8 February 2011
Metiria Turei Co-leader Green Party Aotearoa New Zealand

Address in Reply (embargoed until delivery).

I am here for my father.

I am here for my father and the many thousands of New Zealanders like him. My father was an ordinary man from Palmerston North who wanted an ordinary life. He wanted a decent, regular job with decent take home pay, he wanted a home where he could raise his two kids.

What he got was a lifetime of hardships and he died of a stroke at the age of 48. I dream of a world in which my dad is still alive.

What would have given my father a better chance at a long and satisfying life? What would have made his story more like mine?

Because, like my Dad, I didn’t do too well at school. I left at 16 with no qualifications and few prospects. I worked here and there, spent time on the dole. A few years later I was a solo parent on the DPB, and then I started law school in Auckland.

I used the training incentive allowance to help with study costs, I shared childcare with friends and family, I sometimes had to use the special needs grant to pay my power bill and buy food when things got really tough.

I got support when I needed it; my Dad did not. So I am here for my father.

I want every man, women and child in Aotearoa to have the chance of a good life. We can do much more to help Kiwis like my Dad. We can build a fairer society, an equal society that does not require sacrifice our people or our environment to economic dead ends.

The Green Party is known as a champion for the environment. We love New Zealand and we want to look after it. We are passionate about protecting our rivers, our land, our forests and oceans. But we also want to look after all New Zealanders and that’s my focus today; how do we mind the gap between the haves and the have nots. What can we do about inequality in New Zealand?

First, we can make sure everyone gets a fair go at decent work with a living wage.

WORK
My dad was a labourer all his short life. He worked on farms and orchards, he worked shooting deer, he worked in a bread factory. But in the 80s the work dried up, there were 300,000 people unemployed. As time went on it became harder and harder for a 40 year old working class Maori man to find work. Poverty took everything from him including his home.

Here we are, a generation later, with 156,000 New Zealanders unemployed, with 100,000 New Zealanders underemployed, with 180,000 New Zealanders working at or near the minimum wage.

The economic reforms of the 1980’s failed my Dad and are now failing our children and grandchildren. We have hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders struggling to survive, just like my Dad did.

So wage growth has kept up with the rising cost of living but this is only good news for those with jobs. John Key’s talk simply hides what’s actually happening to families. His Government is not protecting families from the rising cost of living. Unemployment has increased 50% since John Key took office. These families are falling behind the fastest, unable to find jobs while having to meet the rising costs of food and fuel.

The Government’s answer to job losses in the private sector has been to cut jobs in the public sector. That is the extent of this Government’s jobs plan.

The Prime Minister took great pride in pointing out that his Government has

“reduced the number of full time staff positions in core government administrations by five percent.”

In reality many of the workers John Key boasts about sacking will be driven to the wall.

And this means less spending and more job losses. And John Key boasts about sackings.

MINIMUM WAGE

Our minimum wage is so low that many Kiwis who work fulltime still need top ups from the Government just to cover the basics – food and shelter.

The current take home pay for a 40 hour a week job on the minimum wage is just $409. It will rise by just $28 in April. Meanwhile the average rent in Auckland is $416. You simply cannot support a family on 400 bucks a week.

The minimum wage must go up to $15 per hour as soon as possible. The minimum wage must go up to immediately help out the poorest and most vulnerable in our society.

Lifting the minimum wage is good for the economy. There is an increased demand for goods and services, because people on low incomes spend most of their money.

Lifting the minimum wage to $15 per hour would also save more than $1 billion from the Government’s social assistance budget.

Instead, we are subsidising the employers who pay low wages. Their workers put in a 40 hour week but still need help to pay the rent and put food on the table. The businesses who employ most low wage staff are big corporates –supermarkets like New World and fast food outlets like Burger King. Last year, the Foodstuffs supermarket company made a $16million profit while their minimum wage workers struggle.

BENEFICIARY DEFENSE
My father was a peaceful, kind, decent man, just like the thousands of New Zealanders who now find themselves out of work. John Key’s Government suggests they are bludgers, but New Zealanders use the support when they absolutely need it and move on when they can.

That’s what I tried to do, that’s what my Dad tried to do and that’s what New Zealanders are doing today; about three quarters of those on the dole are there for less than a year.

John Key has outlined major reforms to welfare that will hurt families and children.

If his reforms were in place when I became a solo mum, I would have been forced out to work in an unskilled, low-paying job instead of caring for my baby daughter.

With no qualifications, John Key would have considered me “unsuited” to university and I probably would never have been able to go to university let alone law school.

And even if I had made it that far, with no training incentive allowance I could not have made ends meet while I studied. That is the ladder Paula Bennett has kicked out behind herself. That is the ladder that John Key would have stolen from me and from my Dad’s moko.

