Naylor Jono: Social Workers Registration (Mandatory Registration) Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeNaylor Jono: Social Workers Registration (Mandatory Registration) Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 14 October 2015. Volume:709;Page:7244. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JONO NAYLOR (National): I think perhaps I need to declare a potential conflict of interest. As far as I know I am perhaps the only person speaking on this bill who has a qualification in social work. I may be corrected on that but I have to say I have a social work degree.Carmel Sepuloni: But are you registered?JONO NAYLOR: I am not registered. I am not a registered social worker. I have practised social work and although some may say that I am currently not practising social work I think actually all of us as MPs when we have constituents coming through our doors at times find ourselves practising what would often be referred to as social work in terms of the way that we have to deal with some of those constituents.The social work profession has for a long time been a very broad one. I took the liberty this afternoon of looking at the website of that fine institution Massey University to look at the kinds of careers that it says a degree in social work may offer you. It is a long list but it can be read reasonably quickly: hospitals and primary health care mental health and addictions voluntary and community organisations and Government organisations child protection youth justice housing offenders residential care management and supervision tertiary education community work and community development refugees and migrants and schools.The kinds of things that I have heard this afternoon may have made me think that social workers only practise with children and young people or that perhaps they only work for Child Youth and Family because much of the focus of the debate this afternoon has been in that area.I would say that I absolutely endorse the idea that people who are working with particularly vulnerable people should have some level of professional accountability and that they should perhaps be registered. If I thought that this bill was going to achieve what we want it to achieve I would support it. But it is not going to achieve that. It is so universal it is so all-encompassing and it is so broad that really it is not necessarily going to achieve what seems to be the intent behind it.Of course we want children and young people who are having social workers working with them and older people and vulnerable people of any kind to be cared for appropriately. Of course we do not want any children or young people to have the experience that the previous speaker Ria Bond referred to. This bill may or may not fix that because actually as we know from time to time even with registered social workers there still has been disciplinary action and people have been deregistered. We have doctors who have all sorts of professional boundaries that they have to adhere to and that still does not stop people from practising badly. So this bill will not necessarily fix all of our problems.At the moment I am not sure how this would work. If I were to leave Parliament tomorrow and perhaps get a job with Alzheimer’s New Zealand and go and work running a day programme with Alzheimer’s patients I think given that I have got a social work degree I can pretty confidently say I would be practising social work. If this law was to pass I would not be able to call myself a social worker because I am not registered and I am not sure that that is necessarily the intent. Perhaps it is the intent but we have got to look at this carefully.This is a broad broad way that things are operating. Yes at some point we need to look at mandatory registration in certain areas of social work perhaps. Let us face it: in other professions you do want to know there are professionals looking after you. I said to someone today that when I go into hospital I do not mind if the care assistant makes me a cup of tea or perhaps if I am incontinent helps clean me up or otherwise but I do want a registered nurse to administer my medication. There are times and places where obviously registration is going to be crucially important.It is important that we do do this review. This is not about just putting something off. It will not be as the sponsor of this bill Carmel Sepuloni has said us bringing back the exact same bill. No once this review has been completed and the Minister for Social Development has looked at it when we bring back another proposal perhaps for mandatory social work it will be comprehensive. There will be a definition I believe of what social work is. To simply say a social worker is someone who practises social work is far too broad and it is not going to achieve what we want.At this point in time I cannot support this bill although we do support the intent of keeping vulnerable New Zealanders safe when they are having social workers practising with them. Thank you.