Woods MeganGENERAL DEBATEHon Dr MEGAN WOODS (Minister of Housing): I move That the House take note of miscellaneous business.It is a fine day to be a New Zealander. It is a fine day to know that we live in a country that has so much to be positive about so much that we can celebrate and so much that we can look forward with optimism to. Just last month in this House our Government passed a Budget that we can be proud of one that was focused on the future and focused on keeping New Zealanders safe from COVID-19 accelerating our recovery and rebuild and tackling those foundational issues that we must tackle collectively: climate change housing affordability and child poverty. These are things that any responsible Government must take seriously. What we have to do is remain focused on the future. What we cannot afford to do is to slip into what we're seeing on the other side of the House in a desperate and destructive Opposition who are showing zero signs of unity who are more concerned with their own divisions and with their past than with the future of Aotearoa New Zealand. While we're on the subject of the past I would like to just dwell there for a moment. Before I came to this fine House I was a historian. I was a New Zealand historian and I still consider myself to be one. Over the last days we have not seen a finer example of why it is this Government made the right call to teach New Zealand history in our schools; we could not have seen a finer example from the Opposition of what happens when someone is ignorant of their past. We could not have seen a finer example of someone who refuses to accept how we got to the places we got to today. The historians club is upset that it's from someone who purports to call himself a historian that we're seeing this particular behaviour but it does give me some semblance of hope to see that even his own colleagues haven't backed him up—that his own colleagues have been as dismayed at the behaviour and the rhetoric that we have seen coming from the Opposition benches. On this side of the House in order for us to confront those issues in our future—if we are going to tackle those foundational issues like climate change like housing affordability like child poverty—we must understand what has gone before us. We must understand how we got to where we are today and what the policies are that got us to this place. I will for ever be grateful to the many months I spent over the road going through Peter Fraser's papers understanding housing policy straight after World War II. What we're hearing—the reaction from the Opposition—shows the fact that they do not see that to remain positively focused on the future we have to understand what went before us. When I started this speech I said it was a fine day to be a New Zealander. One of those reasons is today's release of the Climate Commission's report. As I indicated in my ministerial statement I distinctly recall sitting in the Paris climate talks thinking How on earth is New Zealand going to reach this target? How are we going to do it through domestic reductions and domestic abatements rather than trading our way out of it with overseas-purchased credits?" Today what we have is a blueprint for how it is that we can start tackling climate change how it is that we can start reducing our emissions. We have a lot to consider. What we do know and I think one of the things that we can be hugely optimistic about is that the commissioners have indicated that we are on the right track. We do have those technologies at our disposal but we do need to do more. We cannot think that the status quo the way we are operating today is the way that we can look forward to the future with optimism. We need to accelerate what we're doing need to bring more momentum and I hope that this House can continue to have a collective approach to that. Climate change is a generational challenge and I'd like to think this Parliament could rise to that occasion."