Delahunty Catherine: Social Security (Fraud Measures and Debt Recovery) Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDelahunty Catherine: Social Security (Fraud Measures and Debt Recovery) Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 27 August 2013. Volume:693;Page:13136. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green):Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker. Thank you very much. I am honoured to speak for the Green Party and to be voting against the Social Security (Fraud Measures and Debt Recovery) Amendment Bill. It is very important that the Green Party stands here today and votes against this bill. I would like to honour all the people who struggle on the benefit because the benefit itself has now become a fraud. The benefit once was truly a safety net but now people cannot live on it. We can live on our comfortable wages but many many people out there cannot live on what they are receiving on the benefit. If they could get a job they would because who wants to be stigmatised? Who wants to be investigated? Who wants to be humiliated? It is no fun to stand at a Work and Income office and receive that treatment.I would like to acknowledge the beneficiary advocates a group of people who are dwindling in the recession. They have pointed out to me that what happens in a recession every time—many of them are veterans of the system—is that there are bills passed through this Parliament to increase the pressure on and the scapegoating of the vulnerable. It is a great system. Of course the Government is not going to go after tax dodgers. That is hard work. They have got lawyers. Well I tell you what—sorry Mr Assistant Speaker not you. I will tell the House my own experience of working with the benefit fraud team.There is already a system of investigating benefit fraud and it is not very pleasant because what it does is it picks on the large percentage of people who either did not realise they had created a debt or are in trouble for various reasons with the department and it now investigates them secretly. It creates an incredibly punitive regime.I have sat at meetings with young parents who did not know that they had to prove they were the parents. The department decided that they were not really with their child enough and they were going to go to court and possibly go to jail. A lot of young women who are in prison are young women who have been done for benefit fraud so their kids are really benefiting from this punitive system now! And this bill is going to make it worse.We do salute the part of the bill that will require more responsibility from partners though I think some of it is going to be an enormous waste of money. Some people will get work out of it. There may be some more jobs in the benefit fraud unit but I cannot actually see it being very effective to try to squeeze more blood out of the vulnerable stones at the bottom of our society which is what this bill is about.So how does the ministry collect a $5000 fine from people who already do not have any money and from people for whom English is a second language and who have come to the benefit support agencies I have been part of saying that they do not know what Work and Income is telling them and they are not sure what they are entitled to? We often then find out that they have not got their basic entitlement but they are being accused of fraud for various reasons beyond their control. So there is the super-vulnerable people at the bottom and we are increasingly seeing mental health survivors become part of the investigation of fraud which is what this bill will target. So let us get on to those mental health survivors let us put them through the system let us investigate them let us threaten them with fraud and let us see how much money we can squeeze out of them! We will get not very much money not very much human dignity and not too much respect.I sat with a benefit fraud investigator one day and she said to a woman: “How many times have you had sex with your neighbour? Don’t you diary your sex life?”. There was no shame in talking to beneficiaries like that—no shame whatsoever. I said to the benefit fraud investigator: “Do you diary your sex life?”. And guess what? She did not but it is OK to talk to those people like that because they are at the bottom and they have got issues and because they are not justified like the tax people! They are the bad people and we can treat them like dirt because dirt is how we treat them! But that does not work. It does not work for recovering money it does not work for inspiring people to do better it does not create jobs and it does not protect human rights.One of the reasons this is a bad bill is the fact that it does not acknowledge that out there in the community some people are trying to get our human right to a decent income and food for our kids even if they are in debt. It does not allow that. The ministry will decide what is reasonable and the ministry will fail because the ministry is failing now. We need to go back to the first principles of the Social Security Act. Much like ACC where we have abandoned the Woodhouse principles we should go back to the fundamental principles about protecting people. Wasting money like this on creating more and more squads of people to investigate more and more other people when it is a small percentage of genuine rip-off merchants is a shame and a disgrace. Let us review the system. Let us do it properly rather than base it on punishment. We are very proud to oppose this bill.