Sepuloni CarmelCARMEL SEPULONI (Labour—Kelston): In making a speech about the Children Young Persons and Their Families (Advocacy Workforce and Age Settings) Amendment Bill I really want to start by referring to a quote that the Office of the Children's Commissioner used to start its submission. That quote is: When I walk down the street I see families walking along laughing happy and it is hard knowing that I don't have a family like that."The whole purpose of this bill is to try to place children at the centre and create a system that better protects some of our most vulnerable children. We really as a political party as individuals who care about these children wanted to see this bill do exactly that and there are so many aspects of this bill that we do support. In fact this bill contains a change that we have pushed extremely hard for and that is a raise in the age of care and protection. It is something that we believe passionately in and it was the basis of our support for this bill at every stage till this point. This is also the reason that we did support the bill at second reading.But this bill also contains a 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. There is no ability for Parliament to have oversight of these powers and almost no checks and balances in 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. We stated at the Committee stage that we would support this bill only if our Supplementary Order Paper 248 which removes the ability to delegate powers was adopted but unfortunately it did not pass and therefore I reiterate we cannot vote in favour of this bill at third reading.I just want to reinforce the fact that we did not come up with our stance alone by making a decision based on what we independently thought when looking at the bill. There were lots of submissions that came through that support the stance we are taking now. I do want to alongside my parliamentary colleagues also acknowledge every single one of the submitters who took the time to submit on this really important bill. In referring to the submitters I do want to refer to comments made in the submissions that support the stance I have just spoken about.We see in the Office of the Children's Commissioner's submission that it raised concerns about functions currently designated only to social workers being shifted beyond that to the chief executive to be used at their discretion. It questioned what this would mean given the current inquiry before the Social Services Committee on the Social Workers Registration Act and whether the two pieces of legislation are compatible. We as the New Zealand First member pointed out questioned whether or not there was compatibility there. On one hand it seems like there is a dilution of power and credibility with the social workers' role and the functions that they perform when we look at the Children Young Persons and Their Families (Advocacy Workforce and Age Settings) Amendment Bill. When we look at this bill it looks like it is diluting the power of social workers but then when we look at the inquiry into social worker registration and what has come out of that in terms of recommendations it looks like there is more weight given. So there were issues with compatibility and that was pointed out by the Office of the Children's Commissioner.The Office of the Children's Commissioner's submission also raised the point that—basically their submission on the Social Workers Registration Act advocated for all social workers exercising power under the Department of Child Youth and Family Services Act needing to be registered. That is what the recommendation from the Inquiry into the operation of the Social Workers' Registration Act 2003 has also recommended. In fact I have to say there were two Opposition members of Parliament myself and Darroch Ball who had bills up in the ballot last year to try to push for that mandatory registration but we had to wait for the Government to undertake an inquiry not for any other reason really than the fact that it did not want that change to be made under an Opposition member of Parliament which is disappointing.The Office of the Children's Commissioner also pointed out that it wanted to recommend public transparency and accountability on how the power would be expanded in terms of the delegation of powers. That is something that we have always struggled with at the Social Services Committee because no detail was provided. There was no transparency and no accountability. How could we possibly support that delegation of powers? It was not just the Office of the Children's Commissioner that supported the stance that we are now taking in respect of this bill. The Human Rights Commission also raised concerns. It agreed with the Office of the Children's Commissioner that there needs to be public transparency around the delegation of statutory powers. Citing one other submission and that is from Barnados it believes that there should be restrictions on the ability of the chief executive to delegate powers and it also raised concerns about fragmented relationships for children and the need for monitoring and evaluation on how these decisions are made.It is unfortunate that we come to the House tonight not able to support this bill because as I said there are aspects of the bill that we have supported that we have pushed really hard for. The first one I said was raising the age of care. We did support that. We support that move and we really wanted to support this bill because of the fact that we have been behind that for a number of years not just as we were considering this bill. We have supported a change in legislation to embed the voice of young people in care into decision making. Of course we support that.Looking at the actual bill and some of the things that needed to be taken into consideration the other aspect that we feel did not get enough attention when we were looking at this bill and considering it at the select committee was the cost pressures that CYF is under. Unless these issues are addressed unless we can get some detail around the delegation of powers we will continue to have concerns moving forward. In fact we will be monitoring this space really carefully when this bill is enacted to ensure that it does not cause any harm to our children who are in the care of Child Youth and Family.It is unfortunate that we are in this place but we gave it a lot of thought. A lot of conversation went on in our own team as to whether or not we could support the bill given that there are aspects of the bill that we support strongly but in the end we could not support the bill given that the Government refused to take out that one part in terms of the delegation of powers. So we are in this unfortunate space but just to reiterate what has been said tonight Labour will not be supporting this bill."