Turner Judy: Children Young Persons and Their Families  Amendment Bill (No 6) — First Reading 
Turner Judy: Children Young Persons and Their Families  Amendment Bill (No 6) — First Reading 
[Volume:645;Page:14597] 
JUDY TURNER (Deputy Leader—United Future) 
: 
 Thank you Madam Assistant Speaker and may I add my congratulations to those of others in this House. I am sorry that United Future was not present this afternoon during the speeches regarding your nomination because we are very supportive of it and look forward to your leadership of the House. 
The Children Young Persons and Their Families Amendment Bill (No 6) is one that United Future feels particularly passionate about. In the 5 or so years that I have been in Parliament I do not think any constituent cases have kept me awake at night as much as the cases that have come my way involving Child Youth and Family. I have a file full of them. I thank the Minister for Social Development and Employment for the open door she has shown me on the many occasions when I have advocated for these cases. 
I am very very pleased to see that as a result of the passing of this amendment bill the chief executive officer whose role will be established more distinctly in the Act will also have as part of his or her job description a requirement to set up a complaints service for this department. That is the area that has been of greatest concern to me. I could cite case after case that I currently have on file in my office of families who have grievances about the way they were treated and the way their cases were handled and who have had no redress. 
Child Youth and Family has powers greater than those of the New Zealand Police and the burden of proof required for it to uplift children is much less than the police would require for a conviction. United Future is not critical of the powers given to this department but we say that if we give people the power to exercise outcomes for families that are at times quite dramatic they must be accountable for the decisions they make and there must be a process in place that is credible and that is independent enough to be credible. Parents child caregivers families and grandparents must be able to ask for a review of the decision that has been made or a review of the way their case has been handled. This is good news. What the chief executive officer chooses to set up is a debate for another day and I have my own theories about what I would like to see. 
I have looked very closely at organisations like the Independent Police Conduct Authority and how it operates. I think there are some things we could learn from the way the authority manages cases. I know there is some talk about offering an internal complaints service within the Ministry of Social Development for Child Youth and Family. I suspect that is where the Minister will start the process. I have some reservations about how credible that would be. None the less it is better than the current vacuum that exists for a complaint service. 
United Future is also pleased to see that in this bill the definition of a young person will be changed to include people up to the age of 18 years. There are some concerns around that and I think we have to remind ourselves that the changed definition of a young person applies to this bill; variations in other Acts will remain unchanged. There are several reasons why we are pleased about this change. Recently the Social Services Committee visited a youth sex offenders unit in Christchurch. We met with staff from Barnardos which has the contract to run this facility and we met with the young people themselves. One of the complaints that both the staff and the young people had was that there was a magical cut-off point at age 17 when Child Youth and Family no longer had responsibility for these young people. It did not matter where they were in their rehabilitation programme; out they went. The young people themselves were saying that they wanted to stay longer they had not finished and they knew they needed more help but they had a 17th birthday fast approaching and it would soon be all over for them. It is a crying shame to see them have to leave a programme that has measurable outcomes. These young people were noticing a difference in themselves. They have serious offending backgrounds—not just in the area of sex offences but that is one of the more concerning behaviours which the programme is trying to address. 
The other area that has come to our attention is under-age sex workers in New Zealand. When we passed the Prostitution Law Reform Bill we made it legal for 18-year-olds to be involved in the sex industry. We now have a group of 17-year-olds who are not captured by the Children Young Persons and Their Families Act. No one from a care and protection position is able to intervene in these young people’s lives and ask some questions as to why they are out on the street dressed in their hoodies sniffing glue out of paper bags and offering themselves for very cheap sex behind grubby buildings. No one is asking where their mums and dads are who is looking after them and why they are allowed out unsupervised. Nobody has that authority because they are in this gap that exists. By lifting the age we can start to ask some serious questions and have some real opportunities for caring people to put in place some interventions that could help those young people at a time when they most obviously need it. There are a number of situations where young people are disadvantaged purely because their birthday clocks in and suddenly the services disappear. 
There is the issue of 17-year-olds still in high school who are in foster care and suddenly nobody is responsible for them. Quite often what happens is that caring foster parents at their own expense keep these young people in their homes as part of their families but there is no benefit and no remuneration. They can get unsupported child benefits but there are all sorts of gaps that these young people fall through yet we acknowledge that they still need to be in high school and learning for their futures. There are some real advantages in this measure and to United Future whether it makes us comply with the United Nations Rights of the Child is neither here nor there. It is just a sensible common-sense thing that needs to happen. These young people are falling through the gaps. That group of 17 to 18-year-olds are falling through the gaps in rather large numbers and we need to do something to stop that. 
From as early as 2003 United Future spoke to the Minister for Social Development and Employment Ruth Dyson about the need to respond to the baseline review. It was pretty damning about what was happening in Child Youth and Family Services back then. One of the problems was that as the department drowned in notification numbers it needed to share the workload. The idea of a differential response model which we asked the Minister to look into has been piloted in New Plymouth and in Royal Oak in Auckland and I thank the Minister for her openness to that idea. My understanding is that the pilots have been very successful. So we are looking forward to the roll-out of that. The Children Young Persons and Their Families Act does not allow for the work to be contracted out; we need a law change so that work involving medium to low risk cases and notifications can be passed on in a timely way to competent agencies within the community that can intervene before these cases deteriorate and become high-risk cases that need statutory intervention. 
United Future is very pleased with much of the content of this bill and we look forward to the submissions to the select committee. 
Debate interrupted.