Russell DeborahDr DEBORAH RUSSELL (Labour—New Lynn): I'd like to just offer a few remarks on this bill as it goes through its final reading in the House. I just want to address one thing right from the start and actually it always is about getting it right from the start—just something to refer to in the speech of the previous speaker Andrew Bayly. It was a reference to broken homes and I guess it's a bit of language I would like to move away from. The way we understand families has changed. Families form and reform. Children live in different structures to previously; it's just our ways of living have changed. It doesn't mean anything is broken; it's just changed. What has not changed is the need for children to be supported by their parents. I was interested when coming to grips with this bill to realise that there's really only one morality statement in this legislation and the morality statement in it is that parents ought to support their children—that's it. Everything else is about getting that right getting it fair and making it easy for parents to meet their obligations ensuring that money flows through from parents to ensure that children are cared for and that's what lies at the heart of this bill. With the transformation of the IRD systems it has made it much much easier for parents to get it right from the start to actually ensure that the correct amount is paid over in a timely fashion. Now in this regard I want to again address something that the previous speaker said and that was the concern about compliance costs on employers. I guess there are two points there. One is that employers do bear some compliance costs here. It's a comparatively small amount extra in regard of child support. There are already compliance costs in respect of PAYE KiwiSaver union deductions—all sorts of activities that go on around employment. But actually this misses the reduction in compliance costs that has been brought about by the Business Transformation project so that overall compliance costs for employers have reduced because of the Business Transformation project. I think that employers these days are a lot better off in terms of those compliance costs than before the Business Transformation project commenced. So while of course we always want to consider compliance costs I do not think they are a significant problem in respect of this bill. I wish to address the point that the speaker raised about the idea that penalties might flow through from parents who are required to pay them to the parent who might receive them or not receive them—the receiving parent or the receiving caregiver. There has been a lot of work done on penalties in this bill and particularly in terms of reducing penalties—there are no more incremental penalties and an offering of grace periods—all in order to ensure that penalties encourage paying parents paying caregivers to pay up on time but do not make it so onerous that they actually just remove themselves entirely from the system. So there's a finely balanced judgment there as to how penalties should be calculated and imposed and collected. But in terms of the flow-through it's one of those things where it does sound like a nice idea but the practicalities of it are completely untested at this stage. The actual cost of it is untested at this stage and it would be well one of those tricky things because it would be interesting to see what precedents it would set elsewhere across our entire system as to when penalties should flow through instead of going to the Crown but then being passed on to someone who is in some respect harmed. So there's a whole issue there that might need to be examined before we went down that route in respect of child support payments. This has been a long process with this bill. It started in 2017 with a discussion paper issued by the Inland Revenue Department and of course people fed into that discussion paper and a policy was developed from there. So the work was kicked off by the former National-led Government and carried on by the previous coalition Government and now by the Labour Government. The legislation was drafted and it was ready for its first reading—or I think the first reading might even have been part way through—when we were hit by the COVID shutdown. What that meant was that the bill could not complete its first reading and it couldn't be referred to a select committee. So it just slowed the whole process down. Eventually it did get referred through to a select committee and that committee worked hard on the bill and has sent it back to the House in good shape and it has come through the committee of the whole House stage in good shape too. So I would like to first of all thank the officials who have worked on this for a very long time now and have really worked diligently and hard to ensure that we have a good piece of legislation in front of us. So my grateful thanks to the officials for their hard work on this. I'd like to thank the Social Services and Community Committee who took it through the select committee process since the election—in particular the chair Angie Warren-Clark and the deputy chair Glen Bennett who chaired some sessions at some stage—and I'd like to thank all the members of that committee who worked so hard on that bill that we now have it in front of us and it is a good piece of legislation. I commend it to the House.