Sepuloni CarmelCARMEL SEPULONI (Labour—Kelston): I am just going to start out by saying that this bill does contain a change that we have pushed extremely hard for and that is a raise in the age of care and protection. It is something we believe passionately in and it was the basis for our support of this bill at every stage—until this point. This is also the reason we will support the bill at second reading. But I want to go to what Mr Doocey said. He was saying that every submitter supported the provisions of this bill and was supportive of this bill. I think he has overlooked one thing and that is that many of the submitters were not supportive of the delegation of powers that this bill enables. In fact I think maybe he was not there for submissions and he missed that part. That is the part that we have issues with. The massive regressive and dangerous set of provisions that will allow the chief executive to delegate powers that can currently be performed only by Child Youth and Family (CYF) social workers is concerning to us. There is no ability for Parliament to have oversight of these powers and almost no checks and balances on the way they will be delegated. We cannot support this provision when it could allow any professionals at the whim of the chief executive to hold powers like the removal of children. My colleague Jacinda Ardern made it very clear in her speech that our support for this bill will be based on the changes that we seek at the Committee stage in respect of this provision. We can support it for now but we will be pushing for changes at the Committee stage in respect of that. Some of the concerns that were raised around this were just the risk of privatisation and what this could mean in terms of delegating very important responsibilities. In fact some people have been referring to this section of the bill as the Serco section" or the "Serco provision". I think that is where the concern lies and so we need to be very straight up in respect of what our intention is with the bill and what our concerns are. It is important to note that before we left Government we had a bill on the Order Paper that would have seen the age of care increased in the Children Young Persons and their Families Amendment Bill (No 6) and it really is unfortunate that that bill 8 years ago was dumped by that National Government. We have then tried to use bills before Parliament to raise the age—these too have been defeated. Last year we instigated a petition alongside the likes of Lifewise and Dingwall Trust to raise the age and we are pleased that the Government has finally acted on these calls. It would have been very difficult not to particularly given the submissions by the young people who have been affected by the current law who at 17 years old were basically dumped by the State—very emotional submissions that all of us on the select committee had the privilege of hearing. If that was not going to inform change then I cannot imagine what would have. So it is good that finally the National Government has caught up 8 years later but it has caught up. Currently the law sets out that a young person remains under the care of the chief executive only until they turn 17. This creates a significant gap in support services. Young people at this age are ineligible for a Housing New Zealand house for instance and accessing a benefit at this age is incredibly difficult. What we saw were young people who were in State care trying to undertake things like exams—really still not even near the completion of their schooling with at least another year to go—and then all of a sudden finding themselves homeless and without anyone to care for them. We are however disappointed that the bill raises the age only for care and protection purposes which will now mean we a have a different age for care and protection than we will for youth justice. Youth justice provisions are set out in the Children Young Persons and Their Families Act and it makes sense to keep those ages linked especially given the likelihood that offending at a young age—as the previous speaker Matt Doocey has pointed out—is often an indication of wider care and protection issues. Of the 1982 offenders in the Youth Court last year Child Youth and Family had prior involvement in about 67 percent of cases. The UN has repeatedly raised our failure to meet our United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child obligations because we try 17-year-olds in our adult justice system. This was an opportunity to remedy that. The Youth Court is not a light touch. It has the ability to apply tough parameters around a young person or to escalate a case to the adult system if need be. It is often a much more confrontational environment for a young person who is placed at the centre of the process and directly held to account rather than being a bystander as is often the case in the adult justice system. As the Children's Commissioner and past Principal Youth Court Judge Andrew Becroft pointed out "the change half-step and not full step to include youth justice seems to us to be burdensome and it will add administrative complexity" and that came up time and time again with the submissions when this particular mismatch was being discussed. So we do obviously support the raising of age care we do also support the establishment of an independent youth advocacy service we do of course want to see the views of children and young people taken into account as part of the decision making at an individual level and in the development of services and policy but it is this issue with respect to the delegation of powers that I just want to spend a little bit more time talking to. We are strongly opposed to those new sections under clause 7 of the bill which vests powers currently held by social workers with the chief executive. This will essentially allow the chief executive to delegate these powers to other professionals with very few checks and balances and without the oversight of Parliament and we believe that is wrong. The bill sets out that the chief executive can essentially make the decision and the delegation can extend beyond those outside of State services and they will simply need to ensure that there are contractual arrangements in place and that each delegation is notified on an internet site. Social workers are trained professionals. Like the police they carry out certain weighty functions set out in legislation and as such are able to be held to account—functions like the removal of children. These roles and responsibilities cannot and should not be taken lightly. We fully acknowledge that the differential response model already allows CYFS to delegate caseloads to social workers operating outside CYFS but the idea that powers contained in legislation could simply be handed over at the discretion of the chief executive is a line that we do not believe should be crossed. As I said a number of submitters shared this view and even those who may potentially be recipients of these powers spoke out against this amendment. Many argued that the collaboration across professions that work with children is already possible without such a huge legislative change. Others argued that the ability to work effectively with families could in fact be undermined by delegating these statutory powers. Overall we believe that these changes could well lead to poor outcomes for children and their whānau so we cannot support them. There were other issues that have come up throughout the duration of considering this bill particularly in respect of cost pressures with CYFS and I want to raise those because those have been raised by submitters raised by the media raised by the general public. So we have concerns regarding the overall ability of CYFS to currently operate even before these changes will be implemented. In 2016-17 CYFS is forecasting a deficit of up to $38 million due to demand-driven costs. The new funding of $35 million allocated for CYFS next year which included the discontinuation of funding from the previous year barely covers its deficit alone. The Minister has also not been funding CYFS to increase the number of social workers as required to by the Government. And actually while we are on the social workers issue the Government had set a target for this year to make sure that every single social worker working for CYFS would be a registered qualified social worker and even that target has not been met. So we do have to wonder at times how seriously the Government is taking some of these really really important targets. CYFS had a deficit of $7.7 million in 2014-15 underwritten by the Ministry of Social Development and it has an unexpected deficit for the current year of $11.2 million. So essentially just looking at those figures we can see really clearly that the CYFS department is incredibly under-resourced and so it is really difficult at times to reconcile the rhetoric that we hear from the Minister in respect of wanting to put children at the centre of all policy decisions and wanting to ensure the best for them and ensure that there is a focus when actually the funding is not following. We do support the intention of this bill but as my colleague and now I have pointed out there will need to be a major change at the Committee stage in respect of the section on the delegation of powers for us to be able to support this bill. Thank you very much."