Delahunty Catherine: Vulnerable Children Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDelahunty Catherine: Vulnerable Children Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 17 September 2013. Volume:693;Page:13402. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green):Tēnā koe Mr Deputy Speaker.Tēnā koutou katoa. I am pleased to follow the previous speaker Phil Twyford and I applaud his courage in naming that issue. I think it is important that we talk about the whole issue of vulnerable children in a holistic way. The Green Party is supporting the Vulnerable Children Bill to the Social Services Committee because we want the debate and we do appreciate the Minister for Social Development coming and giving us a good briefing on the issues. That gave us an opportunity to have a dialogue and to raise with the Minister some of the concerns that we do have and there are some specific issues that I will cover.Above and beyond all that the question that is raised for me is why we are so violent as a society. Why when Sue Bradford put up the section 59 legislation—which most parliamentarians supported—were there death threats howls of violence and parents writing to us saying “These children are our property and we have the right to beat them or hit them if we want to.”? That was depressing and revealing at the same time but what it tells me is that violence is not just restricted to the 25 or so dreadful individuals a year who commit murder against children but also permeates our society. As a society we do not have a respectful attitude towards children. It was horrific to see the death threats about children as property that came out in the section 59 debate. Children are not our property and until we change not only the behaviour of offenders and potential offenders but the consciousness of a whole society towards the real value of children and their mothers who are also often subjected to the same violence no bill—no matter how well intentioned and this one is—will change that.We have got a lot of work to do. I do not think this House is a big part of the problem. I think we are willing to try to find solutions—some of us most of us—but we do have to acknowledge the complex matrix that has led us to being one of the most violent societies in the world. Violence cannot be solved through violence so we need to take a hard look at what this is all about. There are no excuses for violence against anyone let alone children. There are reasons why it has become a pandemic in our society and those are the tough issues that we absolutely have to face.So I draw my attention back to the bill. We do think that the relationship between child abuse and domestic violence cannot be separated. One of the reasons we are still concerned about what this bill misses is the economic vulnerability of women in violent relationships. The DPB was created so that women and children could be safe. In other laws in this Parliament where the welfare system has become based on sanctions women do not have the same opportunity to escape violent relationships if they are going to be taken into even greater poverty. The problem that these women and these children face is that we need holistic and consistent support for women and children so that violence is not their only reality and that they have genuine and real options. This bill addresses a number of specific situations but does not take on that really tough issue—where do these women and children go? Will they just go underground now because otherwise they will be in trouble? Potentially mothers could lose their childrenand Child Youth and Family could become more bureaucratic. So we want these issues addressed at the select committee. We appreciate the effort that is being made by all sides of the House to address these issues but we are really concerned.We applaud the idea of cross-department cooperation but we do not want it to lead to more bureaucracy more reporting and more statistics when what we need is not a top-down but a bottom-up change of consciousness towards this as well. I am interested in what the relationship is betweenWhānau Ora and this bill. What is the relationship between what the Minister forWhānau Ora Tariana Turia said which was that the Child Youth and Family system can never work for our families—she wanted to try something new—and how that relates to this bill? I want to see that.Whānau Ora was trying to healwhānau through self-determination versus the idea that bureaucracies and Government departments with more powers will solve this issue.I think that the member Rajen Prasad made a very good analysis of the challenge of social workers who are not always skilled—and as someone who has tutored social workers I know what he is talking about—in terms of dealing with the complexity of issues that they are confronted with. So we do have concerns about a number of things. We have concerns about the child harm prevention orders in terms of monitoring and spouse manipulation and also this issue of the balance of probabilities. We think that people need escape paths from violence. We did try to talk to the Minister about what has happened to the Ministry of Social Development and the law the Social Security Act around women and options to escape from violence. We do think those issues are intimately connected with child abuse and domestic violence.We do believe that when women and children are at the heart of not only social welfare legislation but also economic legislation then we will see change in this country. When women and children are the basis for the decision making around bills to do with the economy rather than being sidelined into social welfare we may see change. At the moment we are supporting the bill. We will continue to do that.