SpeechJAN LOGIE (Green): Thank you Madam Speaker. It's with pleasure I rise to offer the Green Party's support for this bill though we would have gone further.But I want to start my contribution with picking up from a submission from Morgan Tupaea to the Social Services and Community Committee from Morgan's Master's thesis around the lived experience of removals because I want to ground this in experience of people in our country. The quote that comes later is from a mother who's had her first baby removed from her care due to her experiences as a family-violence victim.The point that the previous speaker Emily Henderson made is that an experience that is very common to anybody who has worked in domestic violence in this country is where survivors of abuse are punished twice for the abuse of their partner and their children lose the attachment to the protective parent because our system does not recognise adequately the dynamics of family violence. And in the case of this quote I'm about to read the victim's victimisation was seen as a reason to sever the relationship between her and her baby. Despite removing herself from that context of domestic violence and working with kaumātua and community groups to make positive changes in her life her history of victimisation—this is from the submission—was weaponised against her by the State a second time. In this instance she was subjected to the uplift of her second child within 24 hours of her birth. This is the quote in the submission: She got to the door of the hospital room. She screamed and she was running and I got up because I've got my walking stick and I'm running and we get outside and … as soon as I got to the door all I saw was police cars. They had a police van across the hospital gate. They had five police cars and were carrying [a] baby out. And we ran and she was screaming and I was trying to catch up to her a cop ran past me. [And] I don't know if he tackled her or what but anyway I'm hoping not I couldn't see 'cause I was down on the ground and they brought her back." And this was from a kaumātua watching the removal of a child from a victim of family violence because of a policy like this which we are about to remove and it's long overdue for it to be removed.There's discussion of harm—and I completely get that we want to care for our kids. If we hold our children centre as I've heard coming from National Party members tonight we have to think about this holistically. Removing the ability to attach to a safe parent has lifelong consequences. This is not removing the requirement for there to be an assessment of safety but it just means that it's up to the State to prove that there is not safety in that family. That is important when the State has such a fundamentally problematic history where the State has again and again and again got this wrong where children and families have been destroyed because of our lack of understanding of this. This is something that I—you might be able to tell—feel kind of passionately about. I think that our whānau and our kids deserve for us to think about this in all of its complexity and not in the simplicity.I also do just want to note that this legislation and the review that was initiated by Minister Martin last term was in the wake of the Hastings uplift where as a country—I suspect for the first time—we got to witness the uplift of a tamaiti Māori and it shook us as a country that this myth of a benign State caring for children was exposed as a myth. The absolute violence of the State and the intrusion into whānau—and the right as recognised by the Waitangi Tribunal of tino rangatiratanga over kāinga was just destroyed. We all got to see something that had up until that point been experienced by whānau again and again and again but hidden—because these are secretive processes out of consideration of privacy. But in that instance they were exposed.I believe we need to come back to that in this debate. Remember for those members who saw that video—and I hope everybody did—what their reaction was to that because it should have been shock. This is important to put in the context of colonisation and the fact that Māori children make up 25 percent of children in this country and yet they make up 68 percent of children in care. As the Waitangi Tribunal has recognised and I will quote from the tribunal ruling around Oranga Tamariki: "The urgent issue before us concerns the long-term and significant disparity between the number of Tamariki Māori and non-Māori children being taken into State care. The disparity has arisen and persists in part due to the effects of alienation and dispossession but also because of a failure by the Crown to honour the guarantee to Māori of the right of cultural continuity embodied in the guarantee of Tino Rangatiratanga over their kāinga. It is more than just a failure to honour or uphold it is also a breach born of hostility to the promise itself."Now anybody hearing that reading that judgment who is going to quibble and oppose the first piece of legislation that makes any step towards addressing that has a problem to my mind. This is the first piece of legislation and it is a tiny step. I do want to bring in the calls from submitters including the Children's Commissioner and I will because we've heard a lot from this side of the House including myself about the importance of the voice of the Children's Commissioner and how we should be strengthening that voice and not undermining it. Then in the next opportunity when we hear from the commissioner and they are saying "Actually this bill should go further this needs to happen." They never said vote against this. They said "Do it. But actually you should repeal the entire provision." It's a real shame to hear that that is not being listened to on this side of the House.The reason they were calling for that is an acknowledgment that while this provision has not often been used in that specificity it has had a profound impact as already acknowledged by the Minister for Children on the trust of whānau in social workers. It has completely undermined the ability for them to build relationships and to be able to work through any issues that the whānau may have. It has undermined good social work practice and meant that social workers have increasingly been making poor decisions in a broader sense. And it has undermined specifically tino rangatiratanga over kāinga. So they are three very significant points that I believe are incredibly important to listen to.So the Greens would have repealed this entire provision and we would have wanted to see legislation that went much further. We've had so many reports telling us that the system is failing. I acknowledge the Minister's commitment to transformation and that's being done through internal work. My concern is that without legislation to bolster that it's very easy for initiatives to go into place and for changes to start happening but when attention goes off things go back to the default of how they were. Our children deserve and need better than that. But this is still a step forward because this provision is harmful. If we have a choice of acting to prevent harm then we need to do that in this House. Kia ora."