White HelenHELEN WHITE (Labour): It's a pleasure to speak on this bill particularly after the passionate speech by Nicola Willis because it does give me a little bit of material to work with. The first thing I must repeat from previous speeches that I have made is that it just strikes me every time that the speeches that come from the Opposition at the current time just utterly lack positive vision and leadership. When I hear those kinds of comments about emergency housing I can't help but ask the obvious question that most New Zealanders will be asking: what possible excuse was there for leaving people in cars? For ignoring the fact that we had families at maraes in haphazard dangerous situations because they didn't have a plan at all? What was the possible consequence of that? What the consequence was was a mess. That is what Labour has been cleaning up. It's been cleaning up a mess created by a total lack of leadership and vision for quite a considerable length of time.We have had in-between an incredibly dramatic crisis and that was COVID. All it has done is it has focused this Government on what it needs to do to recover and build in a better way and that is actually what this debate is about. We did not hear from the Opposition's last speaker anything about building a recovery so I want to devote the rest of my speech to that—because that is a positive thing.Now I can tell you that when I came to Parliament I came—I stood in 2017 and I stood at a time when I was an employment lawyer. I was very concerned because I'd grown up in Auckland Central and I was concerned that I was in a city that was in crisis and it wasn't even being acknowledged. We had John Campbell on the radio talking about homelessness and we had people not turning up from the Government at that time on John Campbell's show because they had somehow decided it was not to be even talked about. That was the world that I was living in and at my work I was watching people's incomes drop and drop and drop and their access to justice drop and drop. I was very concerned about the place that I was living in so I stood for this role and I'm lucky enough to be here when very visionary things are happening.So I want to talk about what those look like for Auckland Central. We have got a crisis over homelessness and we have had for some time. That doesn't come out of one thing; it comes out of many. It comes out of the rundown of our health sector so that we haven't had the mental health support people need. It comes out of people actually just trying to make ends meet and failing to do so. It comes out of alcohol addiction it comes out of unstable work and that sort of thing leads to broken people. And when people break like that and end up on the street it actually takes a lot of effort putting them back together. So you have to build a whole lot of resources that have been run down—one is we have to build a workforce in the health sector. Luckily that work had started before COVID otherwise who knows where we would have been because our health system was able to respond to that crisis.I wanted first of all to acknowledge that the work is not just that of the Government but of the community in general. We have had a response that is right across the board and in my role as a list MP based in Auckland Central I meet with people in the area who are doing jobs that aren't paid that well and they're doing valiant jobs they're zealously arguing for their community and the things they need right now to make it better. So I'd like to just put out a thankyou to groups like the business associations that work for their communities and they don't just stop at their own community of businesses. In a place like K Road the business association—and actually the Heart of the City is another one—these groups actually put in a real effort to making sure that they are welcoming and inclusive to the people who are living on their streets or return to their streets because they have nothing to do in the day. They actually start to work differently because they're thinking differently—they're thinking as a team they're thinking inclusively and they're very good people and they do a very good job. There's a lot of work being done at the ground. But the Government has a leadership role too and one thing that it does is—[Time expired]