Tuesday’s finale of the Annual Review Debate included impassioned debates over the Government’s performance for Maori and Pasifika, and in the area of Social Development and Housing. Frequently the debate on the Maori and Pasifika theme was also, defacto, about housing.
Reports from select committees on government departments are debated during the Annual Review Debate. Photo: VNP / Daniela Maoate-Cox
Try as the Government might to change the conversation to areas where they believed they had achieved great successes, it inevitably and regularly returned to accommodation.
That theme twinned with an aphorism introduced by Denise Roche and picked up by Anne Tolley "that a society can be judged on how it treats its most vulnerable."
Whether the maxim was reason to judge the Government or praise it was debated with both passion and evidence. On
one occasion the same evidence given to support both sides of the dispute.
