Menéndez March RicardoRICARDO MENÉNDEZ MARCH (Green): Children growing up in households where their incomes are below the poverty line—it's a political choice one that unfortunately too many successive Governments have made for decades which is why the Child Support (Pass On) Acts Amendment Bill is a step towards remediating some of this. It will make important changes and finally remove and reverse an unfair decades-old rule often labelled the parents tax which says that if the primary caregiver of a child is on the sole parent benefit Inland Revenue is entitled to take child support payments to recoup the cost of the welfare system. This basically has penalised our families and has created the conditions where the other parent of the child is not encouraged to actually be participating in the sort of family unit and ultimately all that it creates is a situation where the caregiver the primary caregiver will be disadvantaged. So we do support this bill because it will put more money into people's pockets and it will restore certain dignity to our welfare system. I did want to note though that a Government that centres the rights of the child the wellbeing of the child would not just be passing on child support but ensuring that children are growing up with enough to thrive. And this is why in this complicated bill we do have some concerns and things that we would like to explore further at the select committee stage particularly in the way that the bill would intend to treat the pass-on as income for the purposes of determining entitlements to income support and the benefit. I would want actually the child support payments to not actually prejudice the ability for someone to receive their full entitlements under the welfare system and that actually we work towards ensuring that parents are able to receive everything that they can. And I do want to push back on some of the National Party's comments around that focus on putting people off the benefit because I think often these comments seem to ignore that caregiving is work that we should value as such. And if caregivers want to move into paid employment that is a choice that caregivers can make in their own right but I think at no point should we diminish the importance of caregiving as labour that often goes underpaid and not recognised. I think this bill will go some way towards that. I do though agree with some of the comments from the National Party members around the concerns about a sort of shortened select committee stage. We do think this bill is complex enough to warrant a more fulsome discussion and to have input from stakeholders around for example the impact that treating benefits as income would have. And actually I would want officials—as much as I see the brows from the Labour Party members on this—to be able to give us substantive advice for example on what it would mean if we didn't take this pass-on as income for the purposes of determining someone's benefit entitlements. It's important that we get this right because as the Minister noted this has been in place the current policy has been in place for far too long and this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to get things right. From what I've heard from the National Party members I wouldn't trust that if we had a National Government there would be any attempts to remedy this. So I want to make sure that we actually do do the right thing. Finally I hear the Minister's points that this is a complex bill. I want to acknowledge the work that has gone in to get this over the line and to a place where we're able to debate this. The Welfare Expert Advisory Group report is four years old now. It is by no means a gospel and it was a snapshot of the welfare system at the time before the pandemic before inflationary pressures. And so now that we're finally getting this through it is important that we prioritise all the other important Welfare Expert Advisory Group recommendations and more that will put more money into people's pockets and will lift people out of poverty because ultimately this is a choice and a choice the Government can make. Kia ora.