Diolch, Llywydd. I campaigned for a Welsh Parliament all my adult life because I believe in this institution, I believe in the potential that we have here. I've just listened to Abolish the Welsh Assembly, and not a single idea in the whole speech, just a criticism of the institution, when really the criticism should have been directed at the Governments since 1999. I just find it really odd that some people would prefer to be governed by another country.

I'll say to the people sat to the right of the Presiding Officer that Margaret Thatcher got me into politics when I was younger, because I disagreed with almost every single thing she was doing. Quangos: we had the quango state in Wales, and it was a question of who you knew, rather than what you knew. I remember, I was in the Labour Party in those days, campaigning with colleagues against that very undemocratic system of appointing people into jobs that most of us thought they didn't really deserve. And then we had the Welsh Assembly in 1999, now the Welsh Parliament, and some of the very same people I campaigned with have supported doing exactly the same thing, where you have the cartel in Cardiff Bay, led by Labour, propped up occasionally by Plaid and the Liberal Democrats as their helpers, and they have created a self-serving bureaucracy.

This is the point of our amendment, because we're calling on the Welsh Government to ensure value for money by recognising the waste of public resources in the private—that's a key word—private third sector through duplication and top-heavy management. What we're proposing is a democratisation of service by redirecting funding to local government in Wales.

If you look at the very bloated third sector, chief executive after chief executive on huge salaries. If you look at the housing sector, the last time I checked there were 48 different organisations being funded by the Welsh Government, people supposedly fighting homelessness, and yet their £90,000 a year paycheck relies on people being homeless, so do they really want to solve the problem? I would argue not, because what Labour's created in Wales is a poverty industry. A poverty industry. If you look at care, the care industry now, where it's an industry to look after children, and Labour has been pretty clever politically, because they've privatised that whole service area. Eighty per cent of children now are looked after by private companies in Wales.

What we need is to see an end to this culture of canapés in the Senedd. You see the people coming in, the Labour boys and the Labour girls—jobs for the boys, jobs for the girls, Labour largesse and cronyism. Exactly what I campaigned against as a kid in the 1980s, we now see happening in the Welsh Parliament. And when I talk about the third sector, let me be absolutely clear, I am not talking about front-line workers, very, very often on low pay—poverty pay in some circumstances—with fewer rights than they would have working for a local authority.

It doesn't have to be this way. At the WNP we believe in meritocracy, we believe in equality of opportunity, people working hard and succeeding. We need to re-democratise our country and vote out of existence this cosy consensus. We need to give our democratically elected colleagues in local government the tools and the finance to provide services for our people, and we have to stop making profits in Wales out of the vulnerable. I think of children's services departments, where you see social workers rushed off their feet, with mountains of work, a lack of money, and then you see millions upon millions wasted on top-heavy management, chief executive after chief executive, so-called charities that are publicly funded and yet, at that front line of local government, people are really, really struggling.

The people have been taken for a ride by the Labour Party in Wales, and it's time to derail the gravy train. That's exactly what the WNP aims to do. Diolch yn fawr.