Moroney Sue: Social Security (Clothing Allowances for Orphans and Unsupported Children) Amendment Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMoroney Sue: Social Security (Clothing Allowances for Orphans and Unsupported Children) Amendment Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 18 March 2015. Volume:704;Page:2372. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]SUE MORONEY (Labour): It is a pleasure to rise and speak to the second reading of the Social Security (Clothing Allowances for Orphans and Unsupported Children) Amendment Bill. At the outset can I congratulate the MP Tracey Martin who has brought this issue before our Parliament. She is genuine in her concern towards children who are unsupported and are being taken care of by family members and she is genuine in her concern about their equality with other children who are in similar situations. I want to commend Tracey Martin because she has done everything she can to make sure there is some progress on this issue.I also want to say that I feel as part of the Social Services Committee which considered this bill that I know how hard Tracey Martin has worked on presenting this issue. It was with a bit of a heavy heart that I was part of the committee when it agreed to an amendment that sees these changes not coming in until 2018. I think it is important that people listening to this debate understand the background to that because that is not of the member’s choosing and it was not the choosing of the majority of the select committee. It was because the Government does not see this as being a priority.The Government simply would not agree to support this bill unless this proposed change which brings equality to children very much in need was pushed out not just beyond the next election—which at the time the select committee was debating this would have been the election we have just had in 2014—but beyond the 2017 election. I am going to place a bet right now because I am a betting person that by the time this legislation comes into being there will in fact be a Labour-led Government in place. There will be a Labour-led Government in place and by 1 July 2018 we will be in control of bringing budgetary measures into this House that will not only help these children but help all the children who are suffering in New Zealand particularly children who are living in poverty which that Government absolutely fails to even recognise let alone address.This bill comes behind priorities for the National Government like suddenly finding the funding for 10 bridges in Northland—the bridges that the Northland Regional Council does not even want and does not say it needs. But that is a priority for this National Government at the moment and these unsupported children these children who are being brought up often by their grandparents and by other family members do not deserve to have equality when it comes to the financial support they will have as they are growing up. That Government opposite would rather build bridges in Northland. It would rather have put its energy into trying to sort out the Skycity debacle. It would rather actually be focused on—Hon Annette King: Rio Tinto.SUE MORONEY: That is right—giving money to Rio Tinto. That is a priority. That is a priority for this Government. It will address those issues immediately but these children and their families who are working hard to support them have to wait until 1 July 2018. I think that is an absolute indictment on the National Government and its lack of priority for the things that really matter.I just want to remind people—because this is an interrupted debate—whom we are talking about here. We are talking about children who through a range of often really tragic circumstances are not able to live with their natural parents. That may be because their natural parents have died. It may be because—certainly it was in one of the submissions the select committee heard—the father of the children had murdered their mother so the father was incarcerated and the mother was no longer with them. These are terribly terribly tragic situations in which the grandparents had absolutely been there for their grandchildren. They had stepped in at a time of huge grief to themselves and started raising children who were at primary school and teenagers even though they were grandparents who suddenly found themselves in that position.So these are often tragic situations. These are often children whose grandparents have determined or have worked with the rest of the family to say that they are the best people to be caring for those children and yet the State support they get for doing so is less than what people who have no relationship with the children they take them on—foster carers—get. An example of that is that a foster carer can apply for a quarterly clothing allowance. They can apply for an allowance for Christmas and birthday presents. They can have their health and education costs met depending on the child’s care plan. The carer may also be able to provide financial assistance towards recreational items. All of these matters should be extended to unsupported children as well as we call them.I remind the House that these children who are being taken care of by family members often have additional needs. Not only do they need another family member to take care of them but they are often suffering a high degree of trauma and that has financial costs associated with it as well.We had several heartbreaking submissions on this bill before the select committee one of which I just described before but all of them—all of them—had one theme and that was the relatives now the primary carers of these children coming to tell our select committee how much grief it caused them to see that they could not provide. They felt they could not provide as much for these children in their times of need. So submitters were coming to us and talking about how they felt that they needed to go to the op shop and buy second-hand clothes for their children because they could not provide anything more. These are often grandparents who are on New Zealand superannuation. They have got fixed incomes and they could not provide anything more than that and the one thing they wanted was for their grandchildren to be able to hold their heads up high amongst their peers and be able to be treated just like anyone else and they often felt like that was not the case. We heard many gut-wrenching submissions.I also want to also congratulate Tracey Martin on the way in which she presented her briefing to the select committee. As a former adult educator I was very impressed. We did not have bits of paper to wade through like we frequently do in briefings on this matter. We had caricatures of two children and on each of those children—one was an unsupported child and the other was being taken care of by a foster family—was written what financial support they were entitled to from the State and what they were not entitled to. It was a very very graphic way of bringing that information before the select committee.I conclude this contribution by saying that Labour endorses and supports this bill. We wish that it had a start date right now because these children need the support right now.