Doocey Matt: Social Workers Registration (Mandatory Registration) Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDoocey Matt: Social Workers Registration (Mandatory Registration) Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 14 October 2015. Volume:709;Page:7240. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]MATT DOOCEY (National—Waimakariri): I am rising to speak to the Social Workers Registration (Mandatory Registration) Amendment Bill. I will not be speaking in support of this bill but I do acknowledge the Labour MP Carmel Sepuloni whose name this bill is under. The bill was drawn from the ballot and I too have had a member’s bill drawn from the ballot recently. It is great to see your ideas being formulated developed discussed and challenged.There is an issue with this bill with the Minister for Social Development Anne Tolley having already requested the Social Workers Registration Board to look into registration. So I think that it is very much a question of timing—timing of when that report will come back. But also in this bill is an issue with 1 year—1 year being set as a milestone that social workers need to be registered by. I do not think that that is enough time for this very diverse and complex workforce to be registered. When you look at social work it is about timing. It is about getting to the social issues at the right time and providing the right interventions.When we look at the question of regulation or of not being regulated I would challenge that a bit and say that it is about effectiveness. What we need to do is look at the whole of the social work workforce and understand what the blocks and the obstacles are for them to be achieving their aim of improving the social well-being of all New Zealanders. One programme currently in the United Kingdom called Reclaiming Social Work is giving social workers the ability to get back to face-to-face work to engage with the people they are working with—not as a desktop exercise where they are filling out forms. We hear some very scary statistics through the Children’s Commissioner with his interim report that some social workers are spending less than 25 percent of their time in face-to-face engagement with the people they are working with.We need to ensure and understand that it is not just about how we regulate or register; it is about how we free up working practices so that social workers can go out there and provide effective interventions face to face. What we are talking about at the moment is social workers who are so fixated on writing down care plans but what we need to do is upskill this workforce. They have expertise. It is all very well being passionate but you need to have a skill set—a skill set that you then use to provide interventions. Maybe that might be around psychological therapies that make a real change to people’s lives. That is what I would support.I think that it is fair to say that also what we need to do is address the problem—mitigate social problems—and even prevent them right from the start. When you look at some of the successes in the House this week and as the state of the nation report by the Salvation Army said if we want to address social problems then we need to get right up front. What we do around social problems addressed by poverty is around providing better jobs and better incomes. In New Zealand that means exporting more products offshore. By engaging in free-trade agreements we provide more jobs and better incomes for people in New Zealand which addresses social problems like poverty which increases the social well-being of all New Zealanders. When you look at social policy you can have all the aspirations in the world—this social policy or that one—but at the end of the day you need to pay for it. This is about having a Government that can provide strong economic management and create surpluses that can then be reinvested in good public services which go on and give people a good start in life.Could I join people around this House in acknowledging the work of social workers throughout New Zealand. I know that in my electorate of Waimakariri we have been very hard hit post-earthquakes. It is great to see the social work teams getting into local schools—thanks to the Associate Minister for Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Nicky Wagner with her psychosocial plan that allows social workers to go in and make a difference in the lives of young people in New Zealand. Thank you.