do think it is fair to say in this Budget that the Government has been balancing a sense of "fiscal responsibility"—is the phrase that's usually used—with responding to the absolute decay of a lot of our core public infrastructure and the need in our community. We've seen our nurses who have been looking after us so so incredibly well over the last decades up against short staffing people leaving—same with our midwives and many home-care workers—because their work hasn't been being properly valued and there aren't enough people doing the work because of that. It's a compounding situation. Government is using pay parity to address that. Pay parity is just actually removing acknowledged discrimination and that will help I hope keep people in the sector but it is not the core of the discussion in those negotiations. It was deeply disappointing to hear from the Government their I guess commitment—well not commitment; their direction—to suppress public sector wages earlier this year. That really seemed to fly in the face of the acknowledgment of the really difficult work our public servants have been doing including our nurses and our border workers and all of those people in the background who are making the wage subsidy work as well as everything else. That's an indication of that sense of balancing and trying to be fiscally responsible.We hear people talking about the high levels of debt but in actual fact Labour went into the election saying they were comfortable with Crown debt rising briefly to about 50 percent of GDP whereas Government debt levels in Aotearoa at the end of May were 31 percent of GDP. That was $6.9 billion lower than forecast and the cost of borrowing at the moment is incredibly low. It's a real opportunity to invest for the future. Comparing this to international debt from other countries—Australia's level is close to 50 percent of GDP the UK and the US close to 100 percent—there is quite a lot more room for the Government to be able to move to invest in those things that really matter for our communities. It doesn't have to be done through borrowing alone. The Greens had huge support at the election for our policy of a wealth tax which would have affected 6 percent of people in this country just asking them to pay 1 percent on the net wealth that they had over $1 million. That pool of funding would enable us to ensure that every single person in this country had a guaranteed minimum income that put them above the poverty line. We wouldn't have had to have this massive effort every time we go into lockdown of scrambling around to get people food parcels because people would actually have enough money themselves within their whānau to be able to make those decisions and be able to keep the roof over their head and food on the table and their whare warm. That is just not the reality at the moment.So much of our system is spent on making people go here and ask for help and it was really—again not to be down on the Government but—disappointing to see the announcement around the increase in the student hardship fund as the answer to poverty being experienced by tertiary students around the country at the moment. I understand that that will reach about 15000 at max tertiary students as opposed to I think the over 200000 students that we have. They'll be required to go through their university to be able to access that money and I saw Auckland University apparently are asking people to provide two months of bank statements. From a student to their university to be able to disclose that much detail of your life of where you've been spending your money to be able to get some support when we could've just given and taken the money from those with more than they need to those people to be able to make those decisions for themselves to be able to have enough to go to the shop and pay for it themselves without having to have an intermediary—to restore some dignity in our communities.I really do hope while we support the Government moving in the right direction—and I cannot imagine if the National Party had been in Government what a disaster things would have been for the last two years. But the Greens really also want to provide people with that vision about what if we looked up and thought about how we could do this better how we could ensure that everybody had a sense of security for the future that our environment and our climate were taken care of and that everybody had enough to care for themselves and their whānau.SPEAKER: Members in accordance with determinations of the Business Committee this debate is interrupted and set down for resumption next sitting day. The House stands adjourned until 2 p.m. tomorrow.The House adjourned at 5.51 p.m."