Davidson MaramaMARAMA DAVIDSON (Co-Leader—Green): The Greens are proudly part of a global and local grassroots movement of people who understand that we have to work together and do everything we possibly can; that it is our responsibility to the generations coming after us to make sure that we are protecting and stabilising our climate for a good future for our mokopuna; to make sure that we are supporting communities to live decent lives; and that caring for our climate our environment and people goes hand in hand that we cannot separate that care and responsibility for all of these things apart from each other.We know that working with people who are at the front line of these big issues—who are at the forefront of climate instability; who are at the forefront of not having enough to live decent lives; who are at the forefront of trying to look after our natural world our water and our soil and our air and our animals that we all rely on to live—is the essential way that we are going to resolve those very issues.So the problem is that the rules and the way that previous Governments have operated have led to the pollution of our air soil and water. The rules that have been set down by previous Governments have meant that more people are struggling even more to get by while the super-wealthy elite have far more than they will ever ever need. We've just heard from National Party members. It is the National Party's ruinous nine years in Government previously that is absolutely guilty of upholding the cost-saving measures rather than community-serving measures.They have taken that trade-off and we are still seeing the impacts and the legacies from their cost-cutting approach to taking care of our people and our planet. They sold off public housing and we are still mopping up the mess. They allowed houses to be used as a way for wealthier people to build even more wealth where in this country you can get away with owning tens and hundreds of houses as one person while thousands of families still cannot find one home to live in.The previous Government absolutely uphold that and in fact have some pride in allowing that immorality to keep happening. Politicians and definitely the previous Government have caused funding shortfalls for core public services including the previous National Government—funding services to be able to look after our key living systems like water infrastructure that is today degraded that this Government at least is acknowledging needs to be fixed up sorted out. They have allowed for slack rules over the decisions we make over keeping our water clean and plentiful.The previous Government absolutely encouraged the slackness of those rules over our water and land decisions. We have let these slack rules that governments—central and local and authorities—have then made decisions to allow industries to keep polluting water and soil when instead we should be supporting new economic ways of being that are going to ensure that we've still got our rivers and our water sources and healthy growing soils here for 100 years to come and more but that is not the long vision that that previous National Government are ever ever capable of.So as an impact of that we still do have far too many children and their families living in poverty and in hardship. We still do have far too many people finding it really hard to find a warm accessible secure home that they can put their roots down in. We still do have degrading waterways and a water crisis and we still do have an economy that relies on industries that increase our carbon and polluting emissions into the very climate that we should be working to protect.So the Green Party knows that houses are a core public good—are a human fundamental right that everyone deserves. We know that incomes need to be enough so that people can live with dignity and that everyone deserves to live with dignity. We are clear that water is a taonga for future generations and not just a tradable commodity good for the highest bidder. We can do better and this Government has made the important start and steps to turn us in a better direction. We welcome these changes that we have taken to correct generations of harmful Government decisions especially those made by the previous National Government who were selling off public housing—we have stopped that the Nats didn't do that. We have linked benefit increases to wage increases. The Nats—the National Government—didn't do that. We have stopped penalising children for not having their father's name on a piece of paper. We have stopped doing that. The National Government did not do that.So yes I get a little emotional when they stand up and dare try to talk about children in poverty because they didn't make the decisions that could have made it so much easier for all those very children and families that they are now pretending to care about. We've built more public houses this term than ever in the last 20 years. The National Government didn't do that either.So I'm really proud of the things that we have been able to start: things like Jan Logie's whole of Government whole of system approach to ending domestic violence and child abuse; things like finally getting legislation agreed in this House that we want a zero carbon economy in our near future; things like banning new offshore oil and gas permits. This is what you get with the Greens in Government: having water high on the agenda finally as something that we all have to protect; having the largest funding boost to the Department of Conversation that we have seen in 16 years; and pulling in a progressive homeownership plan—something that we haven't seen in this country I think since the 1980s as far as I can remember. And yes we've done all these things. We've got this track record of what we can do with only eight MPs in this Government and we are well aware that we need to go further and faster to make sure that we are resolving our climate change our inequality and our environmental protection issues.I recently opened the first climate-safe house in New Zealand in Waitati in Dunedin. We can have a whole nation of climate-safe houses that are transportable that are made affordable that are energy efficient that are able to withstand the weather extremes and the instability that we are likely to also face.We must ensure that we prioritise public housing. We must have strong rules for water use and to upgrade all of the infrastructure around the country and we have to urgently increase core baseline benefit amounts which is what the working expert group insisted that we needed to do. We need to remove the harsh sanctions in our social security system because they do not work. They make it harder for people already struggling. We need to make sure that the ideas for properly funding these solutions pick up that the super uber-wealthy need to be paying their fair share of tax so that we can increase the revenue to Government to fix all of these issues that desperately need fixing. As the Green Party I am proud to be able to stand up and acknowledge that we need to increase our revenue if we're serious even just on things like saving our harbours from further water infrastructure pollution.The main thing here that I know we need to do is reject the dehumanising and trade-off approach that we have just heard from the Opposition side of this House where they stand up—they want to separate us off. They want to say This group is bad and this group is good." We're all in this together and isolating and dividing and separating us is what has caused these issues in the very first place. We're not going to be able to resolve these massive problems unless we bring people together unless we realise that in every group in every sector in every community they are simply just people. We are all people trying to do our best. Thank you Madam Speaker."