Walker Holly: Families Commission Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Walker Holly: Families Commission Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 24 July 2012. Volume:682;Page:3849. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
HOLLY WALKER (Green) 
: 
 E te Mangai o te Whare tena koe. Tuarua ki nga mema o totatou Whare tena koutou katoa. Tuatoru mihi atu ki Te Wiki o Te Reo Maori arohatia te reo rangatira. Tena koutou katoa. 
[ 
Greetings to you Mr Speaker of the House. Secondly to the members of our House greetings to you all. Thirdly acknowledgments to Maori Language Week; cherish the chiefly language. Greetings to you all. 
] 
I am pleased to rise in the first reading of the Families Commission Amendment Bill to support my colleague Denise Roche in articulating the Green Party’s position on the future of the Families Commission Komihana a Whanau. The Green Party will be opposing this bill at the first reading. 
 We have an interesting history with the Families Commission because we did in fact oppose its original creation in 2003. We saw it then as an unnecessary additional bureaucracy created to meet the demands of a political agreement between the then Labour Government and United Future without meeting the urgent needs of New Zealand children and families. I think it is probably fair to say that the history of the Families Commission since then in terms of its relationship to various coalition agreements has continued on the same track. 
We expressed at the time our concern about a lack of clarity in the role and function of the commission and I guess in some ways that lack of clarity may have led now to this Government bill which seeks to streamline and make more efficient the functions of the commission. However we cannot support the changes outlined in this bill and we share many of the serious concerns outlined by the Labour members in this debate. For the Green Party however these concerns are significant enough for us to be voting against this bill at the first reading. 
I want to address the issue of research—the quality of Government social research and the supposed need for a new families status report which will now be produced annually if this bill is passed into law. I would like to echo the concerns that Jacinda Ardern raised earlier in the debate about the  
Social Report  
and Bryan Perry’s excellent  
Household incomes in New Zealand  
report—both very comprehensive high-quality reports on the status of families and children across a range of social and economic indicators produced by the Ministry of Social Development. Where these were once released with some fanfare they now appear unceremoniously on the Ministry of Social Development website once a year—or in the case of the  
Social Report 
 now only once every 3 years—and I have significant concerns about the future of this important research when the work currently performed by the Centre for Social Research and Evaluation in the Ministry of Social Development is under this bill subsumed into the newly altered Families Commission. 
I also question the additional value of a new families status report in addition to the existing research from the Ministry of Social Development and from a huge range of other organisations and academics that produced high-quality research on the well-being of children and families. I think I would probably speak for many thousands of New Zealanders when I say that I think we are getting sick of more and more reports telling us how bad things are for our children. We are impatient for genuine cross-party action to end child poverty and reduce inequality in New Zealand and I do not see this bill as helping that agenda in any way. 
The Green Party is also concerned about the restructuring of functions away from the Ministry of Social Development and towards the oversight of a new advisory panel in this bill. This I think is part of a trend that we are seeing towards ministerially appointed advisory groups dictating our social policy in New Zealand and it is nothing to be celebrated. First we had the Welfare Working Group then we had the recently announced welfare reform board and now we have a social science experts panel and I have to question whether in fact there is a job for Paula Rebstock in this bill as well. 
Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m. 
HOLLY WALKER 
: Tena koe Mr Speaker. When we broke for dinner I was talking about the trend towards ministerially appointed advisory groups such as the social science experts panel which is established in this legislation. The Green Party is pretty concerned about this trend and would question both the value for money of moving towards these highly paid panels which are more akin we would contest to boards of directors than they are to appropriate social policy expertise and the independence of a ministerially appointed panel such as this. Other parts of the bill cause us to question that independence as well. 
The emphasis on advancing the Government position is very concerning. As we heard before from the member Jacinda Ardern we think that is the wrong way round. Of particular concern is the amendment to section 13 of the Families Commission Act which previously stated that the commission must maintain mechanisms to ensure it is at all times readily accessible to a wide range of views. This bill will amend this section so that it will apply only to its advocacy function and not the monitoring evaluation and research of key issues programmes and interventions. That lack of independence that change is very concerning to us coupled with our concern about the future of high-quality research currently coming out of the centre for research at the Ministry of Social Development and indeed some longstanding concerns that we have had with the Families Commission the direction of the current Government and the lack of action on child poverty and inequality. We remain very concerned about this bill and we are very proudly voting against it at its first reading. Thank you.