I have known what it is like to get paid regularly. Sadly, there are not too many Maori who know the joy of a regular income. Maori are the ones often hardest hit in times of lower economic growth. In communities with high levels of unemployment and benefit dependency, people generally experience unemployment as just one aspect of broader social and economic difficulties.

Community development is about local solutions to local problems. It is about bottom-up development tailored to local needs. It is about partnerships between the government, businesses, and communities. It is about a holistic approach. It is about communities having more capacity to deliver and do things for themselves in the fashion that they want and need. It is about developing leaders and entrepreneurs. It is most certainly about testing innovative ideas, and, more certainly for Maori, it is about allowing space, giving them time to settle down and do what they want to do. There are many hard working volunteers in communities with no shortage of good ideas about how to make things better for their people. Community development is about working in true partnership.

Over the last 10 years the devolution model, based on the contracting out of services, has been used extensively. It is a process in which the term of contract and compliance procedures are dictated by the purchasing agency, often with little or no input from the provider or the larger community that the provider is meant to service. From a Maori point of view, it is a process that makes it easy for purchasers to impose their own definitions of the Maori world on Maori communities and to force those communities to comply with those definitions. Albeit we have a matrix of dysfunctionality within Maoridom. I want to impress upon this house that there area lot of Maori who do know want they want, who do know what they need, and are more than able and capable, given a fair chance, to do just that.

• Let me go back a few years to the time when I was a schoolboy. I vividly recall walking to school barefoot with my several brothers and sisters. Every day, whatever the weather, we walked 5 kilometres to school and back. Although this may not have been unusual for Maori children at that time, there was a certain irony about this journey for me. Every day we would watch the empty school bus drive past us and our other whanau to collect the pakeha kids who lived half a kilometre from the school and take them back to Tolaga Bay. This bus would pick them up, turn round, and drive back.

As a child, the bureaucrats who made these decisions mattered little to me then. All I knew was that I had to walk and that the bus was leaving me and rest of my whanau behind. I used to dream of being picked up by the school bus, but as I grew older I and the others became more resilient. We went from wishing the bus would stop to thinking that if it did stop we would not hop on.

I relate that story because it is often said of Maori that "we've missed the bus", but in many cases Maori have not even had the opportunity to get on the bus. The irony in all of this is that now, as an Associate Minister of Education, responsible for school transport, I am not only riding in the bus but I an helping to drive the bus, along with my ministerial colleagues — Mr Samuels, Mr Mallard, and Mr Maharey. Rest assured, that as one of the drivers I am going to stop that bus and pick up a lot of Maoris on the journey forward.