'Lazy Politicking': Te Pati Māori co-leader attacks Government’s targets

“Lazy politicking” is how Māori Party co-leader describes the coalition government’s nine targets.

Debbie Ngarewa-Packer says the targets lack innovation for providing solutions for Māori and Pacific communities.

“The fact that they’re going to take 50,000 people out of Jobseeker or out of the beneficiary system they actually haven’t said where they’re going to put them.”

Her comments follow the government’s recent announcement of their nine targets which are aimed to be delivered by 2030.

These include shorter stays in emergency departments, enforcing the attendance action plan to lift attendance rates and a 75 per cent reduction of households in emergency housing.

Ngarewa-Packer says with the government promising more, the cuts to public service jobs will mean less support for those who need it.

“It’s typical of a government that is here to look after the privileged and the entitled and to continue to grow that entitlement at the cost of those who through no fault of their own are enduring real hardship.

“I feel aroha for our whanau but I ask that we stay united and we stay focused on looking after each other while we’re experiencing some of this targeting.”

She says the government decides to suffer from amnesia amidst the proposed 40 per cent cuts to the Ministry for Pacific Peoples’ workforce.

“This coalition government is dangerously wielding its power to discriminate and assert more rights on those who are wealthy and privileged.

“It forgets its own interrelationships with those who are not only tangata Pasifika, tangata whenua but also those who have been vulnerable.”

With the Healthy School Lunches Programme under review, she says cuts to the program will penalise children who are already experiencing poverty.

“First of all I’d like to know if David [Seymour] has tamariki. Does David have a whanau he has to support? Does David have an extended whanau two or three generations like some of us live in?

“The hardest thing for our schools is to figure out how to teach our tamariki and rangatahi when they come to school hungry … schools are often the heart of communities.”

She says recent polls from the Taxpayers Union show that support for Te Pati Māori has increased and that numbers for ACT have decreased.

“People, even the privileged, will get sick of seeing a government that keeps attacking the most vulnerable and discrimination our rainbow communities, discriminating against our Pasifika/Māori communities, our youth.

“People will get over it and they will continue to see themselves fall in the polls.

“I reach out to our whanau and just say take heart, get on your voting poll, get on the electoral roll, get out there and make sure you participate and you vote.”