National leader Judith Collins has accused the Government of pettiness in its reluctance to give funding to organisations and policy that was brought in by her party.
Appearing on Breakfast just under a week after the Budget, Collins said she couldn’t understand why the Government put so much into restructuring but so little into delivery of services, particularly for Whānau Ora.
“One of the things that I thought was amazing with the last Budget was so little for delivery on things like Whānau Ora that have been in place for several years and actually not exclusive Māori, that’s the other thing with Whānau Ora,” she said.
“Families can go there no matter what their ethnicity is. It’s not exclusive but is very much in the Maori way of doing things.”
Collins agreed with suggestions that the Government’s reluctance to allocate funding to Whānau Ora was because it was an organisation created by National and the Māori Party when they were in Government.
“It sounds petty but actually that’s what we’ve seen, just about everything we’ve brought in like social investment, which is very much about Whānau Ora for everybody who needed it, they just got rid of it so I actually think it [that suggestion] was probably right,” she said.
Collins also wouldn’t buy Covid-19 as an excuse for what she called the Government’s inaction on immigration in the last 18 months following an announcement of a "once-in-a-generation" reset of the country's immigration system last week.
“Good people [are] doing jobs in our rest homes, in our factories, in our engineering businesses, on our farms and they get treated as if they’re bad people. I don’t understand it,” she said.
Collins said Immigration NZ had not responded to applications for 18 months.
“For a start, when people apply under the rules, deal with their applications, we’ve had essentially almost nothing out of Immigration NZ for the last 17 or 18 months of applications that go in,” Collins said.
“They’re getting this stonewalled reaction of no reaction.”
She also called for more to be done to reunite migrants separated from their families because of the pandemic.
“Some of them haven’t seen their families for 500 days and it’s all very well to say they can go home. No, their homes are here. That’s what they came for. In some cases they’ve sold businesses, left jobs to come here because New Zealand said that we wanted them and that’s outrageous.”
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