Logie Jan: Support for Children in Hardship Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLogie Jan: Support for Children in Hardship Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 05 November 2015. Volume:709;Page:7776. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAN LOGIE (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker. Tēnā koutou e Te Whare. I think it is important to start this speech with the voices of New Zealand children provided through a report by the Office of the Children’s Commissioner describing what poverty means for them. So I am going to quote from children in this country: “Sleep on the floor—wooden floor.”; “No power—can’t pay their bills—can’t cook no heating.”; “Not enough money to pay for basketball fees/sports.”;“You can’t go to the pools and learn to swim.”;“Scavenging for food just to eat for a night.”; “You get bullied because of your appearance—they look at your clothes and mock you.” This is currently the reality for thousands of children in this country right now.If I am honest I feel like I am swallowing a bit of a dead rat standing here today to vote in support of this misnamed bill the Support for Children in Hardship Bill. This bill pretends to support children in hardship when the reality is that it represents a conscious decision by Minister Tolley and the Government to not move children out of poverty. What this bill does instead is take money from struggling families to provide an average of $23.10 per week to our most poor families and to provide an additional $12 a week in tax credits for 4000 families. That is deeply deeply frustrating to me.There are 305000 children in poverty in this country. Two out of five of these children have working parents. Otago University research shows that 60 children a year are dying of lowincome-related diseases in this country. The Government was told that to lift any—not all not even most but any—children whose parents are unable to work out of poverty above the accepted poverty lines it needed to increase benefits by an absolute minimum of $30 a week. Instead it chose to offer us benefit increases of an average of $23.10 per week. It would have cost only a few more dollars a week to be able to get at least some of those children over the line and out of poverty. I believe it does an absolute disservice to us as a country and to our concern for our children to offer that amount.The Government is saying to us as a country that these tiny increases reflect our collective concerns for those thousands of children sleeping on floors and scavenging for food. Well it does not reflect the Green Party’s concern and it did not reflect the concern of submitters who wanted a comprehensive solution a brave solution to address these problems. We are supporting this bill today because we cannot vote against that extra $23 and $12 for those families who today have empty fridges for those children who are scavenging for dinner. But this in no way reflects what we think is right. If I try to detach from my emotion on this issue I can acknowledge that this inadequate increase is at least a formal acknowledgment of the State’s responsibility for alleviating child poverty and that is something.But the Government is taking from the poor to pay the poorest. By increasing the Working for Families abatement rate and lowering the threshold for Working for Families the Child Poverty Action Group pointed out the Government is failing to protect the working poor. In fact by its calculations a family earning the minimum wage working 60 hours a week getting $46000 a year will now be over $2000 a year worse off. These are poor families from whom this Government is taking their money to pay the absolute poorest when some of us in this House could actually afford a bit of our income. People on our incomes could afford to pay a bit more tax to be able to address child poverty in this country. It should not be taken from the working poor.Anne Tolley has said that she will only do this pitiful bit to help our children if their parents do more in return. Let us be clear: this is more for the Government not more for their kids. The Government is saying that in return for a small contribution from the Government parents need to give up their right to choose how to parent their children. They will be required to look for 20 hours of work a week from the time their children are 3. This policy really—the underlying message of it—is that these families are work-shy and ignorant of what is best for their children. And we heard from the Minister for Social Development that there will be discretion here—Work and Income will make the decision on whether it is appropriate work for that family not that parent. The Minister thinks Work and Income is best placed to decide on what is appropriate for the needs of a child.We heard from the previous speaker that the Children’s Commissioner acknowledged that the average time that parents go back into the workforce is when their child is 3. Sure but that is missing the difference between shared parenting and sole parenting. It is missing the difference between the reasons why so many people are on Work and Income benefits due to family breakdown and the needs of different children. There will be children in this situation who have disabilities for whom Work and Income will decide on behalf of their parents how much time the parent can spend with them—taking that choice away from parents. It will be over 14000—that is a horrible under-estimation. Families are leaving violent relationships and I know from having worked with those families that their children need them. For a Work and Income officer who has no knowledge of those children to decide when it is appropriate for that parent to be going back into work and losing that relationship and ability to be on Work and Income assistance is frankly wrong.And we are further concerned that making parents look for that 20 hours of work a week may compromise their ability to participate in kohanga reo aoga amata or Playcentre models of early childhood education which require substantial parental involvement. As has been pointed out by a previous speaker these models have substantial benefits to families. And we believe that the right to participate in those models needs to be protected.There is so much awfulness in this bill. The decision to increase an assistance to be per family and not per child is going to lock in ethnic and financial inequality because we actually know that New Zealand is blessed in some ways that we are protected from the very worst of the ageing population crisis faced by other OECD countries by the higher birth rates for Māori and Pasifika. But that means the families are larger and they face institutional discrimination that is blocking them out of the workforce. So their children—while we should be nurturing them because they are the future of our country and our workforce we are going to be penalising those families compared with smaller families of other ethnicities. That will have a long-term cost for us.There is so much more I could say but I want to wind up now with more words from children about what they want from us. This is another quote from the Children’s Commissioner’s report. They say: “Everyone is equal. We have the same potential as everyone else. Don’t put barriers in front of us and don’t leave us in the ditch. Help and support us our families and communities. How can they [the Government] expect us to look after this place New Zealand in the future if they are looking down on us …”. This bill hands snacks to children in the ditch. By supporting this bill we are supporting children’s right to eat but we are deeply offended that we are being asked to leave them and their parents in the ditch.