Davidson MaramaMARAMA DAVIDSON (Green): Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker and acknowledgments to you and the Deputy Speaker Chester Borrows for having to deal with my emotional outbursts in this House on many an occasion. I wish you both well. I have enjoyed being mediated by you both.I stand on behalf of the Green Party to support the Social Workers Registration Legislation Bill of course. We support the professionalisation of social work but in a positive and empowering way which is the key I think. The key of it being empowering is going to be the main point to my short contribution today. We have also heard from the profession itself in the main that this is what it has always wanted and called for. The professionalisation on its own is not enough and not the core thing and I will hopefully get time to go into that further on down the track.So the status quo at the moment is that registration is currently voluntary and therefore protects only the title of registered social worker. What it means is that at the moment anyone can still call themselves a social worker because registering is voluntary. So supporting this move from voluntary to mandatory is absolutely important. Professionalism safe practice and accountability are the very very least that we can ask for and are the least that the children families and individuals deserve when social workers are dealing and engaging with our people in our communities. We do already know what happens when children families and individuals are exposed to any social work practice that is unsafe or even just unsupported so we welcome this move towards mandatory registration.What I want to talk about today is what we need to be mindful of and my other colleagues in the House have raised the issues of possible barriers. Again the Green Party wants this legislation to be empowering those possible barriers. I really do want to know who is going to bear the burden of these costs. From everything that I have seen the Minister for Social Development has absolutely signalled that this cost must be borne by social workers themselves. I understand that social workers are some of our most underpaid professionals and so I really want to have a look through in the select committee process at what we can do what the discussions need to be about who will bear the burden of this cost and whether or not we going to create these consequences through this legislation that draw us away from having a good quality collective team of social workers purely because of the cost barrier.Also I want to hear more about the length of the qualification and what that will mean again in terms of creating a barrier for social workers who are quality and who want to be registered. My colleague Louisa Wall mentioned that perhaps there is a way that the organisations as part of their contract can consider bearing the cost of the training. So all of these things need to be discussed and I am looking forward to the discussion of those particular possible barriers to registration and others at the select committee.The definition of safe practice I think is something that I want to pick up from my colleague Jan Logie who started to raise it previously—oh and also I do want to be mindful of wanting to make sure this legislation is empowering and not punitive. I certainly heard a more balanced introduction to this legislation from the Minister today but I do want to be mindful that in other public instances social workers themselves have cautioned the Minister on her punitive language in reference to this legislation—for example I think it is something like saying this mandatory registration will weed out the unqualified". So I want us to be mindful that this is to be seen as a supportive process for quality social workers who absolutely want to do the best job they can and need our support for them to be able to do a quality job and for our communities to be able to benefit from social workers having a quality safe practice. So I did want to just allow us the opportunity to reflect on our own practice of the language that we use and the approach that we use in our profession. Thank you.Now I really want to pick up what my colleague Jan Logie said and her reminder of the recommendations that we be absolutely responsive to Te Tiriti. These are not just mere words that need to be uttered; whether it is one or 100000 people who are tangata whenua there needs to be a clear robust framework that ensures that we have safe practice no matter who the child or the individual is that social workers are working with including tangata whenua. Indeed a lack of culturally appropriate responses for any children but especially for tangata whenua has seen social work practices and systems become unsafe.So this for me is incredibly important. Not enough credence is given to kaupapa Māori research about what works—research from our people by our people for our people. Given that sadly at the moment much social profession work faces tangata whenua children and individuals I think it is even more important that we insist that our systems and our qualification frameworks and our processes for registration take into account whom those very social workers are going to be dealing with. But it needs to be upheld at the systemic core of social work as opposed to relying on individual social workers to hopefully be good at what they do when dealing with Māori communities. That is a conversation I hope we will see some submissions on as we go past the first reading in the next term of Parliament.Lastly I really want to enforce that given that it is difficult to separate at this late hour this eleventh hour introducing this legislation to professionalise an industry that has long called for professionalisation—given that is hard to see that introducing this legislation at such a late hour is not a political step I would really like us to make sure that social workers can do their job independently and that professionalising their work is not about tying them with a burden to Government or tying them to political Government.They need to remain independent. They are social workers. They have a responsibility to uphold and be advocates for social justice and so my hope and belief is that we can empower social workers to become professional and registered and accountable without undermining their politically independent voice—their ability to call the Government out when they are seeing in their day-to-day role a lack of housing a lack of healthcare a lack of mental health support and so on and so on and so on. So I wanted to end my contribution with that caution that we all have a responsibility to work together to ensure that our social workers can remain politically independent quality and robust and that they are supported to do the best job that they can do. Thank you."