Maharey Steve: Urgent Debates — Department of Child Youth and Family Services 
Maharey Steve: Urgent Debates — Department of Child Youth and Family Services 
[Volume:613;Page:9654] 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY (Minister for Social Development and Employment) 
: 
 I welcome this debate today because this Government has been in the driving seat on the Treasury benches for 4 years and during those 4 years I cannot remember— 
Simon Power 
: Four long years! 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY 
: I say to Mr Power that they do feel like long years. He should get used to long years because in his young years he will get used to more long years. In 4 years of being in Government I cannot remember the National Party raising this debate once. National Party members say nothing about these issues and I have often wondered why that is but today I think I know the reason for that. If I were in the National Party it would take me at least 4 years to get over the sheer embarrassment of what it did to the Department of Child Youth and Family Services in its various forms during the 1990s. I would be embarrassed about that; I would keep my mouth shut and say nothing. Finally I might creep out of my shell and try to start to debate the issues once again. 
I know a lot about the running down of the Department of Child Youth and Family Services. I used to lecture half the social work students who are currently in the department. Mrs Shipley started the decline of the Department of Child Youth and Family Services; it can be traced to when she became the Minister. She cut the department’s funding attacked its training attacked that organisation and began the process of seven restructurings in 9 years and five changes of name in 9 years. She began that process. She was the person who ensured the department lost money year after year and she began the process of bringing that organisation to its knees. In 1999 the organisation then called the Children Young Persons and Their Families Agency went through a ridiculous process whereby the Government of the day the then National Government tried to call it I think at the time the Department of Child Youth and Whanau Services. The then National Government backed off from that after a large argument—as if it mattered—before it set up its last incarnation of that organisation which it had destroyed. That National Government gave us that organisation in October 1999 and we got our warrants on 10 December. That is when the organisation was formed. We were delivered an essentially abused and neglected department that had been run into the ground. 
National members sit on the other side of the House and say we should fix the department. Let me tell the House about the first thing that we found. The department had been left in such bad shape that when we looked at its first budget we found that 65 social workers would have to be fired in order to meet the cuts that the previous Government had built in to the baseline of the organisation. It had built in sending 65 social workers down the road. National members get up in the House today and say how shocking that is. Let me say to them that social worker numbers in the Department of Child Youth and Family Services today are higher than they have ever been in the history of the organisation and the workforce has stabilised in its turnover so it is no different from any other public service organisation. The previous National Government did not do that; we did it. 
We are confronted with a department that over the last 4 years has had a great number of improvements. Let me just run through some of them. We were the people who asked Mick Brown to review the department. No one else did that. I asked him to give us an independent review. We were the people who set up the non-governmental organisations to be a reference group for the department. We were the ones who restored its baseline in our first Budget so that it did not have to fire 65 social workers. We were the ones who gave more money to community groups. We were the ones who saw to a change in its contracting. We were the ones who raised the salaries of social workers hired more social workers and registered social workers. I know that Mrs Rich on the Opposition side of the House hates to listen to this because she likes to think that nothing has happened for 4 years. After the embarrassment of her Government driving this organisation into the ground cutting its funding and driving social workers away she loves to think that nothing has happened. 
But a lot has happened. There have been changes in salaries a lifting in the number of people and a drop in the number of unallocated cases. The National Party did not even have a system of identifying how many unallocated cases there were. It did not have a system at all. When I was formerly in Opposition I used to ask how many young people were waiting to be looked at and the then National Government could never tell me that. Can we tell National Party members now? Yes we can. Why can we tell them? We can tell them because we record unallocated cases. We insisted that we know what the situation is for the benefit of people here in the House. We introduced the new computer system and a new call centre. 
The Opposition member is completely and utterly ignorant of how the call centre system works. She said that the people who are on the end of a phone call at the call centre do not want to record something—that those professional senior social workers just choose not to record something. They do not choose not to record something; they receive 27000 notifications every year. They receive hundreds of thousands of phone calls every year. Many of those phone calls take 21 minutes because when people ring in to complain about their partner’s treatment of their children they take some time to do it. I know that Mrs Rich knows nothing about social work. She is the agricultural spokesperson on the Opposition side of the House and knows more about pig farming than children in the social work situation. But she does not even know how the call centre works or how a professional social worker deals with those calls. It is embarrassing to have someone on the front bench of the National Party who does not even know the most basic ways that a professional social worker goes about recording a notification. That is embarrassing—[ 
Interruption 
] 
Members on the Opposition side of the House talk about the social work area and baseline reviews as if we are not the ones who asked for the review. When we came into Government the department was brand new and it said it thought it did not get enough money. The department said the previous Government had treated it so badly that it had ended up with no money. I told the department that we could not do a baseline review when the department had been in place for only 5 minutes. I said we would run the organisation for 2 or 3 years and then do a baseline review. We did that. The lines in the paper were written by our officials. We know what is in the paper. We do not need people like Katherine Rich to get up and read out what she almost seems to believe are secrets about the department. We know what is in the paper. We asked for it we worked with the officials and they gave us what we wanted. We know what is recommended in the review: $127 million worth of new funding and a range of improvements yet again to the department. 
The only argument that Katherine Rich came up with today was to come in here to the House and say that seared on to the minds of National people were dead children. She raised sickeningly the case of James Whakaruru. I say to Katherine Rich that if she reads the front cover of the report on James Whakaruru’s death from the Commissioner for Children she will find out when he died. He died in 1999. Who was the Government in 1999? The National Party was in Government. The only argument National makes today is to dig up the case of that poor child and say on the basis of that that this Government is not performing. James Whakaruru died on National’s watch not on ours. National members should not come in here and try to use him to attack this Government which has for 4 years worked assiduously to improve the circumstances of children of families and of social workers. 
I want to go back to what I said at the beginning. I know that National Party members are embarrassed about 9 years of doing nothing. I know they feel bad about that. But I think they should acknowledge that under this Government there has been more money more social workers more work with community organisations and more change all of which has been designed to put right an organisation that they destroyed. Yes they did that. We are the Government that will put the organisation right. They know that. We are the ones who can be trusted to do so. 
The debate having concluded the motion lapsed.