Tolley Anne: Children Young Persons and Their Families  Amendment Bill (No 6) — First Reading 
Tolley Anne: Children Young Persons and Their Families  Amendment Bill (No 6) — First Reading 
[Volume:645;Page:14587] 
ANNE TOLLEY (National—East Coast) 
: 
 I start by congratulating you Madam Assistant Speaker on your appointment to the job and I hope you will remember my name in future! 
The National Party will be not supporting the Children Young Persons and Their Families Amendment Bill (No 6). 
Hon Ruth Dyson 
: You’ve never been asked to. 
ANNE TOLLEY 
: In fact we have never been asked to. I have not been contacted at all to see whether we would support the bill. We believe that this legislation before the House today is a missed opportunity and I note that the discussion document that went out was called  
Safeguarding Our Children: Updating the Children Young Persons and Their Families Act 1989 
. 
I ask the Minister where in the legislation before the House today are there any major changes that will address the increasing numbers of children in our society who are being abused. The changes in this bill are largely technical. There is no major change that will prevent young children from having dreadful things done to them like being put in a dryer by people who think that that is fun. There is nothing in the bill before us today that goes to the heart of child abuse in our community. 
This legislation is about the system. It is about managing the processes managing the increasing number of notifications and ticking off the boxes. It is not about stopping our babies and our children from being bashed and abused—whether that abuse is physical sexual or emotional. There is nothing in here to stop that abuse and that is a tragedy and a missed opportunity. 
When the Minister stood and introduced this legislation she talked about the Labour Government being committed to improving child welfare and to protecting children from abuse and she said that this bill showed that commitment. I ask where we see that commitment. Where is the black and white here? There are some technical changes to the Children Young Persons and Their Families Act. Some of the deckchairs have been rearranged but the ship is still sinking. We still see increasing violence against our babies and children in our community. Every year the numbers grow. What I have seen from the Minister is some changing of technical stuff and some manipulation of figures but nothing concrete to stop the abuse. The National Party agrees with some of the technical changes to this legislation. We agree with a number of the changes and I will come to those. There are also some major changes that we object to and I will detail those. 
I find it very interesting that in the submissions on this discussion document 15 service providers—major providers of services to the Government who will be working with this legislation—talked about their issues not being with the legislation but with the interpretation and the practical application of the legislation. They talked about the individual interpretations that different officers put on the Act and the actual implementation of the Act itself. In particular they talked about the resourcing of the departments dealing with the Act. They talked about training and education in the detail of the Act and they talked about practice-related issues. In other words they talked about how the Act is used to ensure outcomes and that is what the National Party’s objection relates to. 
This legislation and these changes focus on the Act itself not on the outcomes of the Act. So we have sympathy with those service providers. It was very interesting that resourcing is a major issue for a large number of those providers who did make submissions. They were particularly concerned about the resourcing of some of the changes that this bill will require. I was interested to hear the Minister acknowledge there would be some resourcing difficulties and that various pieces of this legislation could be introduced at different times. That rings warning bells and I am sure that service providers up and down the country will be very concerned particularly in relation to the youth justice area that it means that some of the changes proposed in the bill we are talking about tonight will not be implemented because the resources will not follow the changes. That was not the deal. 
The National Party does agree with some parts of this bill. We agree that we need to be able to share information in a much better way and we hear that every time we talk to people in the community who are working at the coalface and using the Act on a daily basis. National members are not convinced that these changes to the Act will actually change the attitude of some of the bureaucrats in different ministries about sharing their information. It is absolutely vital that that information is shared if we are to change the living conditions of some of those children who are at risk. 
So changing the Act is one thing and it is great to see some small incremental changes but I note that we are still talking about “reasonable grounds for disclosure.” It is who decides what those reasonable grounds are that is crucial to sharing information. That can often depend on individuals and individual district health boards in particular sharing health information and of course on individual policemen and women and on individual Child Youth and Family staff themselves. So we agree with the moves being made in the bill to share information. 
We also agree that there needs to be a change in focus for victims both in the Youth Court and the family group conferences. I met a young boy in Wairoa who had been through a family group conference. He had been stealing from an old lady’s house. She was not even notified of his first family group conference. A second one was convened because she indicated she really wanted to have a relationship with this young man. As an ex-schoolteacher she believed she could reach out to this young man so she asked for a second family group conference so she could be involved. She got the second family group conference but it was in Auckland because that is where the boy had been moved to to another branch of the family. There was no way she could attend that family group conference. She felt that if she had been able to sit and eyeball that young man and build a relationship with him as his victim then she could have helped in his rehabilitation. That opportunity was taken away from her because it was more important that he was moved rather than that he actually deal with the realities of the victim. So we support a change in focus for victims. 
We also strongly support extending supervision with activity and supervision with residence. We believe that ongoing monitoring following supervision with residence and supervision with activity is a major part of this and of course John Key’s state of the nation speech at the beginning of the year elaborated on the National Party’s feelings on how important it is to not just put people into supervision with residence for a few months then let them back out into the community and expect them to have suddenly changed their lives. So we certainly agree with that part of this bill but overall National does not support it.