Turner Judy: Social Security (Child Benefit) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Turner Judy: Social Security (Child Benefit) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:617;Page:12699] 
JUDY TURNER (United Future) 
: 
 This member’s bill raises a raft of questions that probably need reclarifying for the public good. The questions are: what are the advantages and disadvantages of universally targeted benefits? From an equity perspective we know that financial supplements that are available to everyone certainly cannot be accused of being discriminatory. We also know that low-income families would welcome a subsidy that did not disappear as soon as they started to get ahead financially. On the flipside we have to ask what percentage of the hundreds of thousands and possibly millions per year that this bill would cost would be spent—and probably wasted—on well-heeled families. 
A second and perhaps more important set of questions needs to be asked about family poverty in New Zealand—how we quantify poverty how we sustainably lift incomes how we best help families to move beyond financial dependency towards financial autonomy. United Future has serious misgivings about whether this proposal is the very best way to improve the overall outcomes for low and middle-income families. However we will support the first reading of this bill because it provides us with a chance to more fully debate the realities of poverty as they occur within the New Zealand context and the chance to facilitate at a select committee level the discussion that so desperately needs to happen around this issue. 
It is a discussion that United Future would welcome. For instance United Future would like to see the debate reconfigured from its usual format which is to focus on child poverty and instead address the context that is facilitating the poverty which is the family. While the plight of children may act as our motivation it is by identifying and understanding the risks and strengths of the adult or adults charged with the responsibility of caring for those children that will best provide solutions for the child living in poverty. 
The key seems to be to take the skills that low-income families use to survive and use them to develop strategies that will see them thrive. Just throwing a bit more money at a family is really of itself unable to lift it out of poverty. A whole range of factors contribute to a family’s lifestyle but that does not mean that we should ignore low-income levels. It is clear that if a family’s income is too low then that family will remain trapped and struggling to maintain even the basics. 
United Future believes that we are well overdue as a nation for an in-depth debate on poverty in the New Zealand context. On nearly a daily basis members of this House demonstrate combined concern about those who fall through the proverbial cracks in our society. We are united in our concern but divided in our solutions and that is the nature of politics. 
United Future has always been upfront about the fact that it prefers tax cuts and income splitting to benefits as the mechanism for delivering better financial outcomes for all New Zealanders particularly families. For that reason United Future is unlikely to support this bill beyond this point but as the family-focused party we welcome the opportunity it could provide us all. That opportunity is to listen to those who work at the coalface of social services to the families of this country to put aside our unworkable ideologies and to genuinely and pragmatically work towards some workable solutions for the New Zealand families who at present fall within international parameters of poverty. We will support this bill at the first reading. 
Debate interrupted.