Collins Judith: Social Security Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Collins Judith: Social Security Amendment Bill — In Committee 
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JUDITH COLLINS (National—Clevedon) 
: 
 The Social Security Amendment Bill we are debating today and that we have been debating for the last few weeks is a bill that could possibly be more properly called the “Single Core Benefit (Phase One) Bill”. I say that because this is a bill that brings in an amendment that the single core benefit was supposed to bring about—effectively a work requirement for some people whether they were sick or simply under-employed whether or not they wished to work and whether or not they could work. Given that this Labour Government has been talking in various stages since 1989 about the single core benefit I think that we could just hold off putting this bill through and instead wait for phase two which we have been promised since 1989. 
A huge amount of money has been spent on resourcing and doing the policy work behind this bill. A huge amount of work has been put together. In fact it is so huge that the current Minister and the previous Minister have been incapable of listing the number of reports on the single core benefit or its progress because apparently to do so would require a great deal of manual collation. Apparently it would require so much manual collation that those reports cannot be counted. 
We support some parts of this bill. We support the idea that those who can work should work if they are to be recipients of benefits under the social welfare system. However we do think that some things could change. We are a little bit worried that some people who are genuinely incapable of working and who are genuinely unable to participate in the workforce will feel they need to try to work even if they simply cannot. That is something that people have certainly spoken to us about at the Social Services Committee. We have received submissions from various groups including IHC New Zealand that felt that if people did not work then under this bill if it goes through they would be noted as simply not contributing. People can contribute to the community in lots of ways; paid work is certainly one of them and raising children well is certainly another. In fact in my opinion the most important contribution people can make to the community is to raise their children well. But they can also contribute by helping out others by helping those who are less well-off and by working with children in a voluntary way. All of those things are commendable activities that can be supported as contributing to the greater community and the greater good. We think the concept of “work first” is good but we also think it needs to be looked at from the point of view of what people can actually do. We do not want this to be a country where those who simply cannot work in the paid workforce feel they are not valued and feel they are not able to contribute in some other way. 
We are also very concerned to see that the “activity in the community” programme which we think could have been developed properly but which has not been under this Government—it has in fact been ignored and under-resourced—will not be taken seriously under this bill and we think that that is a real shame. 
We would like to see phase two put in though so that we can see this bill in its entirety. Phase two which is what we now call the single core benefit is about amalgamating seven main working-age benefits into one and calling it a single core benefit with multiple add-ons. How will that work with this bill? We think it is somewhat premature to have one without the other. Given that we have been waiting since 1989 for the single core benefit and that this Government has been in power for almost 8 years one would think that we could have had some idea about when the single core benefit will happen. Instead we hear constantly from the Minister that apparently Cabinet will look at it either later this year or next year. It is always in election year that something is going to be looked at. Just like the housing policy and everything else it is always going to be announced going to be launched and going to be the newest thing. Particularly when Mr Steve Maharey is in the ministerial role it is going to be the most fantastic and outlandishly exciting scheme that has ever been seen. But what happens? As soon as the election is over Labour members forget all about it and say they are going to look at another phase. 
So we will now have this new part of our vocabulary in Parliament—phase two. Phase two means the bit of the bill the bit of the policy that is promised but that frankly cannot be done because first the Government does not have the votes to do it. We know that there is no appetite in this Parliament anywhere except on the front-bench of the Labour Party to amalgamate seven main working-age benefits into one benefit and call it a single core benefit. We know that nobody in the Greens wants that. We certainly know that the National Party does not want that. We know that the Maori Party does not want that. We know that actually nobody wants it except the Minister.