Bradford Sue: Social Security (Working for Families) Amendment Bill Taxation (Working for Families) Bill — Third Readings 
Bradford Sue: Social Security (Working for Families) Amendment Bill Taxation (Working for Families) Bill — Third Readings 
[Volume:617;Page:13527] 
SUE BRADFORD (Green) 
: 
 Yesterday afternoon when the Budget was announced I felt genuinely moved and gratified that at last this Labour Government was doing something that would directly go some way towards alleviating endemic child poverty. Overall the Green Party has welcomed—indeed applauded—the Working for Families package which at least partially redresses the structural imbalance between rich and poor that has developed over the last 20 years. 
However there are a few issues of concern lurking beneath the socially benevolent exterior of the 2004 Budget. Those are issues that the bill in front of us today actually brings to the fore. 
First of all and most alarmingly upon reading the fine detail of the Future Directions (Working for Families) Bill some of us were somewhat startled to discover that suddenly and without warning the special benefit is to be disestablished and replaced with a much more limited form of assistance called temporary additional support. Now to those who are happily not familiar with the labyrinthine intricacies in New Zealand’s income support system that will not mean much if anything at all. But for those who depend on that very system for enough money to live on the special benefit is unfortunately an unavoidable tool of survival. 
In an ideal world the Green Party would like to see that special benefit and the whole complex range of third-tier assistance abolished completely and immediately—and we would welcome such moves to do that from the Government. The 35 or so forms of benefit and allowance that have grown up over the years are a nightmare to administer. They soak up huge administrative costs including salaries which could be put to a much more productive use elsewhere in the economy or even within the Work and Income system—for example in providing a lot more vocational support for unemployed people. 
The special benefit also has a particularly difficult history because it has been administered so ineffectually and with such random application between geographical areas. As a result of that beneficiary advocacy groups in the last couple of years have carried out what they call special benefit impacts in Rotorua Hawke’s Bay and the East Coast in an effort to get Work and Income to pay people what they were actually entitled to in the first place in those areas that suffered particular discrimination. Those impacts have had a significant effect in encouraging local departments to improve their attitudes towards beneficiary entitlements. The Government is to be commended for the work it has done in trying to reduce some of the greater inequities and stupidities in special benefit administration for being prepared up till now to budget more for special benefits and for having an overarching policy that says all beneficiaries should actually be able to access their full entitlements—quite a novel notion really in the history of social welfare in our generation. 
However what we are seeing in this bill in front of us this afternoon overturns all of that. The effect of this bill is to remove the special benefit and replace it partially with something called temporary additional support. While that sounds fine on the surface in fact what the Government has not spelt out in any of its great Budget promotion in the last 24 hours is that this new allowance will be much lower and far more restricted in its application than a special benefit. When I introduced an amendment during the Committee stage this morning to attempt to reverse that aspect of the bill I was probably naively surprised when the Government suddenly placed a fiscal veto on my innocent little amendment alerting me to the fact that the financial implications of what was going on were probably a lot worse than I had suspected. I then turned rather belatedly to the estimates themselves to discover that the Government will be saving $7 million on the special benefit in 2004 $45 million in 2005 $57 million in 2006 and $91 million in 2007. 
While there will be some compensation for some future beneficiaries in the fact that those with children will gain through the new family support regime and while some people will get help through the additional temporary support allowance the savings I have just outlined go to show that in fact the Government plans to gain a substantial amount overall from cutting the special benefit. The people who will suffer particularly are most likely to be beneficiaries without children and those who have particular high living and medical costs. The Government will save a great deal of money from scrapping that benefit at the expense of a lot of people who rely on the temporary support it affords them in otherwise desperate situations. 
It is particularly disturbing that the Government is rushing a change of this significance through under urgency and under the cover of a bill that overall seeks to improve things for families and the poor. That is the sort of administrative change and benefit cut that should have been subjected to the normal select committee process where all concerned groups and individuals could have had a chance to analyse the bill closely and make their views heard. I just hope that the Government implements its further promised reforms of the benefit system with enough alacrity and with enough compassion to ensure that the kinds of social and personal disasters that could result from what it is doing today will not in the end eventuate. 
Apart from the matter of the abolition of the special benefit the Green Party has some broader underpinning concerns about the way this new legislation will continue to bed in and extend the discrimination between the families of beneficiaries and the families of those in paid work. Beneficiary families gain only very modest amounts from changes made in the legislation and the new in-work allowance is directly aimed at encouraging beneficiary parents out of their homes and into the paid workforce. I have no problems with anything that can be done to assist people into the paid workforce but what we should not be doing as a society is saying that firstly somehow the children of those people should be punished for the situation their parents find themselves in and secondly that somehow people should be forced into getting a job—of any kind at any cost. People should have the choice of staying home with their children when those children are young and should not have the kind of pressure put on them by a society that says paid work is automatically and intrinsically worth more than caring for one’s children. 
A third area of concern which New Zealand First brought up in this debate is the timing of the proposed changes. We were happy to support New Zealand First’s amendments—which were also met with a fiscal veto—that changed the timing so that increases to family assistance and the rest of the changes could be brought in a lot more quickly. Of course the Government says that it cannot afford that. But we can see the Budget the Government is dealing with and we say that if the Government were serious about supporting families now—and it acknowledges for the first time that there is serious child poverty in this country—then those changes should have been brought in a lot sooner. Through the media in the last 24 hours I think we have seen some of the people who have been really upset to have heard first of all the promises that Dr Cullen made yesterday afternoon and then to have realised that the impact of those promises—the benefits they will gain and whether they will mean a few dollars or a lot of dollars—are not really going to hit in for at least a year if not 2 3 or 4 years. 
A further area of concern is that area around the accommodation supplement. The Government is putting a lot of hope into the fact that the accommodation supplement will increase for some people. We see that in the long term the accommodation supplement is not the solution. It is a subsidy to landlords and employers and the Government should be putting a lot more focus on extending social housing stock. 
But overall—and in some ways I am sorry to have been so negative in this final speech on this bill—the Green Party is delighted with the direction the Government is taking in this legislation. We would also like to acknowledge the role that United Future played in putting it together. We are delighted that Labour is helping families overall and that it is finally making an overt commitment to ending child poverty and that is long overdue so we congratulate it on the overall direction it is taking. We will vote for the bill.