King Annette: New Zealand Public Health and Disability Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeKing Annette: New Zealand Public Health and Disability Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 16 May 2013. Volume:690;Page:10179. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon ANNETTE KING (Labour—Rongotai): Clause 4 is the major part of the New Zealand Public Health and Disability Amendment Bill (No 2). It is the part where we ought to have a lot of information where we ought to be very clear in this Chamber as to what we are voting on and what the impact is going to be on the many disabled people whom this bill will affect. I was hoping that maybe the Minister of Health would have started to answer some of the questions that have been raised by this side of the Chamber.We have had the usual speeches from the Government such as “I move that the question be now put.” We have had very little contribution other than that. We have had one contribution from the Minister for the whole day. We started this debate at 9 o’clock this morning or thereabouts. The Minister made the contribution that he has to make with the first and second readings reading out his speech. He has sat mute in that chair until a few moments ago and did not answer a single question raised by this side of the Chamber. This is our only opportunity to be able to find out how the bill will work. If the Minister cannot answer it—and obviously he is not in the chair any more so he is not there to answer it—we are going to have to rely on the Minister in the chair Mr Woodhouse to answer the questions. Or maybe Dr Hutchison knows the answers to the questions but I suspect that he is being kept in the dark as well.Otherwise tell me this: what are the operational details of this policy? Who does it affect? How do we define a person of “high need” and “very high need”? These are veryimportant questions. Do you know why we cannot get the answers? Because the Minister informed the media yesterday—not Parliament—that they have not worked out the operational details of this bill and that the operational details of this policy are still being finalised. Information on how and when people can be assessed for eligibility will be available when do you think? Will it be this afternoon? Could it be on Monday? Could it be in the next month? No it is in September this year. That is when the operational details of this very important policy which has been rammed through Parliament with no scrutiny from the public will be available.So do we know who will be defined as having high and very high needs? Can the Minister please tell us today who these people are. Are they people with motor neurone disease? Are they people with muscular dystrophy? Are they people with severe physical and neurological disabilities? Are they people who have got a mental illness? Are they people who have got needs for palliative care who are terminally ill? Who does this bill cover? Why do we not have that information? The operational details are absolutely crucial to knowing what we are passing. The sheep opposite are all going to vote yes and not one of them can tell us the operational details of this policy. That is shameful—absolutely shameful. Why would we be rushing through a piece of legislation when the work has not been done?I can tell you how we know the work was not done. The regulatory impact statement arrived on the table of this House today. Most of the important stuff was blanked out which is very much a sign of a rushed piece of policy work and a rushed piece of legislation. The Minister did not want this part of the bill going out to the public because it is this part of the bill that people would have questioned. They would have asked: “How is it going to work? Which of our family members are affected by this?”. There would have been hard questions for the Minister to answer and he did not want to face them. I think it is disgraceful that we do not have the operational details of this policy.The Minister himself in his very short contribution on the bill after the many hours we have been debating it mentioned the technical advisory group. Well the technical advisory group was a very narrow group indeed. In fact we heard from the people who do the caring—people from Carers New Zealand. I raised earlier on I think in my second reading speech the question of whether any of the members opposite met with Carers New Zealand. Did they know Carers New Zealand? Had they met with Carers New Zealand? Did they know anything about the organisation which works with thousands of carers across New Zealand and has got a very good handle on what is going on?Well you would have thought that it would have quite a major impact on the technical advisory group. In fact it had very little—very little—impact at all because the Government did not have any engagement with the carers in the policy design or the systems that were to be used. It got one person on the technical advisory group and do you know what her role was? Her role was to respond to a series of questions from the Ministry of Health. That was her role. How could that be considered as input into policy development to ring her up and say “What do you think about this?” Where is the real input that you would expect from carers in New Zealand? That is the sort of feedback that we have been getting since we started to debate this bill. The truth comes out eventually. Even when a Minister wants to ram through a piece of legislation and wants to restrict debate to keep it tight so that people cannot really see what is going on—feed them manure—eventually it comes out.Members of this House have been receiving the same emails that I have been receiving so we have moved a number of typescript amendments to this particular part of the bill clause 4. I think some of them really go to the heart of what people havebeen saying. One in particular is—and my very good colleague Ruth Dyson has moved these amendments—that we amend clause 4 with a new section 70D(3)(c) and insert: “Any lower rates set may not be lower than the minimum adult rate of wages payable to workers set under section 4 the Minimum Wage Act 1983.”I challenge any member there to stand up and tell this Committee the people of New Zealand and those who care for the most disabled people in our society that they should not be paid a rate similar to other carers in New Zealand. Stand up and say that their worth their work is not valued enough to pay them a similar rate to other carers. The ministry in its report said that they ought to be paid around $16 an hour. This Government has said they will be paid $13.75. These people are not working just a 40-hour week—although that is what they are going to be paid for—they are working 7 days a week 24 hours a day except for the brief times that they get some respite care.I say to the members opposite: do not vote to pay them only the minimum wage; vote to have them have a fair wage—a fair wage—for looking after their family members. I will be absolutely astounded if the members can go out of this House go back to their constituencies and say that the carers of the most disabled people in New Zealand are worth the minimum wage only—“Don’t worry that you do a 24-hour-a-day 7-day-a-week job; you are worth only that and you’re damn lucky to get it because we didn’t really want to give it to you anyway.”If you read the Minister’s own press statement you get the flavour of where he comes from. He says that most New Zealanders expect families to look after their children. Well most New Zealanders do but there are Mrs Tolley some children who are adults who do need more looking after because they have very high needs and they are disabled. Why would we treat them in this way? I would have to ask Mrs Tolley—who has been smirking and laughing over there because it is not very important to her; she is busy chasing police who are eating hamburgers at a cut price rather than the real issues—why we would treat these people differently.I say to the members opposite that there are a number of amendments. They should get out of their seats get a copy of them have a read and maybe show some of their own internal fortitude and vote for what is right not what they have written down on their research notes and not what they have been told to say and vote for. This I believe has been a shameful process and the Minister is not even in the chair now.