Collins Judith: Social Assistance (Debt Prevention and Minimisation) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Collins Judith: Social Assistance (Debt Prevention and Minimisation) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:641;Page:10853] 
JUDITH COLLINS (National—Clevedon) 
: 
 The Social Assistance (Debt Prevention and Minimisation) Amendment Bill has been a long time coming. It has taken a long time for this Government to start taking beneficiary debt seriously. It has been a long time coming. 
I remember a meeting of the Social Services Committee just a few years ago. I can well remember the Chief Executive of the Ministry of Social Development Peter Hughes say in answer to a question from me about beneficiary debt that 49 percent of beneficiaries were in debt to Work and Income. Now according to the answer I eventually got from the previous Minister for Social Development and Employment David Benson-Pope that figure is actually around 70 percent. So about 70 percent of Work and Income clients—in other words beneficiaries—are in debt to the Work and Income system and the benefit system. 
Phil Heatley 
: Will that be the truth though from Benson-Pope? 
JUDITH COLLINS 
: Well I say to Mr Heatley that it will not be any less than that. I think that 70 percent of beneficiaries in debt is a hugely bad statistic. 
As the Minister who has just resumed his seat Pete Hodgson pointed out these people are the most vulnerable in society. They do not in most cases have any real means with which to repay debt other than at a very modest rate—say $10 a week or something at that level. When I have asked parliamentary questions about some of those beneficiaries the answer has been that some of them will be paying off debt for more years than they can possibly live because the debt is so huge. 
Why does this happen? Sometimes it is about fraud. Sometimes there are very fraudulent people out there. I take into account the case of Wayne Patterson who was sentenced earlier this year. He ripped off the benefit system for over $3 million as I recall. That Government has sat by and allowed that to happen. He got caught out by a bank employee who happened to wonder why there seemed to be all those bank transactions from the one Internet address. Nobody apparently at Work and Income seemed to wonder why there were so many bank transactions to the one Internet address or why all the notices and things were being sent to the same post box. So it was a very interesting situation where the benefit system was being defrauded of millions of dollars. 
Now of course Mr Patterson is living on the largesse of the taxpayer in the Department of Corrections no doubt with heated tiles that he can walk his little feet on. He is now enjoying himself and more than likely getting a student loan which was revealed by the Opposition last year when we pointed out that all those prisoners were getting student loans to learn no doubt animal homeopathy. Of course that was eventually discovered to be a fraudulent thing to do and the Ministry of Social Development said it would get on to that and stop it. Well a year later legislation finally turns up so that we can stop this. 
After we listened to Mr Hodgson’s speech—and of course he is the Minister of Health; I do not know why we are not hearing from anyone on the social development side—we would think that all debt owed by beneficiaries came about innocently. In many cases of course it has. In many cases it will be a case of someone being overpaid and often there has been overpayment upon death because Work and Income will keep on paying after a person has died even after it has been notified and often for about a month or two. I have certainly acted as a lawyer for people who have been in such a situation. Suddenly for example widows or widowers have had to repay national superannuation that has been wrongly paid and they had not realised it had been happening. They were trying to deal with funerals and other expenses and dealing with grief and suddenly they are asked to pay back what is a huge amount of money for them. 
The National Party is keen to support anything that stops beneficiaries from getting into debt unnecessarily or wrongly but also fraudulently. We however are very concerned that it has taken this Government 8 long years and many many hundreds of millions of dollars of computer systems later to finally work out that sometimes when a whole prison is full of people who happen to have student loans there might be a little bit of something going on there and maybe it is not genuine.