Bennett Paula: General Debate 
Bennett Paula: General Debate 
[Volume:671;Page:17544] 
Hon PAULA BENNETT (Minister for Social Development and Employment) 
: 
 I start by acknowledging Christchurch. It is now over a month after the devastation and I will say exactly where we are on responding to people’s needs and also what a movement there has been to respond quickly and to get help to where it needs to be. There is the earthquake support subsidy. Nearly $146 million has been paid into that subsidy and I will tell members where that subsidy is going. It is for those businesses that need support. There have been nearly 9000 applications supporting more than 45000 employees and 10600 sole traders and contractors. The list goes on. 
I will talk about the way we have had to shift those resources to where they are needed and what that means for the rest of the country because as identified we are still in tough times. We still have people needing the State to lean on. People still need to walk into Work and Income to get that sort of support. We still want to make sure that superannuitants are being paid and are getting the level of service they need. We have had to make sure that that was happening. 
We needed to make some changes. We have had to make some changes over the last couple of years and I stand up quite proudly to talk about those changes. We needed to be more efficient we needed to be smarter at how we work with people we needed to put more into the front line and we needed to look at how we were actually helping people as they came in. In the worst of times we have shortened waiting times for those who go into Work and Income and we can be proud of that. 
When it comes to this Budget we will be making changes. We will be making changes we will be demanding efficiencies and we will also be looking at what is and is not working. We talk about it a lot but it is truly evidence-based to say that we are making a difference for those families who genuinely need it. 
We heard from Annette King that she has the silver bullet for how she will help under-5-year-olds. Well I say what a load of rubbish. We need to go through step-by-step incremental changes and make tough decisions to cut and shut down what is not working. It is about stepping up making a difference and putting children at the centre of what we do for them. It is not about throwing more money at a problem standing back crossing one’s fingers and hoping and thinking it will be an easy call to make. These are the tough decisions that Labour members under 9 years of a Labour Government were not prepared to make. We did not see the tough decisions being made for the families who needed them most. Now those members sit on the Opposition benches and they think that they can throw out a few sexy headlines for the newspapers and that will make a difference for the children who are truly broken and hurting out there. 
Under this Government we have had 12 new initiatives that are evidence-based and that are making a direct difference for those children who need them—a direct difference for those children who truly need them. The initiatives are not in the headlines we see on the front page of the newspapers. They are not the ones that numerous stories will be written about. They are the ones that are fundamentally making a difference on the ground. We are working with the right professionals the right people for those children. These initiatives are the ones that will make the most difference. 
We will also do some of the other stuff that is hard to do. I will give some examples of what we have done already. We looked at the Training Opportunities Programme. Let us look at what that was. It was run through tertiary education but we took some of that back under the Ministry of Social Development and looked at what needed to be done for those sorts of programmes in both cities and provinces. We said that we would be focusing that spending on employment where it needs to have an education focus. All the evidence tells us that industry partnerships relating training to the jobs that young people are going into will help not just those young people but anyone else on an unemployment benefit more than any other programme we do. Let us get back to the evidence base. What a difference it will make! 
Under the Ministry of Youth Development which I am also responsible for the range reach and relevance initiative that we have run in the last 12 months has meant that in some cases we have quadrupled the number of young people we are working with. That has meant being smarter and it has meant getting an evidence base for the number of weeks we should work with a family. 
We hear a lot that things do not need more money; we just need to work smarter. Things do not need to have a lot more dollars thrown at them but tough decisions do need to be made. I am proud to be part of a Government that will stand up and make those decisions. We will hear from the bleeding hearts who say: “Oh my goodness my favourite programme or my favourite little neighbourhood thing is getting a little shaky.” I say that we should make the tough decisions and put the children at the foremost of what we are doing. We can make a significant difference not just for them but for our economy as well.