Hague Kevin: Social Security (Long-term Residential Care—Budget Measures) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Hague Kevin: Social Security (Long-term Residential Care—Budget Measures) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 24 May 2012. Volume:680;Page:2546. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
KEVIN HAGUE (Green) 
: 
 In the second reading debate on the Social Security (Long-term Residential Care—Budget Measures) Amendment Bill I made some references to parliamentary debate and to remarks made by the Prime Minister at the time Michael Joseph Savage around the passage of the Social Security Act. I am going to give that quote in full now. He said at the time that the honourable gentlemen “on the Opposition benches want to turn back the clocks. I want to know why people should not have security—why people should not have security in the evening of their days or when they are invalided. What is there more important in Christianity than to be our brothers’ keepers in reality?”. That idea of security has formed the basis of the social contract between the State and the public since the 1930s. That idea of security involves a number of different concepts of course. It includes the idea of fair treatment—people being treated fairly. It involves effective high-quality services and it also involves policy stability. So all of those elements are important and all of those are called into question by the Government’s behaviour around this bill.  
Asset testing is a discriminatory regime. As Grey Power has so ably advocated asset testing is a form of discrimination against older New Zealanders. It has no place in the New Zealand policy landscape. It is also contrary to the direction that we want to pursue in our economy in that in our economy we are trying to encourage saving yet asset testing for aged residential care encourages people instead to spend not to save—to dispose of their assets or else to conceal them. That is inappropriate. Asset-testing regimes lead to situations where those who have the connections and the legal nous to be able to evade the test are generally easily able to do so and those who do not are thereby penalised leading to capricious effects. That is not what we require in a law.  
Asset testing for aged residential care also mitigates against being able to pursue our Ageing in Place strategy where we want to try to retain older people’s ability to live in their own homes. A person who needs aged residential care for a time but is required effectively to lose their family home because of the asset-testing regime and then regains their independence actually is no longer able to leave the rest home and to return to their family home—a situation that we would expect to occur more and more as time goes by. So asset testing is discriminatory and something to be discouraged on all fronts.  
Ruth Dyson has just spoken in the House about the repeated attempts that Labour and the Green members made in the last Parliament towards an inquiry into aged residential care and this Government—or I guess the National Government that we had at that time—resisted every one of those. Yet the inquiry that we undertook found that wages were totally inadequate in that sector that quality of care was totally inadequate in that sector and that training was totally inadequate in that sector. What we see is a situation where both the asset-testing regime and the type of care that is provided show a disrespect for older New Zealanders.  
But also people are entitled to policy stability. That is part of security. There are many New Zealanders older and otherwise who will have planned their retirement who will have planned their aged care on the basis of the policy settings that have been in place. For 10 years those policy settings have been that asset testing is being phased out. That has been the goal of the law. Now with a stroke of the pen this Government is changing those policy settings changing the goal so that rather than the aim being to eliminate asset testing the goal of the Government’s policy is now to retain asset testing to freeze it in place in real terms. In fact that is a polar switch and one that older New Zealanders were entitled to at least know about before it occurred—and we believe to have a say about.  
In fact I had to struggle to restrain my incredulity at the comment from the Hon Tony Ryall. He appeared to give the impression that Age Concern and Grey Power were in some way consulted about this change before the Budget was read yesterday. My understanding is that Age Concern and Grey Power were told about what would occur approximately an hour before the Budget. That fails every test of consultation law in New Zealand. If the Government believed that those organisations were entitled to be consulted then actually there was a whole lot more it needed to do.  
The reason behind this bill is really in fact to fill the hole in the Government’s health budget—to fill the hole that a 2 percent increase on last year’s appropriation for health will leave. That 2 percent increase will go no way towards covering the costs of merely treading water in health—merely being able to retain our same capacity to provide services—let alone deal with population growth an ageing population changes to KiwiSaver that district health boards will need to somehow accommodate and the trumpeted $1.5 billion worth of new initiatives. In fact those will have to be funded entirely from savings or cut programmes within the health sector and this is one of those.  
The Government needs this bill to fill that hole to compensate for the magical thinking that lies behind its health budget. That is why we have got this bill—that is why we have got this bill. It needs it for that reason. The next step in the logical chain is that it needs to be able to pass it through into law without public consultation because it knows that the public are extremely exercised about the topic of asset sales and would wish to actually have their say about that matter. The Government cannot afford to have this bill go before a select committee because it knows what the public would say it knows what older New Zealanders would say and it knows that it would make it a heck of a lot harder to get this bill through. It cannot afford to have it go through select committee and that is the reason for the urgency. That is the reason for the urgency. The 1 July commencement date for this bill is actually the end of the chain; it is not the beginning of it. This whole process is in order to allow this Government to get this bill through without public scrutiny to fill the hole left by magical thinking in the health budget. It shows a contempt for the processes of this House and a contempt for older New Zealanders. Shame on this Government.