Lees-Galloway Iain: Social Security (Commencement of Benefits) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLees-Galloway Iain: Social Security (Commencement of Benefits) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 17 November 2015. Volume:710;Page:8246. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North): The explanatory note of this legislation says that this bill gives effect to the policy intent of the original legislation passed—well the debate occurred on 14 May 1998 but it came into effect on 3 June 1998. This whole debate and this whole legislation has been predicated by the premise that there was a clear policy statement from the 1990s National Government that it was its intention that the stand-down period should last a full 7 days. I do not think a single member of this House has been able to find any evidence that that was in fact the policy intent. The only reference that we have to turn to to try to find out what the policy intent of the Government at the time was is the Hansard. I have spent a fair amount of time this evening as I have been listening to the debate thumbing through the relevant Hansard and there is no reference at all to the stand-down period or to what the length of the stand-down period should be—certainly not in the Minister’s speeches and it is the Minister’s speeches to the House that we often go to to find out what the policy intent actually is and there is no reference in there at all.At the outset the purpose of this legislation stood on very very shaky ground indeed. Then we have a variety of other issues that have been raised throughout the debate this evening. Principal of those is that if it was the policy intent of the then National Government for the stand-down period to be a full 7 days and if this was a genuine mistake then it was a mistake born of rushed legislation. The original legislation was passed under urgency—actually during Budget urgency which appears to me to be a gross abuse of Budget urgency because this was not a Budget measure at all. It was passed under urgency and it was not shown to the Opposition until a few hours before the debate took place. This is the kind of error that occurs when you push things through under urgency. In a way it is deeply ironic that the current National Government is seeking to fix a mistake made by a previous National Government—a mistake that was made under urgency—by passing legislation under urgency; legislation that the Opposition has not had an opportunity to scrutinise properly which we have been given no regulatory impact statement for which we have been given no background documents for and which we have a very very scant departmental disclosure statement for. We are at risk once again of making bad law that is not fit for purpose and that does not actually achieve the policy intent that is being stated by the Government.I wonder what would have been the harm of taking this legislation to a select committee because it has been more than a year and a half since the Government actually realised that it was acting illegally—and let us be clear about that. I have heard from members opposite that this is just a technical amendment to tidy up a technical mistake. That is not quite the truth. The truth is that the Government has been acting illegally the Government has been acting illegally for some 17 years and Governments of both hues have been acting illegally. But the interesting thing is that when this Government discovered that it was acting illegally it made a conscious decision to continue acting illegally and it was only after that illegal action became publicly apparent that this Government decided to take action. So I think that speaks to the values of this Government. It is one thing to make a mistake; it is another to know that you are acting illegally and to continue to do so and hope that you can hide it from the public for as long as possible and act only when that information becomes publicly available. That is what the Government has done.This is more than a technical amendment; this is actually retrospectively making legal what was illegal and through that process denying people who have been adversely affected by the improper implementation of the legislation as it was enacted back in 1998 the opportunity to seek compensation for the illegal activities of the Government. So when members opposite get up and make very brief speeches about how this is nothing more than a technical amendment I say that there is nothing that could be further from the truth. Nothing could be further from the truth because that Government knowingly acted illegally and in a way that detrimentally affected the incomes of potentially thousands of New Zealanders. We know from the one bit of information that the Minister was able to give us that over 8000 people have made claims within the narrow opportunity that is available for people to make claims. That is 8000 people. That will be a tiny subset of the total number of people who have been affected by this legislation.There is another thing that I also want to challenge which members opposite have been saying throughout the debate and it is that this legislation is about a large number of very small claims. I think that was the thrust of the ACT Party leader’s contribution: that these are small claims that are of no real significance and that Parliament and the Ministry of Social Development should not waste resources on dealing with them. In fact what we suspect—and what we really know; again we do not have details—is that there will be a group of people who are severely and adversely affected by this.I know this is a source of great amusement for National Party members but there are a number of vulnerable working people who are severely and adversely affected by this and those are people who are on temporary work people who move in and out of fixed-term contracts people who are on temporary contracts people who get work through labour hire companies and people who move in and out of work on a regular basis because every time they move out of work and have to apply for a benefit the stand-down period applies to them. We have had the example of teacher-aides but there will be numerous other examples of people who by the nature of their work move in and out of work and they will have had a number of these days where they have been illegally denied income through the benefit system and that will total up. Over 17 years—moving in and out of workmaybe 5 times a year—there could very well be some people who have been significantly impacted by this. Again I say it is a source of amusement for the National Party; that is not so for those of us on this side of the House. We are actually concerned that there are people out there who have been severely and adversely affected by the failure of this Government to appropriately address this illegal activity that the Government has been engaging in.As I said I have been looking through the Hansard looking for any indication that it was the Government’s original intention for the stand down to be 7 days not 6 days. I could not find any but I did find this and I think it is an appropriate way to finish this debate. It is a quote from my predecessor and friend the Hon Steve Maharey who said at the time during this debate: “This Government wants to see beneficiaries be the fall guys for its faults. This Government wants the victims of this Government to pay for what it is not able to achieve. There is no opportunity in this Bill. There is no chance for a person to get a decent job with a living wage. There is nothing about families in this Bill. There is nothing about getting ahead in this Bill. It is all about the Government saying: ‘We can’t get the economy to grow we can’t give you a chance to get a job we can’t get wages to go up and beneficiaries are going to wear it.’ ” Those words are as true today as they were in 1998 and that I think is a very appropriate way to finish this debate on what is an appalling bill which has been a shambolic process to tidy up a classic National Party shambles.