Williams Poto: Social Security Amendment Bill Education Amendment Bill Taxation (Support for Children in Hardship) Bill — Third ReadingsText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWilliams Poto: Social Security Amendment Bill Education Amendment Bill Taxation (Support for Children in Hardship) Bill — Third Readings[Sitting date: 03 December 2015. Volume:710;Page:8592. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]POTO WILLIAMS (Labour—Christchurch East): What a dreadful contribution from the Government Minister. This is important legislation and we should—Jono Naylor: Ah! Not yet—not yet.POTO WILLIAMS: I am sorry I have given the member a promotion—not deserved I should say. That was a dreadful contribution from the Government. This legislation will mean that a family can buy roughly a couple of loaves of bread a bottle of milk and maybe add a little bit of petrol to the petrol tank. It does nowhere near enough to address what it claims to address—providing support for children in hardship.Let us start with the name of the original bill because nowhere in the legislation does the Government really define hardship or say how it will actually target that hardship and how it will measure itself against those targets. That is a failure of this legislation. The Government cannot even define hardship. It interchanges the term with “poverty” and “deprivation” all through its discussion all through the regulatory impact statement and it does not actually know what it is trying to achieve with this legislation.I see that the regulatory impact statement talks about monitoring it through the Ministry for Social Development’s DEP-17 or deprivation index. But we will not know for a few years whether this particular legislation has had any impact on that index because the commencement date is not until April 2016. So families after being promised much are going to get nothing until after April 2016. That is how desperate this Government is to support children in hardship—it cannot bring forward the commencement date to the day after it receives the Royal assent. That is how desperate it is!Let us talk again about what the regulatory impact statement says are the causes of poverty and hardship. The statement says that it is when the household income is too low even with good budgeting and discipline and when the special demands of its budget are too high from such things as high levels of debt servicing. Sometimes the debt is actually the debt owed to Work and Income by families who owe the Government money for things that they actually need in order to get on with their lives such as furniture and suchlike. Another cause is high net accommodation costs for renters and unusually high health-related costs because often people are living in homes that are not fit for children to grow up in and they have terrible health conditions. They may be trying to fill major gaps in the stock of basic household furniture and appliances and they may have high work-related costs—for example childcare and transport.So the $25 that Mrs Parmar says we should all be grateful for is not going to go very far to support families who have to deal with these issues every single day. The $25 that the Government mentions is actually also a misnomer because we know from the tables presented to us in the select committee that we are talking about an amount somewhere between $12.50 and $23.10 a week that families will get in the hand. We are talking about between $12.50 and $23.10 per family—not per child but per family—and this definitely is not going to go very far towards addressing the causes of poverty as quoted in the regulatory impact statement.On top of that parents are work tested when their youngest child is aged 3. The current age is 5 and nowhere have I seen—despite asking the Minister for Social Development for clarification—any justification for why the age is now 3. The only evidence that was presented to the Social Services Committee was from the Children’s Commissioner who said that that is the age at which most people return to work. When their youngest child is 3 that is the age at which most people will return to work; not people who have serious difficulties in paying for transport costs and childcare costs who have high health costs or who are dealing with high accommodation costs in relation to their income. So there is no clear justification as to why that age should have been dropped from 5 to 3.While we are talking about childcare we have not actually traversed the issue of access to quality childcare. We have not thought about what happens in rural or remote settings. We have not thought about the quality of childcare that is available. We just demand that these parents are work tested and that the children are required to go into care. And do we have care available to match the requirements of the jobs that these people will be likely to hold? No likely not—that is right. They are jobs that may be outside the standard hours of work of nine-to-five—often we are talking about people who are involved in the retail sector who may have jobs stacking supermarket shelves at night and who may have shift work. Finding childcare to cope with those requirements is really difficult. They often are going to be in low-paid jobs and they are going to be subject to some of the most precarious working conditions that workers have faced in this country particularly around 90-day trial requirements.My colleague Jacinda Ardern talked about the Child Poverty Monitor and she had the infographic there for you. But I just want to refer to some of the statistics that were in that. One in 10 kids is in severe poverty. That is about 6 percent of New Zealand’s population in severe poverty. To quote what is also on that poster this means that these kids are going without the things that they need and their low family income means that they do not have any opportunity to change this. I know that we keep stressing the point but we cannot stress it enough.Actually an increase of $25 is something but it is nowhere near enough for these families. Again we are talking about the payment going to a family that may have two or more children. So we are diluting the impact of this. If we have five children four children or even three children in a family we are talking about as I say a couple of loaves of bread and a bottle of milk. A block of cheese in the supermarket is about $10. We are not actually going to make a significant contribution to bringing these children out of hardship.We are also going to rely on Work and Income staff to make the decision about what suitable work is when we know that staff at Work and Income are under all sorts of pressures to meet the Government’s policies particularly around work testing. Are they in a position to actually make a judgment about what the right appropriate work is for these parents to take? Are they the right people to make judgments about the quality of work or are they under such pressure that actually they will be applying pressure to those parents to take work that may not actually be suitable?I just want to end my contribution with a quote from one of the submitters the New Zealand Christian Council of Social Services which made a great contribution to the evidence at the Social Services Committee. It talked about the fact that this legislation does not factor in the number of kids in the family. It talked about how more regulation around emergency benefits and increases in obligations are really going to impact. In terms of the number of sanctions for example that might apply to families it talked about the 80000 sanctions that had applied over 14 months which meant that were 44000 children in those families to whom sanctions applied. That is a huge number of children to be impacted on and sanctions will often mean a cut in benefits. I just want us to think about that for a minute—that we can have the power to sanction these very lowest-income families and jeopardise 44000 children.As you know we are supporting this legislation because it will put a few more pennies in the purses of people who need it the most but it certainly does not go far enough.