Turner Judy: Corrections (Social Assistance) Amendment Bill Customs and Excise (Social Assistance) Amendment Bill Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation (Social Assistance) Amendment Bill — Third Readings 
Turner Judy: Corrections (Social Assistance) Amendment Bill Customs and Excise (Social Assistance) Amendment Bill Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation (Social Assistance) Amendment Bill — Third Readings 
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JUDY TURNER (Deputy Leader—United Future) 
: 
 I rise on behalf of United Future to support the third reading of this legislation which has now been separated into three bills. They will reduce and prevent the amount of debt accrued by beneficiaries. 
The point of this legislation is not to cut off at the knees people who are in receipt of a benefit. The point is that when circumstances arise such as someone serving a prison term a person’s benefit will need to be adjusted. Another example is when someone reliant on a benefit is to be cut off and the benefit reallocated to people who remain at home. 
Work and Income New Zealand has historically been slow to respond to these changing circumstances and beneficiaries have ended up accruing unacceptable levels of debt which is a weight around their necks. We understand that sizable numbers of New Zealand beneficiaries have enough debt as it is. The department will often help out with a loan when a large household item needs repairing or replacing and a beneficiary is unable to do that on his or her income. I know a number of beneficiaries who have $15 or $10 removed on a weekly basis to service that kind of debt. One then adds on to that the potential for debt to be accrued where for instance a partner has gone into prison the benefit was not cut off in a timely way and now that family is dealing with what debt it has plus additional debt. 
We had some really interesting submissions. I was just checking through one from the Law Society that pointed out to us that in the previous year there had been 23 discrepancies it knew of where the wrong person had had his or her benefit cancelled due to a name mix-up. I guess in any system one will always have to guard against that kind of inevitability. The point of this legislation is not about doing harm to families but making sure that they are protected from accruing unnecessary debt. 
As part of the work that the Social Services Committee did on this—and I want to reaffirm my thanks to the House for the collegial way in which the cross-party work proceeded on this bill—we made sure that when a benefit is going to be cut any family affected by that would be given proper notification before the cut-off date. A family would be notified and its members would be able to go into Work and Income explain their situation and reapply for the level of benefit that they were entitled to. A seamless transition would then be able to happen without debt accruing. It seems wrong to us that historically a large numbers of families often with a dad in prison have additional trauma added to their already loaded plate when they suddenly discover that they owe the department hundreds and hundreds of dollars in overpaid benefit. Often in the traumatic circumstances that family members find themselves in with a member sentenced to a prison term the last thing they are thinking about during the process of a court case sentencing and everything else is their income. They can be blindly dealing with the emotional baggage that goes with having a parent or family member sentenced to a prison term and forget that they have some income issues to consider. This legislation makes both the Department of Corrections and Work and Income responsible for sharing sufficient information with each other to proactively guide family members through this process for their own benefit. 
United Future is therefore happy to support these third readings. The legislation highlights something that I suspect may underpin some of the concerns that the Greens still have about this legislation. It is interesting. I have spent this morning at a conference at Te Papa for a group of people who represent the concerns about biometric information-sharing. Although this does not necessarily have direct relevance to this legislation we are seeing an increasing amount of legislation where Government departments are empowered to share information with each other in a way that can be helpful. I believe that the intention is to be helpful but we always need to be mindful of the fact that information gathered for one purpose that is used for another purpose starts to have what we call “function creep” occurring. I caution the House that I think we are currently making a lot of these provisions in a whole range of legislation and we do not have a broad ethical framework in place. I know that the Law Commission in cooperation with the Privacy Commissioner currently has as part of its work programmes some really good reviews around privacy issues to do with the law. I look forward to that being brought forth because it may have some implications for those kinds of provisions. 
However I think that the intention of this legislation is for the good of the people it affects. It is not about people owing money to society when they are overpaid. That is the least of my concerns; my concern is about the burden that debt is to extremely low-income people on a benefit and about the need for a timely intervention to remind them that they need to go down to Work and Income and renegotiate the benefit that they are entitled to and all that goes with that when there has been a major change in their family circumstances. 
United Future feels that this legislation has been well considered. I thank the people who made submissions on the legislation. The information they provided us with was thought-provoking and I think we certainly responded very well as a committee to those suggestions. United Future is therefore very happy to support the third readings of this legislation.