Logie JanJAN LOGIE (Green): Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker. It's a pleasure to rise and offer support to select committee for this bill the KiwiSaver (Foster Parents Opting in for Children in their Care) Amendment Bill. As usual I would like to offer my congratulations to the member National MP Hamish Walker for getting this bill drawn and for leading off in this conversation.This bill will make it possible for any foster parent or kin carer to approach a KiwiSaver provider to open an account for a foster child in their care. Now the Green Party has long been a fan of supporting low-income families and children in particular to be able to contribute to KiwiSaver. We've had a policy of actually starting accounts for every child in this country to have $1000 in KiwiSaver and for families below the poverty line to be able to have a contribution by the State of $200 a week up until the child turned 18. The intent of that—which would've resulted in every child when they were 18 having an average of $12000 in their account—is to provide a mechanism to address that wealth inequality that we see in our country where some children are very lucky to have family money behind them which gives them opportunities when they come to that next stage of their life of considering study or employment or just buying a car to be able to have more options.This was our policy so we are quite interested in the discussions around how we can use KiwiSaver to support young people in our society who have fewer resources. So we're happy to support this to select committee. I would say though that we do have some concerns around the detail of the bill that we will be looking to properly discuss and hear from submitters on. One of the issues that we are concerned about is that while there is a provider Simplicity who has said that they won't charge fees is it actually appropriate for Government to be setting up a mechanism or a system that privileges one provider that would over the long term have a financial return from that? Is that appropriate? If it's not and this is actually just set up neutrally right across then do we want to be in the situation of young people who are not able to contribute but who have the account opened in their name and fees accruing actually ending up with a deficit in their account—so actually us contributing to them being further behind than they were in the starting point? That is—clearly with our goals around improving equity and reducing inequality—something that we could not support.Also just to be looking at how this sits with the other arrangements through Oranga Tamariki and the financial delegations which currently for foster carers sit with the agency rather than the foster parents—what are the implications of shifting that for the children? I heard the ideas that were presented from the previous speaker about providing more opportunities for foster parents to be able to support the children in their care and I do think there's a question we need to ask about whether this is in the best interests of us as a country when sometimes the foster arrangements may be quite short term. Do we want to be enabling all foster parents to be able to do this when the child may only be in their care for a few weeks and the implications are lifelong? I think those are questions we will need to properly interrogate through the select committee process. But we do welcome the conversation and it is in some ways a nice reversal from the last Government's erosion of KiwiSaver so we're happy to support this.