Swarbrick ChlöeCHLÖE SWARBRICK (Green—Auckland Central): Yes Mr Speaker thank you. E te Māngai tēnā koe. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. On 27 January within just a few hours of heavy rainfall parts of Tāmaki-makau-rau my home and the homes of many across this House and of our communities were under water. Land slipped away and livelihoods were destroyed. In Grey Lynn next door to Auckland Central a whānau escaped from the second-storey window of their house the first floor entirely overwhelmed by water with a kayak from their next-door neighbour. Stories like this were not novel or unique; they were found across Tāmaki-makau-rau Auckland. A fortnight later Cyclone Gabrielle tore havoc across the North Island and 11 people are now dead. Auckland Council warns that we are at serious risk of slips for the foreseeable future and we're yet to properly count the hundreds of millions of dollars in damages.This is climate change. I never anticipated that I would have a hair-trigger response to rain but speaking to many of my friends in Tāmaki-makau-rau it is precisely the visceral response that's been embedded in all of us by virtue of this experience. This environment has been brought about by the fairy tale economic thinking that has been intent on destabilising and transforming—sorry the economic thinking has destabilised this environment. This is the same climate change we experienced in Tāmaki-makau-rau that's delivered states of emergency and multiple one-in-100-year weather events across the country every single year. We have seen it on the East Coast on the West Coast in the top of the South Island in Northland and now on Queen Street in Auckland Central. When that climate crisis unfolded we saw what really matters. Communities jumped to action. Neighbours looked after neighbours—no questions asked no means testing no concern about who deserved it.Then you step into this place and what really matters couldn't feel like further from the agenda in a debate like this and frankly I've got to say it's just kind of embarrassing given what has happened to the North Island over the past few months. A lot of the debate here is fuelled by these fairy tales of economic thinking and what we've got to sacrifice to this notion of the economy. So let's talk about the facts of that economy—that economy being all of us and the stuff that we create and the rules that we put in place about how that is distributed and the kinds of outcomes that we want to incentivise. We don't live in a game of Monopoly which by the way was actually invented to teach children about the pitfalls of an economy that is built on land banking and capital accumulation in the hands of a few. The rules can and should change when they don't work for the majority of us—and they don't. The rules can and should change when they are destroying the climate necessary for human civilisation and survival—which they do.Inflation is currently sitting at 7.2 percent and the major drivers of inflation are housing—namely rents—transport and household utilities. Statistics New Zealand make it clear that this inflation is hurting lower-income New Zealanders disproportionately hard because they spend the majority of their income on essentials. This inflation comes on a backdrop of pre-existing inequality—in fact the highest rates of wealth inequality that we have had in this country since records began. To lay this out once again that disparity sees—based on the estimations of Max Rashbrooke an economist based at Victoria University of Wellington—that the bottom half of New Zealanders 2.5 million New Zealanders hold just 2 percent of the wealth; the top 10 percent hold 60 percent of that wealth; and the top 1 percent hold 25 percent of the wealth.If we want to address mythologies let's address the mythology that there somehow apparently isn't enough to go around because clearly and evidentially there is. It is a matter of what we value and what we prioritise and we saw in that climate crisis which struck us in Tāmaki-makau-rau that the values out there on the streets in homes and among whānau and communities are values of humanity looking after each other responding when that crisis strikes. And the job of this place is to respond to those slower-moving crises which we can see on the horizon. They are those slower-moving crises of deeply entrenched wealth inequality and the climate crisis which only exacerbates that wealth inequality. If I can say anything in closing it's that we have an opportunity for transformation here in these next few months of this Parliament.