Prime Willow-JeanHon WILLOW-JEAN PRIME (Labour): Thank you Mr Speaker. Thank you for the opportunity to take a call on the third reading of the Social Workers Registration Legislation Amendment Bill. As has been said by previous speakers from our side we will be supporting the bill. However I do want to take this opportunity to just outline some of my concerns about what happened in the committee of the whole House stage of this debate on the bill because I agree with the Hon Carmel Sepuloni who actually for the benefit of the House read the entire correspondence sent to the Minister for Social Development and Employment by significant organisations regarding the reduction of the time from four years down to two years. I want to just take an opportunity to put on record what my unaddressed concerns were about that.I asked questions in the committee stage about whether the Minister in her consideration of her tabled amendment had given any or sufficient consideration to Māori impacted by her proposed changes. Because we had a letter from the Aotearoa New Zealand Association of Social Workers and a message included in that from the Tangata Whenua Social Workers Association saying that their written submission was incorrect; they made an error. They tried to withdraw their submission. They tried to correct their position. The proposal to reduce it from four years down to two years was on the basis of the Social Services and Community Committee report which relied on these submissions which the submitters said they tried to have removed but due to some procedural errors at the select committee that did not happen.So they wrote to the Minister on 13 February to have her reconsider the tabled amendment of reducing the time frame from four years to two years. We interrogated that; there was some questioning and answering happening in that stage but what I didn't get answers on was any specific consideration given to Māori social workers—no answer; the debate closed.The Minister today in her third reading speech talked about a very small number of social workers who apply under section 13 to the pathway to registration but what I want to note is that there has been an increasing recognition of the value of indigenous te ao Māori practice in social work where the experience pathway supports this. Around a quarter of social workers registered under the experience pathway over the past 13 years have identified as Māori; however the proportion of Māori under the section 13 applicants is increasing. For example between the years 2020 and 2022 31 percent of social worker registrations under the experience pathway were people who identified as Māori. So the Minister said in her third reading speech that it's a very small number that we're talking about and that she doesn't in her opinion regardless of the letters that she received from those two organisations that I mentioned earlier—in her wisdom she believes that it should in fact remain as she proposed two years instead of the four.So I'm standing to reluctantly support this bill this evening. I wanted to totally support it as it was originally introduced by the Labour Government with a four-year extension. We fully supported it. When the Minister first picked it up it still was four years. However it's been reduced to two years and I have some serious concerns about that and other speakers in the House tonight have said that we hope we are not back here in two years' time taking up more of the House's time to consider whether an additional extension is required or not.So that's all I wanted to add to the debate this afternoon summing up our discussion our questions and answers that we had last week in the committee of the whole House stage our unsuccessful attempts to get the Minister to heed the request of the Aotearoa New Zealand Association of Social Workers and the Tangata Whenua Social Workers Association to go once again to four years instead of two years. She is totally ignoring that and in her own wisdom insisting that we stick with the two years and today saying it will affect a very small number of people yet the evidence that I have in front of me is that is an increasing number of Māori social workers. As we know social workers provide a really important service to our most vulnerable and as we've heard in debates earlier in the House this afternoon with 7000 more children likely to be in poverty from one single action of this Government this afternoon we know that Māori are impacted in many of the areas that require social work services and so I am disappointed that the Minister did not heed the request and advice of these organisations and extended it out to the four years. So we are supporting the bill this evening but are disappointed that the Minister did not take that advice.