Williams Poto: Vulnerable Children Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWilliams Poto: Vulnerable Children Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 15 April 2014. Volume:698;Page:17278. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]POTO WILLIAMS (Labour—Christchurch East): Thank you for the opportunity to speak on the second reading of this bill the Vulnerable Children Bill. This is a bill that had its origins within theGreen Paper for Vulnerable Children all those years ago which is a piece of work that I am very familiar with. At the same time as the green paper which became theWhite Paper on Vulnerable Children there were other pieces of work in play—the inquiry into the determinants of well-being for Māori Children the Family Court review and of course the review by Professor Boston on child poverty with the expert advisory group. So this bill has its genesis in a significant body of work delivered by significant experts in the field. I have to say that although the bill does go some way to addressing the issues that were raised by all those experts over all those years of work sadly it does not go far enough.I also want to comment on a discussion that one of the Government members had prior to the dinner break today when he commented on one of the other members of the House’s comments on those people who are impacted by the safety aspects of the bill. The Government member was misinformed and misinformed the House when he said that what the Green member had said was that those who perpetrated acts of violence were people of ethnic origin when that was in fact not the case. What the Green Party member was trying to say to the Government member was that those most impacted by violence and abuse unfortunately tend to be Māori and Pasifika children and Māori and Pasifika women. I found it extraordinary that someone who sat on the Social Services Committee and who heard the submissions from the sexual violence sector could get it so very wrong. It does speak to the heart of what happens within a Government bill if people who are on the select committee do not actually understand the very basics of the bill and whom the bill is trying to protect.The bill talks about vulnerability and we offer this label to about 30000 children whom we call at risk when we freely admit in this House that there are over 285000children living in poverty. I would suggest that 285000 children living in poverty are potentially at risk; however they are not by that definition covered under this bill. So it does not go significantly far enough to protect those children.One of my learned colleagues said earlier in the second reading of this bill that what we should be looking at is setting some standards for our children for their care and protection and that we should be setting some outcomes for those children. When children are not meeting those outcomes we could look at targeted services for those children. I think that is a much fairer approach. It is actually an approach that speaks to our desire for all of our children to have an element of care and protection in their lives. When we look at those potential outcomes that would protect our children the first one of course has to be tackling the issue of child poverty. Child poverty is freely accepted by both sides of this House—conservatively—to be impacting 285000 children. Yet we defy the experts by refusing to measure child poverty. We are therefore not dealing with the specific issues that hold these children in this state.One of the other outcomes we should be looking at is housing: the affordability of housing appropriate warm and dry housing housing that families can occupy and housing that permits them to put down roots within a community. One of the symptoms of vulnerability is the transience of our families whereby children move to different schools and communities and the support services and agencies are no longer able to track them to continue to provide care for them. So when we are talking about care and protection we should be looking at housing.Finally I want to talk about one of the other aspects of this bill when it talks about safety checks in the workforce. It has already been covered by a couple of members in this House but I also want to reiterate some of the comments of my colleague Sue Moroney who said that harm to children does not necessarily come within the paid workforce. There are many examples where children are harmed in sports arenas or by other activities that occur in the community and where we do not pay that much attention to children’s care and protection. Thank you.