Logie Jan: Social Security (Commencement of Benefits) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLogie Jan: Social Security (Commencement of Benefits) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 17 November 2015. Volume:710;Page:8173. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAN LOGIE (Green): As the bells rang I was speaking to the point of the importance of trust between the people of this country and the Government and indeed this Parliament. This bill in front of us going through this House under urgency I think creates the risk at the very least of giving New Zealanders the impression that the first rule is that the Government is never wrong and when the Government is wrong see rule No. 1: the Government is never wrong. And I want to say very clearly that I do not want to live in that society. I want to live in a society where as a Parliament we seek to strengthen—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Order! I am sorry to the member. Those who are leaving the Chamber please do so quietly and as quickly as possible so that in fairness to the speaker we can all hear.JAN LOGIE: As I was saying I want to live in a society where as a Parliament our focus is on strengthening the people’s trust in the Government and public institutions and where we do our best to protect the rule of law and the human rights of everyone in this country. There are some very significant principles at stake with this piece of legislation. I have already spoken to the principle of trust and quite significantly connected with that is the principle of balance.Last year this Government in this Parliament passed a piece of legislation to strengthen Work and Income’s requirement to recover debt from beneficiaries. It did this in response to court rulings that suggested the human rights of beneficiaries to shelter and food may actually have primacy over Work and Income’s right to reclaim debt. I want this House to think about that—that when the court said the human rights of New Zealanders may take primacy over the Government’s fiscal agenda this Government came to this House with legislation that said: “No our fiscal priorities need to take priority.” This House passed legislation that undermined people’s human rights to shelter and food. And now here we are about a year later in this House when the Government has been told by the courts very clearly over year ago that it is misapplying the law and denying people money that they are entitled by law to access and the Government is saying: “Oh we made a mistake. I know the courts think we owe these people this money but actually we’re retrospectively going to rule out that right and deny people that money.” I think that raises some pretty major questions of trust and balance.I want to talk this House through the process as it has happened as I can work out—the time line. The law was introduced on 3 June 1998 and section 80BA(4) of the Social Security Act states that if a stand-down period applies under this section benefits commence on the day on which the stand-down period ends. The day on which the stand-down period ends is the day on which the benefit commences and yet somehow for 18 years the Ministry of Social Development has been commencing the benefits on the day after the stand-down period ends. That is a pretty clear piece of legislation—benefits commence on the day the stand-down period ends—yet for 18 years despite reviews of legislation that piece of legislation has been misinterpreted.We have been hearing from the Government that well that was a technical error and that there was always the intention that the stand-down period be a week and that benefits commence the day after despite the fact that the legislation says “the day on which”. I have asked the Parliamentary Library to go through the debates at that time in 1998 to consider where the debate was and whether there were some points raised in the debate that would back up what the Government is telling us. The library could not find one reference that backed up the Government’s perception that this was not the intent of the law. We have nothing on record that backs it up.Then in May 2014 we had the courts establish that Work and Income was incorrectly interpreting the law. That is well well over a year ago. That practice of misapplying the law has continued until 29 September denying people what they were by law legally entitled to. It seems to me very worrying that despite there having been two court cases reinforcing that law and—as we heard from a previous speaker Alfred Ngaro—Cabinet having considered the fact of those court rulings Work and Income still refused to implement the law. It chose to act illegally until about 2 weeks after this came to the media’s attention.So we have court rulings—two court rulings—we have a Cabinet consideration and nothing. There was a decision and there were choices not to apply the law to beneficiaries as it was written. I can assume it was only because Work and Income did not think that beneficiaries would have any public support to back them up on accessing their legal rights until the matter managed to come to the attention of the media—through advocates raising this in a select committee. The Minister for Social Development said to me that she was not aware and then we get to a very significant problem of a major breakdown between Minister and department.