Sepuloni Carmel: Support for Children in Hardship Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSepuloni Carmel: Support for Children in Hardship Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 10 November 2015. Volume:710;Page:7859. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CARMEL SEPULONI (Labour—Kelston): I am standing to speak in the Committee stage. Firstly I just want to say that Labour does support the Support for Children in Hardship Bill but we have some major reservations that we will talk about in detail tonight. When we were weighing up whether or not we would support this bill of course the primary factor that made it difficult is that there is a small offering being made to these families. It is an additional $25 per family per week. In the scheme of things it does very very little to alleviate the poverty that many of our families are talking about and we will go into more detail about that. But there are some areas in this bill that we do have major reservations about. We have been looking into them thoroughly and we have been discussing them in detail with our stakeholders. I am going to talk to at least one of those areas in this speech right now. I guess our primary concern when really digging down on what this bill does and looking for evidence is that actually there was no evidence gathered by the National Government when pulling together this particular bill. I think it is very fair to say that this bill has seen a National Government blindly making legislation that is ideology-driven rather than evidence-driven. I think New Zealand should be really concerned about that.One of the areas that we have reservations with is the fact that what this bill does is it changes the requirement for work obligations so that the sole parent has to return to work when their youngest child turns 3 rather than 5. Some may ask: “Why do you have concerns about that?”. The primary reason we have concerns about that is that there is no evidence to say that these families will be better off by doing that. In fact when we looked for our own evidence and went and looked at international evidence around this we found in so many countries including in the US where work obligations like this were imposed and where women were pushed out into the workforce at earlier stages like this bill requires in many instances the research says they ended up worse off financially than when they were on welfare. The reason for that in the research is that actually many of them were forced to take on any work that they could get any work that they could get into quickly and more often than not it was poorly paid work. There are issues that have been raised with this particular part of the bill around the safety of children and the fact that these women—largely women; not always women but largely women—who will be required to return to work when their youngest child turns 3 rather than 5 will have to look for childcare for early childhood education. We had some concerns about that because we know as a country that recently in our media our academics have been discussing the fact that there are areas in this country where adequate levels of early childhood education are not available let alone adequate levels of early childhood education that is deemed quality early childhood education. To force these parents back into the workforce when we know that this provision of early childhood education is a real issue is something that we should all be concerned about.There are some Supplementary Order Papers that I have put up tonight. One of them is in relation to the age issue. We will not be supporting the drop from 5 years of age to 3 years of age. In fact I think I will make it really clear from the outset despite the fact that we do support this bill because we found it difficult not to because of that small financial offering that these families will be getting we cannot support the whole of Part 1 and we will be voting against that when we get the opportunity to do so. Part 1 is the part of the bill where we see part-time work redefined from 15 hours a week to 20 hours a week and where we see clauses 4 6 7 and 8 reduce the age of children at which the work requirement kicks in for the parents from 5 years of age to 3 years of age. One of the Supplementary Order Papers that I have put up Supplementary Order Paper 136 deals with those two particular issues. We will not be supporting the drop from 5 years of age to 3 years of age. We are supported by almost all of the submitters in relation to that decision because many of them pointed out the fact that not only is there no evidence to support the fact these families will be better off if they return to work at that point but also there were real concerns that the Government does not support the important role of parenting in this country. We had this discussion at the select committee. Many of the National Government MPs seemed to also not realise that we are not necessarily talking about sole parent households with one or two children sometimes we are talking about a sole parent who has been left to raise and look after three children four children or five children. While I am on that subject I am just going to say how awesome those parents are who make the decision to stick around and look after their children when in all too many cases they have been left by themselves to do that. I think the other side of the Committee fails to grasp that.Clause 4 which changes the definition of part-time work to 20 hours—so it goes from 15 hours to 20 hours—is not supported by us as well. One of the reasons for that—there are a few reasons—is that actually in this country at the moment for 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds we have supposedly 20 hours’ worth of free early childhood education per week. If you take into consideration the amount of time that a parent needs to travel to the early childhood education provider then to work and back to pick their children up then actually if you are saying 20 hours is the amount of time they have to be in work then there is a fair enough assumption that the travel time and those 20 hours is going to be 22 hours maybe 23 hours and if you are in Auckland it could get even more out of control than that. These parents are being pressured back into work but the early childhood education that their children are being provided with is not fully subsidised. When I say “fully” I mean free like the 20 hours that we were talking about. That is an issue. The other issue with pushing part-time up from 15 hours to 20 hours is that the moment we know there are currently 58000 New Zealanders looking for part-time work. The fact is that we just do not have that work available for them so it is an unrealistic expectation to think that we can expect these parents to go from looking for 15 hours of work to looking for 20 hours of work a week.Also I am going to go back to the fact that all too often what it felt like when we were considering this bill was that people were neglecting to realise that actually we were talking in some instances about multiple children. It seemed like everyone thought these were single-child households that we were talking about and that juggling that one child would not be so much of an issue. But we know actually the more children you have the harder that is to juggle but at no point was that ever taken into consideration. Those are the two areas I wanted to talk about at this stage. I know that my colleagues have a lot of other areas they want to talk about and I am going to stand and talk about some other parts of this bill and my thoughts on those when we get a chance. But I want to make it really clear that Labour does not support reducing the age in terms of work obligations from 5 years of age to 3 years of age for that youngest child I have laid out really clearly why and we will not be supporting the increase of hours in terms of part time going from 15 hours a week to 20 hours a week. Thank you.