McKee NicoleNICOLE McKEE (ACT): I'd like to start my five-minute call just giving a tautoko to Minister Kris Faafoi for his shout-out to those wonderful people down in Canterbury who helped out during a time of need and adding to that all the volunteers within the Canterbury community because without them we could have been in a much worse situation. But my speech tonight is really about a disappointing Budget. It appears that it's actually spent quite a lot of money but where it really matters it appears to us that it's falling short—falling short of delivering solutions to some real problems that are being faced by New Zealanders. You would expect that a Budget would show the priorities of a Government. Well if this Budget shows the priorities of the Government then New Zealanders will find it lacking. Where was the commitment to safety I ask safety of the people up and down this country? Under this Government of course we've seen a 50 percent increase in the number of gang members. That's a 50 percent increase since 2017 of the gang members that we know about—only the ones on the national gang list. Given that there's been such a dramatic increase I thought I'd go and have a look through the Budget and see what actions are being taken to address such a significant problem currently facing New Zealand. I went and looked under the justice booklet under Vote Police. The word gang" appears once—just once. Gangs have appeared more times in Ministers' diaries than they do in the Budget. But it gets worse. We do see as other members have said this evening a reduction in the total amount of money in the Police appropriations this year. Now the Government has its own explanations for this but this is a problem because at a time when we're seeing gang membership increasing by 50 percent instead of increasing the resourcing for police the Government's overseeing a cut in their budget. In a time of gang-related crime—gun violence and family harm incidents are surging—one would expect that the Government would use this Budget as an opportunity to invest in the police in order to address some of these issues. But what the Budget does make crystal clear is the fact that we do have a soft-on-crime Government. Besides a small boost of $12 million to the Police appropriations budget the Government actually took away $90 million worth of cuts from that Police budget. So why is it that I want to talk about this today? It's because from the emails and messages that I'm receiving from the general public we have Kiwis that are saying they want the Government to stand up to violence and intimidation. We should be arresting the gang members who create crime not having cups of tea with them. This week gang members intimidated members of the public in the Hawke's Bay. They drove them off the road. We've seen reports of children sitting in cars crying because they were intimidated by that gang activity. The gangs do intimidate people they do carry out violence they're running around with illegal guns and we don't have a Government who's prepared to support our police to go after them. I would have expected the Government to be of the same opinion as us in this case but it just turns out not to be that case. The fact that the Government Ministers like Willie Jackson and Marama Davidson are meeting with patched gang members and visiting the Mongrel Mob in Waikato shows exactly how distorted this Government's priorities are. These are organisations who inflict harm on New Zealand. Their members harm our people. They peddle drugs that fuel misery crime and dependency and they use tactics of intimidation to get their way. The Government talks a lot about kindness and the need to support the most vulnerable people in our society. Well the most vulnerable people are the ones that are being preyed upon by the gangs. They are the victims of violence and they are the victims of the drugs and misery being peddled by the gangs and our Government is investing time in pursuing dialogue with them. ACT would rather invest our time in stopping the crime that these organisations inflict on our country. Thank you Mr Speaker."