Upston LouiseIn CommitteePart 1 Amendments to Social Security Act 2018Hon LOUISE UPSTON (National—Taupō): Thank you Mr Chair. I was waiting to see if the Minister was going to stand—which is what normally happens when a piece of legislation is being debated under urgency—to explain some of the detail around it and in particular why the bill is being debated and pushed through all stages under urgency. I'm sure I will feel like a bit of a stuck record when I say that I'm always against legislation that is debated without public scrutiny. One of the members opposite chipped in to say this was urgent but actually nothing comes in effect until next year and actually one of the provisions which I will get to in detail will result in $11 a week by 2023. So that's not urgent—clearly not urgent. In fact when this first came to the House's attention it was meant to be I thought in the Families Package but for some reason the Minister decided it wasn't urgent then either.What we are talking about in Part 1 of the Social Assistance Legislation (Budget 2019 Welfare Package) Amendment Bill is one of the provisions that will come at a cost of $115 million of taxpayer money. So it does require a good amount of debate and questioning in this House in the committee stage.Some of the questions I've got for the Minister are around the advice she's received in terms of the number of sole parents currently that have exemptions the number of sole parents full stop and the number of which the obligation isn't being met and therefore a sanction is applied and actually how those three areas will change as a result of this legislation. I have noted and put on the record earlier that there is an expectation that sole parents will rise by 1600. I'd like information from the Minister on how that figure is derived because obviously this is a change to the obligations that occur on sole parents so if there's an increase in 1600 over the period of time you know we'd want reassurance about how the $115 million will increase and how that's being factored and what other mechanisms the Minister is putting in place to ensure that that burden doesn't increase and that actually the burden decreases so that taxpayers aren't picking up that tab.As we've said in the earlier stages the $115 million pretty much comes from dads that won't be paying their child support that they would have otherwise and with an increase predicted by the Government in the Vote Social Development document—and if the Minister needs to know what page that was on because she tended to look a bit puzzled before I'm happy to assist her in finding where those forecasts are—that's also $195 million increased spending which of course any time the Government spends anything hard-working New Zealanders have to earn it in the first place.So I've got several questions around numbers which I'm hoping the Minister will answer around how many are currently affected how many will be affected after this and what steps the Minister will take to reduce that liability on taxpayers. We've got a number of Supplementary Order Papers—I don't think my one is on the Table yet—but we are just looking in the first instance around questions around Part 1 so I've got specific questions that I want the Minister to address in terms of the repeal of section 192 which we used to refer to as section 70A in the old social assistance legislation.Some of the other questions are around indexing for example and why if it is so critical to reducing the number of children in poverty the indexing hasn't been structured in a way that would mean that beneficiaries actually have more money in their pockets sooner. As I said before the indexing isn't new so it's not transformational to have indexing. All that is proposed is that the indexing will change in terms of the method from being adjusted to the Consumer Price Index to being—[Time expired]