Tinetti JanHon JAN TINETTI (Labour): Thank you Madam Speaker. I'm absolutely sad to be fair to be speaking here today because this is a terrible piece of legislation and as someone who used to be the child poverty reduction Minister I'm heartbroken that we are even discussing this. Child poverty reduction is an incredibly hard goal but this Parliament came together to vote for that legislation and it was a world-breaking piece of legislation that we have had in this country. Then as our Government moved towards those targets we looked at ways with our welfare advisory group of how we can best meet those really ambitious targets that we had and all nine of the child poverty reduction targets were trending downwards.What is really sad is that what this bill is turning around is that indexing of those benefits. We've heard here from so many speakers on this side of the House that one of the main aspects of that child poverty reduction happened in 2019 when through that Budget benefit abatement thresholds were increased and main benefits were indexed to align with net average growth rather than inflation. This is particularly important and critical for maintaining the progress towards the before-housing-costs 50 target. If people on the other side of the House aren't really sure what those targets mean look it up and make sure you absolutely understand what is happening here today and the difference that it will make because in the supplementary analysis report—and particularly I heard my colleague the Hon Carmel Sepuloni talk about this—in paragraphs 30 and 31 it talks about In isolation indexing main benefits to inflation may impact progress towards child poverty reduction targets. Preliminary modelling … shows that indexing main benefits to inflation leads to an estimated increase in the number of children in poverty [in] the [after-housing-costs 50] and [before-housing-costs 50] poverty measures over the forecast period".What does that actually mean? That means 7000 children put into poverty under those measures each of those measures—7000 under each measure. What does that look like? That looks like an impact on women who are predominantly situated within those benefit recipients but also sole parents as well; 80 percent of our sole-parent population are women. That is a huge impact on them and therefore a huge impact on those children. That is absolutely shameful that we see so many young people that will be put back into poverty just by the stroke of a pen and by the passing of this piece of legislation.What does that actually look like in reality? That means food insecurity. That means young people that don't have enough clothing. If you look at the measures that make up those particular measures you can see children that don't have more than one pair of shoes if any pair of shoes at all. That means children who are living in trauma because of the impacts that poverty has put on them. That is 7000 more children on each of those measures of reduction that will be put back just because of the passing of this legislation.But alongside that we see some other measures as well. The impact of the scrapping of the 20 hours' free childcare for children aged two years—now that was something that I was particularly proud of because it meant that more young people could go to childcare and more people would have the flexibility more women would have the flexibility to be able to choose to go back into the workforce. We hear the other side saying "Oh we're interested in people getting back into the workforce." How do they expect women to get back into the workforce if childcare's being taken away from them? You know I haven't heard that answer here in any of this. What they are impacting on is they're impacting upon young people going into poverty and their parents not having access to that childcare. This is not a Government that is interested in lifting children out of poverty; they are interested in funding their tax cuts."