Logie JanJAN LOGIE (Green): E Te Māngai o Te Whare tēnā koe ki a koutou huri noa i Te Whare tēnā koutou katoa ngā mihi o Te Wiki o Te Reo Māori ki a tātou katoa. Kāti! Ka kōrero au mō ngā Kākāriki i roto i te pānuitanga tuatoru o tēnei te pire Social Security (Extension of Young Persons Services and Remedial Matters) Amendment Bill. Kia ora tātou! [Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker and to all of you throughout the House well done and good tidings to us all for Māori Language Week. Enough! I will speak for the Green Party in this the third reading of the Social Security (Extension of Young Persons Services and Remedial Matters) Amendment Bill. Congratulations to us all!]Excuse my mangling of the language. The Green Party is voting against the Social Security (Extension of Young Persons Services and Remedial Matters) Amendment Bill and for many of the reasons that were demonstrated by that previous speaker Matt Doocey who stood up and listed statistic after statistic of the problems with our young people. That member demonstrated so clearly the Government's deficit model when it comes to understanding the potential of our young people. This piece of legislation does a disservice to our young people and we will not be supporting it. I must say I have spent almost a decade of my life working alongside young people in education youth health and development organisations and I have loved that work. I felt it a complete privilege to work alongside young people and experience the inspiration of their resilience their creativity and their smarts when they have been given the opportunity to deliver based on the belief that they can. This legislation is the antithesis of that experience. I think it is a generally well-understood concept that if you treat a person particularly a young person like an idiot they are probably going to fulfil your expectations. This was proven actually in the years of research and experience that led to the development of a strength-based approach to youth development. Old approaches to youth development focused on problems. They were reactive targeted tightly and intended to deliver programmes with professional providers putting young people in the place of being recipients of services. This approach took lots of resources but the results tended to be short term or not so successful. Positive youth development strength-based youth development turned this on its head. The initiatives were developed in partnership with young people. They involved community members and sought to develop a community response to supporting young people. It was proactive not targeted and looked towards positive outcomes rather than looking at problems or deficit models. If you start with focusing on what someone is good at and go from there—ehara! They are more likely to believe that they have possibilities. Conversely if you start with a focus on risk then—surprise! There is a much higher chance that young people will either just do what they are told for as long as they are made to rebel or give up hope in themselves rather than develop the skills and attributes in themselves that will sustain them throughout their lives. This we know from practice; this we know from evidence. This is not what this legislation is about and when the chair of the Social Services Committee stood up previously and told us that we had obviously not read the Productivity Commission's report around how to work with young people—I have got to say I read the report but I do not think that it is the expert on strength-based youth development and how to work with young people. It is not. This legislation extends the bad old ways of working. It starts from the point of telling us that some young people are at risk of being a long-term liability to the State—of being beneficiaries. This legislation assumes that all parents who have their children before the age of 20 who are not working enough hours or who are not being supported by a partner who is earning enough are at risk. We are no longer talking about children under the age of 18 here; we are talking about young parents up to the age of 20. It is even more tightly targeted and risk-based too when it comes to young adults without children because to develop this legislation the Government is going to use predictive risk modelling taking information from other State services like education and the existing Child Youth and Family—or whatever it might become—to decide which young people might be at risk of long-term welfare dependence. The chances are—and we have to keep acknowledging this—that most of these young people will be Māori rangatahi because contact with Child Youth and Family is one of the factors that the Government has said it will use to define risk. Almost 60 percent of those young people in care are Māori. Those young people will be separated from their peers who are not deemed to be a risk and without any choice on their part they will be subject in addition to the work test or work preparation obligations to budgeting interviews and reporting obligations alongside money management supervision which will pay most of their bills for them and require them to shop primarily at certain stores. These are adults we are talking about—19 and 20-year-olds. Of course if they miss an interview or do not provide the information required in enough time their benefit will be cut completely. As well as this increased scrutiny young parents up to the age of 20 will need to go to work or into low-level stage study from when their baby is the age of 1 or if a teen parent unit is available from when their baby is the age of 6 months old. These are young adults who we know are so likely to have been told that they are a problem—at school in society—over a long period of time already and now they are going to be told it again by this Government. Let me be clear: this is not a strength-based approach. Let me be clear: this is not an empowering piece of legislation. What this legislation does is it infantilises and stigmatises young people. It entrenches and exacerbates already painful inequalities. It makes young people the problem and fundamentally alters their relationship with people in their community who could have worked alongside them in a positive way. Increasingly international evidence shows that the interventions that work best are less targeted unconditional and involve extra money—the exact opposite of this programme—so we in the Green Party do not support a measure that uses our precious resources to increase targeting and conditions and is strongly risk-based rather than strength-based. The Government tells us that despite not having a comprehensive evaluation of its initial programme it is extending it because it has aspiration for these young parents and young people and it is willing to invest in them now. Well I do just want to remind this House that repeatedly when this Government has been given the opportunity to increase those young people's access to higher education above the level of National Certificate of Educational Achievement level 2 which we know is likely to get them off these benefits 6 months earlier and enable them to stay off these benefits longer it has turned down that opportunity. The costing of how much extra it would have cost to be able to extend it to higher level courses was only $10 million but apparently these young people are not worth that $10 million. Although the Government tells us that it has high aspirations—well not that high. Again when this Government has been given the opportunity to put safeguards in place to protect the children of these parents—to give the person who may end up applying sanctions the discretion to not apply that sanction if it would make it difficult to feed clothe or care for the well-being of that child—this Government turned down that opportunity. It demonstrated that fundamentally it does not put children first. It does not have aspirations for our young people or our society. The Greens will be strongly opposing this bill. Nō reira tēnā koutou tēnā koutou tēnā tātou katoa.