Collins Judith: Social Security Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Collins Judith: Social Security Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:639;Page:9105] 
JUDITH COLLINS (National—Clevedon) 
: 
 Not everything in this bill is bad. In fact there are a few good provisions and on the select committee we made our views known about which provisions those are but the one in particular that we could not like at all and could not vote for is in clause 4 where the definition “activity in the community” is put into section 3(1) of the principal Act. Clause 14(1) repeals the definition of “activity in the community” from section 88A of the principal Act. Clause 14(1)(b) omits “an activity in the community or” from the definition of “recognised community activity”. The effect of that is that further on in Part 2 which we will come to later the term “recognised community activity” will mean voluntary work and will not include activity in the community. 
This is actually all about making sure that activity in the community will no longer be available as an employment intervention for people on the unemployment benefit. I think that that is a real shame. We in the National Party think that that is something we should not in fact support. The reasoning given by Government members is that they expect such people will return to work immediately or within a short time. Unfortunately that is not always true for everybody. Some people have been on the unemployment benefit for many many years and those are not the people who will be rushing off back to work. We think it is a shame because it is a really good opportunity to give people the chance to get work experience to build up their confidence and to actually see what they can do. We think that is a real shame. It is being driven by an ideological view whose proponents would see the introduction of a work-for-the-dole scheme. 
The reality is that at the moment we have low unemployment but we know that economic times are very cyclical and that at various stages there could be higher or lower unemployment. One of the best times to get people into work is when there is actually work for them to do and when there are jobs out in the commercial sector in shops and in factories—the few factories that are left here. The jobs are mostly in the retail sector—mostly in clothes shops to be frank—but there are jobs there. 
Anne Tolley 
: Shoe shops. 
JUDITH COLLINS 
: That probably says something about Anne Tolley’s downtime. There are jobs there but the thing is that it is not sensible to expect people who have been out of work for a long time to just cruise in and get a 40-hour-a-week job in an area in which they have no experience nor is it sensible to expect an employer to just take them on. So we think that for some people the “activity in the community” or its variation is a very good way of easing people into work but also of building their self-esteem and giving them the work experience that so many people lack. 
One of the toughest jobs to get I have always believed is the first job. The first job for a teenager is the toughest job that person will ever get. The first job in any career that someone has trained for is the toughest job that person gets. That is because the people taking on someone say that he or she has no experience. They ask about that person’s track record and what he or she can do. They do not know how that person will operate if told he or she cannot do something he or she wants to do. They do not know whether that person will turn up on time and there is nobody to verify it because if someone has been to school we do not always know whether that person has worked as hard as he or she could. If someone has been off to university well we all know university hours are distinctly different from those of a full-time job. 
I think it is great to have that opportunity open so that when there are people who need it we actually have it open to them. It is a bit unfortunate that the Government has gone and changed this provision part-way through the bill because we would have been much more supportive of it if it had been left in. It is a major plank of our policy in welfare that we will have a programme of work experience for people who need it and we think it would be counter to our own policy to support this part. That is unfortunately the bit that really really annoys us. 
The other issue is of course that of planning for getting into work when there is no follow-up. We heard a submission from the Rotorua Peoples Advocacy Centre which made it very plain that the plans that are currently required for domestic purpose benefit beneficiaries once the youngest child is a little older are not always acted on to the extent that staff at the Rotorua Peoples Advocacy Centre—which by the way has prepared a research document for the Families Commission which presumably was paid for by the Families Commission—said that in most cases these plans are not even given to the beneficiaries to take away. When asked they said that it was because no one does anything with them. They get done every year and no one takes them away. We think that is a bit of a sop. It is a lot of extra hassle for nothing. If one is to have a plan about getting people into work it should be followed through be taken seriously and there should be a genuine expectation that something will happen from it. 
Of course a lot of women particularly those on the domestic purposes benefit have found that the in-work payment has meant that it is financially viable for them to get into work but at the end at the day the in-work payment—which is what costs us about $400 million a year as I recall from the last time I looked at the accounts—added to the domestic purposes benefit as it really should be means that the numbers are just going up.