Our most vulnerable families are not the enemy Mr Key, they are families just like mine. Indeed, they are families just like yours.

Since we arrived in Parliament, the Green Party has said benefits must go up and we are firmly opposed to the cuts signalled by the Prime Minister today.

Instead of suggesting we need to punish the victims of recession and poverty, let’s talk about how to help these New Zealanders.

John Key talks about the importance of early childhood education, but his cuts in that sector have already seen parents pulling their kids out of early childhood education because they can’t afford the increased fees.

There is no better investment in our families and children than early childhood education. For every dollar we spend, we can save up to $17 in reduced health, justice, and other spending. That’s a better return than a hundred roads of national significance.

John Key talks of 220,000 children dependent on benefits, as if that is their fault. We can help them, by extending the Working for Families support to their families, to help pay for food, rent, warm clothes, and electricity.

Instead, we are staring down the barrel of changes to welfare that will widen the gap between those who have the most, and those who need the most.

We will pay for his mistake in hospital bills, new prisons, and future welfare payments.

We will pay his mistake in the lives lost to poverty.

HOUSING

Growing up, one of the big challenges for my Mum and Dad was finding us a decent place to live.

When my parents were out looking for houses to rent, they always sent mum because my dad was Maori, and landlords wouldn’t rent to him.

One time Mum had scored a house. A week later after the landlord had met Dad we had an eviction notice. We lived in the car for a week or so before moving to a house in the country.

We lived in a lot of old farm houses because they were cheap and Dad could work on the surrounding farms.

Housing remains a major problem here in New Zealand. We have more than 10,000 families on the waiting list for a state home. We have high rents and poor quality rental properties. We have overcrowding. We have third world rates of rheumatic fever that comes from overcrowding and that cost our health system $10 million every year.

Poor housing costs lives, the lives of our men and women in their prime.

The Green Party supports a comprehensive state house building program to increase the stock by 6000 homes in the next three years. This building program would create 28,000 jobs.

This building program would help those New Zealanders most in need and it would help our struggling construction industry. My dad would have loved a job like that, building houses for people he cared about.

But last year John Key's Government cut the budget for state houses from $120 million dollars to just $18 million dollars

What we have heard from the Prime Minister today suggests that he does not care enough about the 20,000 New Zealand families with chronic housing problems to bother to solve the problem.

He aims to shuffle existing housing stock and to push people out of their homes through reviewable tenancies. This will not address the fundamental problem -- there are not enough homes for families who need them.

This Government’s lack of compassion and absence of solutions is gutting.

We can be a better country than this, there are other choices that we can make.

PROGRESSIVE POWER PRICING

We can choose to assist the most vulnerable families in our country by helping with the cost of power. One way to do so is with progressive pricing which would lock in a low electricity price for every household, up to a certain threshold – it could be about 4000 kilowatt hours each year. In many homes this would be enough to keep warm and dry at an affordable price.

We’re unique in that we still own the majority of our electricity generation assets—the big renewable projects that our grandparents built – so we have the ability to look at a progressive pricing scheme which would help our most vulnerable families stay healthy and warm.

Ensuring a fair price for customers is just one of the reasons we need to maintain full public ownership of our power companies. Selling our public power companies, as National has proposed, will make it harder to achieve cheaper, sustainable power for everyone.

MMP

Our voting system is also part of the solution. I know that me being in Parliament would have blown my Dad’s mind. No one in this place ever talked about the reality of his life. No one in this place ever saw him as a person to whom they were responsible. No one bothered that their decisions would determine the course of his life. That is until MMP allowed for people like him to be here and speak on his behalf.

So in this year’s referendum I will vote to keep MMP and improve it.

CONCLUSION
The gap between the rich and the poor grew very rapidly here in Aotearoa between the mid-80s and 2000. Real incomes for lower and middle income families fell while the income of wealthy households soared. The mid-80s is when work dried up for my father. He died in 1995.When my dad had his stroke, he couldn’t even get decent help from the local hospital. He was disbelieved, discounted and even dropped on the floor. This wasn’t intentional mistreatment. It was the same casual disregard that dogged my dad his whole life. At the hospital in the last days of his life, he really needed to be treated with some dignity, just as he deserved some dignity and respect through his working life as he struggled to support our family.

My dad was sacrificed to deadend economic ideas. He did not live to see the shift that is happening right now – the shift to smart green economics. I wish he had, because smart green economics does not demand the sacrifice of our environment. It does not demand the sacrifice of our people. It would not have demanded his.

Our Government has a role in shaping a fair society, our Parliament can help guarantee the essentials and make sure every New Zealander gets a fair go and a bit of respect.

So I am here for my father, Richard Ropata Eruera Tūrei.

I am here for the many thousands of New Zealanders just like my father.

ENDS

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