Moroney Sue: Support for Children in Hardship Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMoroney Sue: Support for Children in Hardship Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 01 December 2015. Volume:710;Page:8431. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]SUE MORONEY (Labour): It is great to have an opportunity to rise and speak about the title and commencement clauses of the Support for Children in Hardship Bill. I do intend to talk mostly about the title. I hope to get an opportunity to also talk about the commencement date but we will see how we go because I have got quite a bit to say about the title.I want to say what I really do not like about the title of this bill the Support for Children in Hardship Bill. It is far too accepting in my view that in a country like New Zealand we will have children who live in hardship and that all we really need to do is just support them. I do not like that concept at all and neither does the Labour Party because the Labour Party has zero tolerance for child poverty—and that is the sort of ambition that you would want from a Government. You would want a Government to say it is not acceptable that children live in hardship or in poverty rather than to actually give a bill a title that is very accepting of the very idea that in Aotearoa New Zealand the sort of country where we produce food where the living standards were once very good right across the board—today the Government has to name a specific piece of legislation the Support for Children in Hardship Bill.This bill will become the Support for Children in Hardship Act. It will be on our books for a very long time in terms of our legislature. I feel offended by that as a New Zealander. If that Government still had the ambition it once said it had for New Zealand it would never think of giving a bill this sort of title—a bill that accepts that in this country children will live in hardship and that the Government’s only real role in that is to fling them a bit of support.What is that bit of support the Government is flinging them under this bill? It turns out to be about $17 or maybe $23.10 at the outmost per family. We have already heard a number of speakers talk about how the Government has kind of gone into poverty denial on this. Even though we know there are now 305000 children in this food-producing nation of ours who are living in poverty the Government lacks ambition so much in this area that it has decided that it will try to address only 18000 of the most worst-off families.The reason I raise this is that if the Government really understands poverty and knows the depth of this poverty it surely knows that adding $17 a week or maybe $23.10 per week for each of these families at the most is not going to fundamentally change the problem for those children. In fact statistically not one of those children will be lifted out of poverty with this addition—not one of those children. These families living in—as the Government calls it in the title of this bill—hardship are living at the most extreme end of hardship in this country. It is completely unacceptable and it should not be recognised in the name of a bill.If this Government was truly ambitious for New Zealand and wanted to address this issue then it would be addressing the fundamental causes of poverty. It would be addressing the lack of wealth distribution we have in this country now under this Government. It would be addressing the fact that two out of five of these children live in homes where their parents are in paid employment—paid employment—and that that paid employment has such appalling conditions and wages going alongside it that those children live in poverty even though their parents are out earning wages.These are the families on the zero-hour contracts that the Government wants to codify in law. These are the families that have been forced to choose—well not choose. They have been told they cannot get the benefit after their child turns a certain age 3 years of age and that they must take whatever work is offered to them. That is putting these children in hardship as this bill names it. If the Government was ambitious it would have had a better title for this bill.At the outset I indicated that I wanted to address the commencement clause but I did warn that I had rather a lot to say about the title. I will now move on and briefly address the commencement clause of this bill. Again it shows a Government that lacks ambition. It shows a Government that lacks urgency over this issue. It announced in its Budget this year—in May this year many months ago—that it was going to bring this measure in. That measure should have been taken urgently. There should not be a wait until 1 April 2016 before any family can get any benefit from it. If the Government truly understood the depth of the urgency of the need of these families it would have acted an awful lot earlier.We are about to move into the most expensive period of the year for families. We are moving into the Christmas festive season. For many families this is the most expensive time of year. Yet here we are on 1 December and this Government could have moved much more urgently to address this issue and given these families a little bit to come and go on over the so-called festive season—it will not be terribly festive for these families I can tell you. If the Government was truly committed to the urgency of this then we would be talking about 1 December—today’s date—for introducing this additional payment.We have got Christmas coming up. We have got the holiday season coming up. We have got the school year about to start next year with the cost of uniforms the cost of school fees and the cost of stationery. All of those things impact upon families and make it extremely difficult for these so-called children in hardship to participate fully in their education.I am going to wrap up my contribution there. I think it is extremely disappointing that the Government lacks so much ambition for New Zealand that it accepts that there will be children in hardship in Aotearoa and accepts that doing anything about it is not terribly urgent.