 Na mihi o te iwa. It is a pleasure to be here. I was a little bit reluctant initially to agree to talking tonight, because I spend my time looking at social policy from a national perspective, and I don't know much about what goes on at local government policy area. And I guess to the traditional way of looking at public finance is that it is central government's responsibility to redistribute to achieve fairer income and wealth outcomes and it's local government's job to administer the city efficiently. But what we see in Auckland and the previous speakers have outlined this is we see writ large the failures of national policy. The issues are in your face and they're urgent. So, while I think that there are things that local government can do to ameliorate inequality, central government has to take prime responsibility and we have to remind them of that responsibility. So, a well functioning city requires that people have sufficient income and secure asset base. So the shops and cafes can flourish, people can get around the city, the flow of money can keep going around. But what we have as has been described is a two speed city. So on the one hand we've got real Auckland housewives and on the other end we've got the desperately poor families living in paths in the middle of winter at the other. The affluent of Auckland are immune to the price system but just doesn't matter what things cost. They know the price of milk. At the other end lives are spent economising on miserable and insufficient disposable incomes where every last 10 cents and every price rise matters. So I don't want to let the government the central government off the hook tonight. How do we get this two speed city? My life as a researcher into family incomes began in the 1980s when the Rodgernomics Revolution was beginning. The essence of that policy was to promote competition, drive down wages, make us more competitive, small government, use of pay, low tax and social assistance to be only for the poor meaning that social assistance was to be targeted. Such targeting worried treasurer greatly because they were aware of the effective marginal tax rate problem which is when someone ends an extra dollar they not only pay tax but they lose access to social provision be it in education or transfers and are left with very little disposable income. I think Chamerville just described how Auckland has very low disposable incomes. Well of course after all these offsets it's even worse than that. The policy Rodgernomics policy reached at Zenith in the 1991 budget where it was claimed that the nasty side effects of high effective marginal tax rates had a technocratic solution. So social benefits were cut social welfare benefits were cut and families were to have their social provision aggregated onto a smart card bled out at a uniform rate and the effective marginal tax rate problem was to be solved. As a young researcher I was deeply troubled by this and not at all surprised when that technocratic solution proved unworkable. They had to walk away from it. It was abandoned and that was shocking because what we were left with was the overlapping effective marginal tax rate problem and the deep poverty. What we saw from the beginning of the 90s was a great rise in family poverty and of course associated things like rice and the use of food banks. In 1992 I was asked along with others including Ruth Richardson Michael Cullen and Rodney Hard to write an article for the Dominion Post. I was expected to look forward to the year 2000 to see where the country was going and my contribution was decried as being unduly pessimistic and it gives me no pleasure to read that I wrote that we were going to have in the early part of the century a problem with the disposable income that people were left with after all of these offsets through the targeting of social provision and I also wrote we have no capital gains tax so there are a few levers in place to prevent further widening of the income and wealth distribution such policies also leave us ill-equipped to moderate another share market and asset boom. So I saw that the challenge was going to be that technological change would be destroying jobs the labour market opportunities and the proportion of national income paid out by wages likely to continue to decline ownership of productive assets becoming more concentrated and I said by the year 2000 we may need to abandon the idea that hard work and saving should be the basis of redistribution the fundamental challenge would be to find ways of redistributing non-labour income in order to maintain demand and prevent poverty and alienation the government did not rise to that challenge we are now 25 years on from the 1991 budget and a large part of the Auckland population are paying a very heavy price for those disastrous policies of 1991. What article would I write today about when we've been 10 years time? Many families are repaying large student debts at 12% above a tiny income they lose working for families that's been incredibly run down and they lose subsidies for things like childcare and accommodation supplement leaving very little disposable income for any extra earnings that they may have I belong to the Child Poverty Action Group and for the last 17 years we have run post budget breakfast up and down in Zealand and every year the news has got a bit worse we keep an eye on indicators such as trends and third world diseases things like dental extractions for children under the age of 3 and the use of food banks in Auckland one of the key barometers of distress is the demand for food parcels at the Auckland City Mission since the early 1990s the growth has been steadily upwards doubling over the last 6 years and I was updating these figures recently and I looked at the change December to December the monthly figures and the last monthly change between December 14 and December 15 was 50% and last Christmas you might recall we had people spilling out onto the road queuing some of them all night to get the basics what are we going to be looking at next year or in 10 years time the state of homelessness in Queen Street is in grave danger of becoming normalized overseas papers like the Guardian in the UK having a field day highlighting the extremities of what we are allowing to happen in Auckland to live happily in the city people must have enough money and they must have enough time and Aucklanders many Aucklanders are failing to have either of those two but when I look at the older population I see that they are doing a bit better than young families the supported programs for the old wage linked New Zealand superannuation and the gold part facilitating travel around Auckland are good policies they are good for Auckland they help inclusivity in Auckland the continual erosion of social welfare benefits and programs like working for families and the accommodation supplement are not good for Auckland we have student incomes that are too low and require far more support we have students showing up at food banks we have students who can't afford to come into this university because of the cost of travel so maybe at the local level we can look at ameliorating some of these problems with local policies but ultimately we have to support better policies from the centre if Auckland is to function better and not worse in 10 years time I think we've got to tackle wealth disparity with proper tax reform it does not be thinking about where we are headed thank you