Salesa Jenny; Chhour KarenORANGA TAMARIKI AMENDMENT BILLSecond ReadingDebate resumed from 1 September.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): When we last were debating this bill the Oranga Tamariki Amendment Bill—the next call is an ACT Party call. I call on Karen Chhour.KAREN CHHOUR (ACT): Thank you Madam Speaker. Thank you for the opportunity to speak on the Oranga Tamariki Amendment Bill and there are just a couple of things I'd like to point out when it came to the consultation on this bill. Unfortunately it ran parallel with the Oversight of Oranga Tamariki System and Children and Young People's Commission Bill and I feel that many of the submitters either got confused between the two bills or this bill just got hidden behind the other bill because it was of such importance. So unfortunately we didn't have much feedback around this bill and around how it would affect people in the real world. I was having a look through this bill and we supported it through the first reading because I felt that we needed an opportunity to look into the subsequent child provision. Currently as it stands for anyone who has had a previous child or a young person removed from their care and there's no realistic prospect that that child or young person will be returned to that person's care the next child seems to be automatically uplifted. I honestly did not see how that was fair. People deserve natural justice. People deserve to be innocent until proven guilty and to have an opportunity to have a second chance.But the more I thought about it and the more I see stories coming out around Oranga Tamariki and decisions made and children that are being abused in care or abused in the homes of the parents or stepparents I have to push back a little bit. Right now what we're proposing is that it will only be for a parent or a caregiver that has been convicted of murder manslaughter or infanticide of a child or a young person that is in their care. But often we see children that may not have been murdered or may not have died at the hands of their caregiver or their parent but they have been abused quite badly to the point where in a case recently the child was beaten so badly that he nearly died and he was left permanently disabled. Those children wouldn't come under the provision of subsequent children because they didn't die.So I feel that maybe there needs to be another section added in there to include anyone who has been convicted of an offence involving assault or injury to a child who was in the person's care or custody and who has had an imprisonment of at least three months so that we're actually including that in there. The way it's written now we won't take into account the children that have been beaten so badly that they are permanently disabled and I don't feel that is right. So we cannot support this bill through the second reading and hopefully at committee stage we can make some changes that will allow us to continue supporting this bill.There's also another section within this bill that I was looking at and I couldn't understand the changes that were being made and the little amendments in the back. It was around bail for young people and it is in clause 29: If a child or young person appears before a court and the court considers the child's or young person's bail no breach of a bail condition that occurred before the appearance may be used to support a subsequent arrest under this section." I'm a bit wary of changing bail conditions for youth when we have a huge spike in youth crime currently and I'm just wanting to understand why we're making that change because no submissions were made on that. I'd just like a better understanding of that and maybe we can discuss that in the committee stage as well.Unfortunately I've heard a number of stories and had a number of emails that have come to me around concerns with the uplifts of children and with the uplifts of subsequent children. One example of when it goes wrong when Oranga Tamariki doesn't uplift a subsequent child—there's a story where a young lady is already currently taking care of three of her sibling's children that have been removed from care and put into the care of the sister. The mother is now pregnant with the fourth child and this caregiver is saying "My sister is not capable of looking after this fourth child but I'm not capable of taking on a fourth child." She contacted Oranga Tamariki and Oranga Tamariki will not go further with that because the baby is not born yet.That is unfortunately where the problem lies. Instead of making provisions available so that we're not uplifting children at birth I feel that we need to look at this in a better way. We need to look at it before the child's born—wraparound services before the child is born—and then there would be no need to change this law because we're dealing with the parents and providing them with the services they need to prepare for the birth of the subsequent child. We wouldn't necessarily need to uplift if we've got a plan in place before the birth of the child. Now we remove the child once it's born and then we put a plan together. Those first three or four months are the most important for the bonding between the parent and the child and we've taken that away from the mother—and the father—if they've done nothing to deserve the child being uplifted.So I think although the best of intentions are there there are still many questions to be asked in the committee stage and I would like to be able to debate that completely in the committee stage so we can support this bill further. But right now ACT can't support this bill in its current form."