Davidson MaramaMARAMA DAVIDSON (Co-Leader—Green): E Te Māngai o Te Whare ata mārie tātou katoa. It appears that we are in agreement at least at a high level today in this House with the passage of this the Child Poverty Reduction Bill. I am absolutely pleased relieved and hopeful about this in fact. I know and it has been acknowledged already by many members that we may not always agree to the pathway on how we actually get enduring sustainable long-lasting solutions to child poverty. I want to be very clear that child poverty is whānau and community poverty and that is one of the strong points that the Greens have always understood that we cannot separate tamariki from whānau.I want to acknowledge the systemic and environmental causes of poverty and I think my starting point therefore—and possibly it is political—is that poverty is not an accident. It's also not a personal choice and there have been utterances today of the opposite. But I'm going to be very clear that poverty is created in actual fact by the decisions that have been made in this House by the decisions made over long successive political actions in this House by people who are not in poverty. So I do welcome this bill. I do welcome us working together as a Parliament to ensure that we are going to measure be accountable for and have political will and commitment to remove poverty from our communities.The Greens do not accept—we do not accept—that any measure of poverty is inevitable. We know that this has in fact been a status quo narrative that we have been held hostage to for ever for far too long—that that is going to simply be the case in our communities. Well certainly not the case to the extent that it appears today and I certainly will continue to say and know that there is no excuse actually in this beautiful Aotearoa of ours for anyone to not be living in dignity and with all their social economic and spiritual needs met in this beautiful country of ours. So I am very pleased about the passage of this bill—the clear commitment that it's going to require from all of us not just to work together but to work with our communities.But I will if the House doesn't mind maintain some reservation about how we are going to get there. That has already been put on the floor by several members as part of the not always consensus around the pathways. There's also not always consensus about how we got here I have to say. And I too like Minister Martin will be blatant enough to own—poverty is political. We cannot separate property from politics. And if it is far too political of me to say then it is not always with ease that I sit and receive particularly Opposition members' flagging that we must do all we can to negate poverty in our country when some of the actions of that Opposition's Government absolutely made it worse.Nicola Willis: Shame—shame on you.MARAMA DAVIDSON: That's why I'm pleased to see this bill will consider the ecosystem of poverty which will require that we have to understand how our housing decisions in this House impact—how selling off and reducing the quota of public and social housing absolutely has a part to play in the increase of poverty on children. So I am glad to see that and I'll go into submissions now. And I'm not ashamed for putting that on the floor—not at all.I'll go through the submissions now. Many—most—were very clear that we have to be aware of the systemic and ecosystem dynamics of poverty and that poverty does not sit in a vacuum. Again this is what the bill is hoping to pick up and the accountability of the bill to that systemic dynamic of poverty will be really crucial for our work going forward.I want to acknowledge for example Te Pou Matakana the commissioning agency for Whānau Ora who insisted as many others did that we report on poverty by age gender and ethnic group to make sure that we are picking up—because poverty doesn't impact on all groups in the same way. We know that here and it's very very clear. I echo what Minister Sepuloni highlighted about the different impacts on Māori Pacific and people and children with a disability. Mothers and children also are more likely to be impacted on by the decisions that we make in this House over housing health education justice—all of the areas will impact on whether or not families live with dignity and above the poverty line. So I welcome those many submissions who highlighted that the reporting if we're going to do it properly needs to be very clear.I really want to pick up on the submission of Hāpai Te Hauora who put into words in a far better way what I have always wanted to be articulating as a responsibility of my role in this House. Absolutely many of the submitters came through with the importance of Te Tiriti and an understanding that in fact it is a breach of Te Tiriti that tamariki are not being protected when they are so overly disproportionately represented in poverty and that we understand the impacts of colonisation and the systemic racist structures that can absolutely impact on children who are Māori and Pacific and that that has to be taken into account in our solutions. In fact addressing poverty for all families and including Māori families is about enhancing the sovereignty of whānau hapū and iwi and the well-being of children is relative to us understanding mokopuna as our taonga. The structural barriers to well-being relate back to the original loss of land language and place in our country. So I want to acknowledge the many submissions that came through identifying some of those structural causes of inequality of poverty for whānau and communities.That is why as others already have done in here there are always going to be political points that actually have to be made in this conversation. That doesn't detract from the collaborative work that we have to do together in this House but I think it would be remiss to dismiss the many submitters who came through who are on the ground every day dealing with the systemic barriers and if we do not address them then this bill is worth nothing.I wanted to raise a particular point from the submission from Hāpai te Hauora who wanted to talk about a single statistician—you know I do acknowledge my colleague James Shaw as Minister—reminding us that data translation is never impartial; never ever. So making sure that we understand that the collection and translation of data needs to be independent and accountable and we need to be accountable for it. So I was again pleased to see in the Social Services and Community Committee's report an understanding of a wider call and collection for data particularly by gender age and ethnicity again.Most of all many submissions came through outlining that poverty is not a statistic and that we keep the lived experiences the narratives the actual real human stories of the experiences always at the forefront of the work that we do. For example Kaipara Māori Women's Welfare League insisted that—and again I agree with this—the most enduring solutions require Government to actively partner with Māori to resolve the systemic issues that have caused poverty in the first place and that we cannot keep plastering over the wounds of racism and institutionalised frameworks that haven't worked over consistent political Parliaments.So I am very pleased to lift the voice of those submissions that came through. I'm very pleased to highlight this day of the second reading of a bill that absolutely has all of the support in this House. I am not at all shy of upholding the political points that are inevitable and I know that that won't detract from us continuing to work together. Kia ora.