Luxton Jo; Parker DavidHon JO LUXTON (Labour): Thank you Mr Chair. I appreciate the opportunity to make a call and I am looking forward to hopefully the Minister in the chair Simon Watts answering my previous questions. I just wanted to follow on from a point that the Hon Dr Deborah Russell brought up. If I think back to my time in early childhood education (ECE) when we enrolled children we had to verify that they actually existed. We had to upload information into the Early Learning Information System; we had to have evidence of birth certificates and what have you. I'm interested to know whether there is going to be security or what is actually going to be in place to stop someone—say I find out what these receipts are going to look like that centres provide and I'm going to pretend I have a child in ECE and I'm going to start claiming this rebate I want to know what security is going to be in place. Are ECE centres and IRD's IT systems going to be talking to each other to verify that there is an actual child here or are parents going to have to also be expected to provide verification that there is an actual child here as well? I'm talking a bit about the whole fraud side of things because we do know there will be people that if they can might like to take that opportunity. So I'm actually really interested to know what security measures will be in place to protect against that.Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour): Thank you Mr Chairman. Can I thank the Minister for providing me the information as to the fiscal costings of FamilyBoost. For the benefit of listeners I couldn't find it because it's not in the bill it's not in the explanatory note to the bill and it's not on the regulatory impact statement to the bill and when I went through the summary of initiatives I checked education and social development but I wrongly checked Inland Revenue under I" rather than revenue under "R". You might call that a rookie error but I was somewhat pleased to see that it took the Minister a minute or two to find it. In any event it now discloses that the cost in 2024-25 is $174 million and it goes down by about $3 or $4 million a year—$171 million $167 million and $165 million—in the subsequent years.There are two questions that I have arising from that. The first is that the National Party campaigned at the time of the election that the abatement threshold for this increased subsidy for childcare costs would rise from $42000 of family income to $50000. Presumably given that the National Party would've liked to have kept their electoral promise they did cost what would have been the fiscal impact of lifting the abatement threshold from $42000 to $50000. It's relevant both to the cost of the policy relative to what was promised at the election but it's also relevant to the Amendment Paper that is in the name of Arena Williams which seeks to lift that threshold to $50000 as per the National Party promise at the election. So I presume that that would have been costed at the time of the election. I'm interested because it seems likely that the National Party's either going to rule out this amendment on fiscal grounds or vote against it either of which does bring into relevance the cost of changing that abatement threshold.The second point I would make—I have already referenced the decreasing amount of the cost of this over time. I am presuming that as a consequence either fewer people get the benefit of FamilyBoost over the time or the amount that people get under each of those entitlements decreases over time or a combination of both as a consequence of inflation and inflation-related wage increases. I would like the Minister to confirm that that is in fact the case and if that is the case whether any consideration was given—given that we quite often hear from the National Party about the desirability of adjusting thresholds for inflation whether any work was done on adjusting the FamilyBoost payments to make sure that over time it didn't decrease by $3 million per annum."