Harawira Hone: Social Assistance (Debt Prevention and Minimisation) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Harawira Hone: Social Assistance (Debt Prevention and Minimisation) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:645;Page:14807] 
HONE HARAWIRA (Maori Party—Te Tai Tokerau) 
: 
 Kia ora Madam Assistant Speaker; kia ora tatou e te Whare. We can tell it is election year because everybody is jumping on the law and order bandwagon condemning the rise in crime and attacking the criminal justice system. We have been witness to a number of highly charged political reactions to the homicides so far in 2008 including a whole tool box of answers ranging from boot camps to lowering the age of criminal responsibility to keeping kids in school until they are 18 to locking up the parents. New Zealand’s youngest killer has once again been pushed into the media spotlight because of his impending parole in September after 7 years’ incarceration in various youth institutions. The victim’s mother has spoken out and Victim Support says that the key focus for election year must be on strengthening the rights of victims in the criminal justice system. It would appear that everyone is targeting criminal justice as an issue to grab headlines and votes. 
So it is that we come to the Social Assistance (Debt Prevention and Minimisation) Amendment Bill which is using prisoners to trial a range of increased surveillance and monitoring strategies. Why is it using prisoners? Well because they are a captive audience and because most people do not like them anyway. Yet the truth is that the overall crime rate is actually dropping. Last year there were 102 recorded offences for every 1000 people compared with 128 in 1997. But if we listened to all the doomsayers then we would think that Aotearoa was the most crime-infested den of dishonesty in the Western World. Mind you the fraud statistics are nothing to shout about though. In 2005 nearly 20000 cases of fraud were brought before the courts. There were 12000 cases of white-collar fraud and only 8000 cases of benefit fraud but to nobody’s surprise this bill targets benefit fraud because beneficiaries are easier to dump on and because within that group prisoners are quite literally a captive audience. 
The purpose of this bill is to stop payouts to beneficiaries who go to jail by hooking them into the Big Brother computer system—that is matching information between the Department of Corrections the Customs Service the Accident Compensation Corporation and the Ministry of Social Development and suspending any benefits allowances and student loans immediately if a data match is identified. Although that all sounds OK we are talking about people here: brothers sisters mothers fathers aunties uncles and whanau members who are in many cases the sole breadwinner of the family. Whole families are being dumped on by snooping bills like this one. The Ministry of Social Development confirms cases where the families of prisoners are hugely affected by shock interruptions to benefit payments and it says that the fault lies with the families for not contacting it immediately. It blames the poor dumb victims again which is typical behaviour from a Government that does not care about the poor. It is not as though Work and Income never causes hardship itself. The only difference in that situation is of course that when we complain about Work and Income we are trespassed off the premises it ignores our complaints and we never get our money back anyway. 
A study released earlier this year  
Improving Work-Life Balance for Domestic Purposes Beneficiary Sole Parent Families 
 included a number of comments that confirm what we hear from people about the hassles they get at Work and Income. It quotes people like Amelia who said: “The way I have been treated at Work and Income is just shocking. They look down on you”; Beatrice who said: “It’s just the way they treat the person. They look down on you as … like a bludger. It makes you feel uncomfortable”; and Marie who said: “I actually feel sick in my stomach every time I have to walk in their door. Some of them make you feel unworthy”. Even the principal of our local kura kaupapa Maori who went to Work and Income looking for an employee felt so chastised and ignored by the process that she decided never ever to go back to Work and Income again to look for somebody to work at our kura. 
This is a Government department we are talking about here; an agency of the Crown that is supposed to provide fair and just treatment to the beneficiaries who come through its doors. But it is not doing that. We have a right to expect far better service than that shown by the experiences that I have related to the House tonight. 
Another issue identified by the Social Services Committee itself is that income support may be improperly suspended as a result of data matching without the families being notified because of a policy that the notification of benefit suspension will now happen after the suspension has been acted on not before as happens at the moment. That problem is already happening and it will simply become worse under this legislation. We express our concern for upholding the human rights of all citizens of this great land including those in jail. We do not support the notion of targeting prisoners through increased surveillance simply because they are prisoners. Being locked up is the punishment. Punishing prisoners a second time by depriving them of their human rights is unacceptable in an open society. We are also concerned about prisoners being deprived of the opportunity to study given that student loans and student allowances are included in this bill as well as other forms of assistance. 
We accept that information sharing can reduce bureaucracy and may help people to be not saddled with debt while they are in jail but we believe inmates and their families should not be left in a worse position simply because of poor communication. We support the call of the select committee that all efforts should be made to ensure that the potential hardship for other family members is minimised and that families are not saddled with debt when the imprisoned family member gets out of jail. The Maori Party will support this bill but we point out again the invasive nature of data matching and the focus on the poor when in actual fact the most significant fraud continues outside the prison walls. Kia ora.