Williams Poto: Support for Children in Hardship Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWilliams Poto: Support for Children in Hardship Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 01 December 2015. Volume:710;Page:8430. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]POTO WILLIAMS (Labour—Christchurch East): Tēnā koe Mr Chair. I will start with the title of the Support for Children in Hardship Bill. Like other colleagues I want to refer to the word “hardship” within the bill because over the course of the debate that has become interchanged with “poverty” “deprivation” and other words that indicate that our children are actually suffering. However what has failed to occur in all of the debate is actually some measure of that or some definition around what hardship might actually look like.It would appear that hardship occurs to only the 18000 or so children who are going to be impacted on by this particular bill. That of course is not the case when we consider the 300000-odd children who are living in poverty which no one in any part of the Chamberis disputing. Calling the bill “Support for Children in Hardship” does cause us to consider whether we should define hardship. Should it become a measure that we then make some advance to ensure that we can reduce those targets because when you are talking about hardship or poverty or deprivation you cannot ignore the other things that surround the difficult lives that these children have.Perhaps in the title we should be looking at developing words that encourage a suite of responses to these children such as adequate warm dry affordable housing and such as access to decent education with all the resources that level out the playing field for all of our children so that they have equal opportunity—so I do have a problem with the word “Hardship” within the title of the bill.I also have a problem with the word “Children” because as we know the bill is really more around the household income as opposed to supporting individual children. We know that the bill will support a family—increasing benefit rates up to $25 a week—but not necessarily the individual children within that family. Your family might have four or five children but be able to access only the $25 a week. The fact that the children are part of the title I have an issue with.I also have a problem with the fact that we have been led to believe that these families will get an extra $25 a week when we know that it could be anywhere in the region of $17 or $12 or $23 depending on the situation that your family finds itself in. The Government has been trumpeting the fact that it is providing more money to the family which is great and we support that. However the view that has been widely trumpeted that it will be $25 a week for all families is clearly not the case.I have a real problem with the commencement date. If we are desperate to ensure that our families are well resourced should the commencement date not be the day after which this bill will receive Royal assent and not 1 April 2016? It would bring to a whole lot more families some support when they need it not having to wait for a further 4 or 5 months for that to happen.We could call this bill the “Complex Tax Changes (When They Should Have Just Passed Labour’s Bill to Increase Abatement Rates)Bill” because there are some complicated changes to the inland revenue Acts that will change abatement rates when if the Government was really serious about supporting children in hardship it would have supported Labour’s bill which might have put an extra $50 into the pockets of our families.This bill should also be called the “Changes to the Definition of Part-time Work (And All That That Might Entail)Bill”. Of course we know that the definition is moving from 15 hours a week to 20 hours a week. We are talking about families probably mostly women who will be required to go back to work who will be work tested. They are likely to go into roles that are at minimum wage or just above and are probably quite precarious in terms of being under the 90-day legislation. It will be probably fairly casualised employment.I have an issue with us wanting to have long-term sustainable support for children in hardship when we have not really done the groundwork to ensure that the workplaces the types of work and the payment for that work are going to be sustainable for those families in the longterm because they will be in a position of less power being potentially new back to the workforce low skilled and going into low-paid jobs.I also have concerns about what happens to the children. All those families when they are required to be work tested and get back into the workforce when we are in situations where adequate good quality and affordable day care is not available to some of those families—it could be that we are talking about families in rural settings.I also have a major concern when we are talking about the types of roles that might require shift work or working outside the normal hours when decent and affordable childcare might be available.So really in summary there are some major concerns about the naming of this particular bill. Does it really support children in hardship? How do we define hardship? Is it about the children or is it about the income that comes into the family? Is it more about the definition of “part-time work” and what the nature of that work might be or is it really about providing opportunities for families and parents and children to better themselves? I think not but thank you for the opportunity to make this contribution.