Prasad Rajen: Vulnerable Children Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumePrasad Rajen: Vulnerable Children Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 17 September 2013. Volume:693;Page:13389. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr RAJEN PRASAD (Labour):Namaste. Thank you very much for the opportunity to take a call in the first reading of the Vulnerable Children Bill which will be a very important bill in the series of important discussions in the Social Services Committee and indeed through the other stages of this bill. I accept what the Minister for Social Development said about her sincerity in bringing this bill to the House arising out of concern for our most vulnerable children and that this is not politics. I hope the Minister will accept in return that this side of the House also is very sincere in trying to find solutions to longstanding problems around vulnerable children and that the select committee will use all of its intelligence and all of the resources available to it to interrogate in depth what these proposals are about and whether or not they are likely to succeed. I hope that we will not rush through the process and that we will have the information we require and that the changes made to this bill will be as a consequence of collaborative discussion. So Minister you have our assurances on that.It is often said and worth repeating that a nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members and vulnerable children are certainly its weakest members. If we just use that quote as a standard then greatness in this particular area is not something we can be proud of. I guess we can all take responsibility for that. But it is worth reflecting on how we got this way. New Zealand has one of the oldest child welfare systems in the world. When Minnie Dean was killing off children in Winton—she was the last person to be hanged in New Zealand for murder—we immediately passed child protection legislation and then the Child Welfare Act. That Act stood until the 1970s. We have had a long experience of protecting children and promoting them.How is it that in the 21st century our performance is so bad? Why have we not been more successful in protecting our most vulnerable? It is not as if we have not had many policies. We have had policies for Africa. We have had new ideas for Africa. We have had new reports for Africa. We have had new programmes being developed all the years that I have worked in this particular field and yet they end up in this place. When reading this particular bill I have been looking to see what is missing and throughout the select committee process I hope we as a committee will look at that. I do not think grand plans will achieve the goals that the Minister has set and we accept that our children should not be placed in a vulnerable position.There are a number of things missing and we should confront those. We should try to seek explanations about what is missing from the proposals so that we can make the proposals more comprehensive. My colleague Jacinda Ardern referred to a number of these. The time has come for us to look sincerely at the needs of our children particularly our most vulnerable as comprehensively as possible from the perspective of what impacts on their development. I think sometimes this House takes the idea that this is a comprehensive plan far too readily without actually interrogating what that means. We have the signs we have the knowledge and we have the research to do it and understand it. There are textbooks in libraries full of this information about what provides children with the best start in life and what protects them from vulnerability. Yet much of what we do in our society works against those interests.Jacinda Ardern talked about poverty. You cannot talk about addressing the needs of vulnerable children without addressing that as well. Poor housing poor health communities that are suboptimal—all of that—[Interruption] I do not know what the member is interjecting about. If the member would like to listen and just carry on listening we might get to it. We are on the same select committee Mr Sabin and I think unless we reach a level of understanding of these points we are going to make the same mistakes again. I say to the member to please listen because we are sincere about the select committee doing this work well and that information is there. Maybe in that member’s life experiences he has not come across this material. Well many of us have and we intend to ask the officials to show us where those are. Unless those are addressed—Mike Sabin: Twelve years as a detective—never saw a thing happening in child abuse!Dr RAJEN PRASAD: That is the problem with the member. If this is what carries on then this is how the select committee will progress. Here the Minister has very sincerely put her agenda on the table and we are responding to that sincerely but Minister if that is the kind of response your colleagues will give us then I think the member might need to speak to you to say how you intend this to progress because we intend it to progress well. So the total environment I say to Mr Sabin also needs examination and unless we do that we will not have it. We can all talk about those things inside the home that make for a good place to develop children. But if the community in which they live is toxic if the policies that inform that are toxic and if our whole perspective on what happens to that subset of society is toxic and negative then nothing will happen. Mr Sabin that is precisely the environment from which many of these vulnerable children come. So I ask the member to just contemplate that.We are not here looking for short-term gains. We are not looking for something to suit our particular ideological agendas. We are looking for some real change. Members of the select committee ought to look at that in some detail. I ask then: is the package that we see here likely to make a real difference? Have we examined the programmes that we have introduced over the years comprehensively enough to see what it was about them that we missed? There was a time that this Parliament debated proposals justlike this and passed policies and laws that were designed to address these issues and yet we come back and we have to redo them again.We all know a lot about vulnerable children. Early identification is not the problem. In many many environments those children who are vulnerable are identified sometimes 1 week after they are born sometimes 1 week after they enter early childhood education or sometimes 1 week after they enter primary school. Yet many of those children end up on the negative side of the effects of that vulnerability. A lot of professionals see this. Why is it then that even when we identify those children even when we refer them somewhere in many many cases they end up being vulnerable? Well there is something missing in this and the bit that is missing is the question of the people who are actually working in these vulnerable environments and how they are trained. What is their expertise? In order to do that it actually requires a lot of expertise. That is a piece that is missing out of the considerations here. Even after you identify vulnerable children the work to get them to the point where they receive the services that they need where they make the personal changes that they need and where their families are just as they need to be is a very very expert set of activities yet the profession largely charged to do that is social work and the allied professions.But we do not have minimum standards for their training. We do not have compulsory registration for them. We do not have workforce planning and development. We do not know how many we need. Many many courses around the country have great standards and very poor standards. There are 2-year programmes and 4-year programmes. There are postgraduate programmes and certificate programmes. And yet somehow these professionals are entitled to enter into the lives of these vulnerable children in the hope of making some difference. So writing a coordinated policy amongst Government agencies is easy but actually making sure that those vulnerable children are serviced by competent people who will make a change is harder. This will flounder again unless we have the right people working with that. Mandatory registration of social workers is important so that we can guarantee to the vulnerable that those who will come to work with you will be competent whether they are in the statutory agencies or the voluntary agencies. We want to say to social work educators that it is time they understood well what is demanded of the profession and they should be resourced and positioned to deliver to us the social workers we need.The final point is that we need to know that we are producing sufficient numbers of them so that we have a workforce pipeline. In this area for as long as I can remember there has been nothing there. The Social Workers Registration Board has come up with a very well written report saying that social worker registration should now be compulsory. I think it is that missing link that has to be tied into this programme. We certainly will be asking officials to tell us what those figures are. Thank you.