Clendon David: Support for Children in Hardship Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeClendon David: Support for Children in Hardship Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 05 November 2015. Volume:709;Page:7781. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID CLENDON (Green): It is with no great pleasure that I take a call on this piece of legislation the Support for Children in Hardship Bill. As my colleague Jan Logie has said we are supporting this bill but simply because it would be perverse not to support even the most begrudging parsimonious increase in support for our least well-off families—for our least well-off children. The previous speaker made the comment that there was unanimous support for the intent of the bill and I would be very surprised if there were not unanimous support for the intent of better supporting our least well-off children. It is in the implementation where this Government and this bill fail badly. It is all about the appearance of giving more support to our least well off and it is very very thin on substance.Equally thin is the boast we have heard ad nauseam—if I may borrow that phrase—from our members in the Government about being the first Government in “x” number of years to increase benefits. It is a good thing to increase benefits but such a parsimonious begrudging approach to this—it is a very blaming sort of approach to suggest that the responsibility invariably rests with people in the position of being amongst our least well off. The Greens believe that we need policies that actually contribute to children’s well-being—to put children first in fact.I am reminded that in the 1980s when there was a significant and very interesting debate about the establishment of what eventually became the Ministry for the Environment—there was the proposition that something like the Ministry for the Environment should exist; I think it was referred to as the “Ministry in the Middle”—there was the idea that all Government policy and all proposed legislation should pass through the filter of “Is this going to have positive environmental outcomes?”. As we know unfortunately that is not how the Ministry for the Environment evolved. I do wonder whether it would be valuable if we could apply a similar lens to all legislation going through this House—“Is this going to benefit our children collectively and individually?”. Would that not be a really powerful and useful way to interrogate proposed legislation? Put that lens over it: is it good for our children? Frankly I think that this legislation would at best get a very marginal C minus—it certainly would not be in the B’s or the A’s.One of the provisions that have been talked about is the fact that the point at which work-testing of parents will kick in is when the youngest child is 3 years old. I think that that is an unrealistic blanket application. It is true. Actually I recently spoke just a matter of a day or two ago to a woman who is returning to the workforce. Her children from memory are 4½ and perhaps nearly 3. She is returning to a well-paid professional job. Her husband is in good employment where he has some flexibility. The woman whom I referred to is also coming back on a part-time basis with a degree of flexibility. That is a very happy situation. She is wanting to get back into her career and good on her for doing that. She is assured of high-quality childcare for her kids for the time that she is at work. That will absolutely not be the situation for many of the people with children as young as 3 years old who are forced into this work-testing regime.Children at 3 are still very high needs. I know this. I am blessed to have two 2½-year-old granddaughters and they are in need of constant attention and constant stimulation and—dare I say it—some wrangling. It is a privilege and I enjoy it a great deal as do their parents most of the time. But to impose this 3-year limit on people I think is unreasonable. It borders I think on the inhumane. It does not recognise the reality that some families do not have access to even part-time work that is even modestly well paid.I live in Northland and would not choose to live anywhere else. But a lot of our least well-off families who are dependent for the moment at least on benefits will be seriously disadvantaged by this determination that they must begin looking for work when their children are as young as 3. Access to work itself in an area with still sadly the highest levels of unemployment in New Zealand—physical access transport to work getting there looking after a number of children getting quality childcare for a number of children based on the income you might extract from part-time work in a fairly low-income environment—is simply not the reality. It is not true; it is not going to occur that way. We need to do a great deal better and the Greens in Government will. Kia ora.