Sepuloni CarmelCARMEL SEPULONI (Labour—Kelston): I want to start with a quote that is relevant to this bill and that quote is: I have learnt through my own experiences and the experiences of others around me that our young in particular can quickly begin to self-stigmatise when the media and society stigmatise them. When the media portrays only a picture of a ghettoised poverty-stricken group of troublemakers then our youth can resign themselves to the fact that this is what they are." In relation to this bill I just want to say this: is it not so sad that it is not the media or external society that we are talking about here? We are talking about the Government stigmatising our young people and that is why we cannot support this bill. That quote was actually from my maiden speech and young people—the education of them and them going into employment—is something that has always been important to me and it is also very important to the Labour Party. We heard the Minister for Social Development talking about the social investment approach and how this particular initiative this particular bill is in line with that social investment approach. Clearly this is an indication of how flawed that social investment approach is that that social investment approach is short-sighted and that it takes a deficit approach to our young people. The social investment approach talks all about negative measures in relation to a person. It depicts people as liabilities to this country rather than focusing on the fact that people—particularly our young people—are the biggest resource and asset that this country has. So we will not be supporting this bill. The Minister talked about the fact that the Youth Service has been successful to date. Well I am on the Social Services Committee. We have asked for evidence of that and there is no evidence to suggest that what we currently have in place is actually successful and now we have the Minister putting more money into something when there is no evidence to support that it has been successful and she is looking to extend it. To us that makes very little sense. We put up three amendments at the Committee stage that we thought were fair and they were not supported by the National Government. I think really those amendments when we look at them would make sense to a lot of New Zealanders hence why they were supported by a large number of the parties in the House and were maybe one vote short of actually being able to get through. The first of those amendments was in relation to education. One of the issues that we have with this bill is that it encourages education up to only National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) level 2 and after NCEA level 2 is attained the focus goes primarily on employment. We are not opposed to young people going into work but first and foremost we want to get behind young people to get the highest level of education that they can hence why we put up an amendment in the Committee stage to say it actually should not just be NCEA level 2; it should be NCEA level 3 or higher. The Government decided to vote that down and what we have instead is a bill that does not support educational achievement any higher than NCEA level 2. Another amendment that we put up was an amendment that would have enabled young people who were not identified through the Government's predictive risk modelling to actually opt into the Youth Service programme if they thought it would be of benefit to them. Part of the reason why we put that particular amendment up was that we want to take the stigma out of this programme. Enabling young people who have not been identified by the Government's predictive risk modelling as being at risk to actually opt in would go some way to removing the stigma attached to this programme but again the Government voted against that amendment. The third amendment we put up was in relation to the expectations of young parents who participate in this programme. The concern that we have about young parents was that the expectation on them to return to work or to return to study is much greater than what it is for any other parent. As was pointed out by the Human Rights Commission it discriminates against young parents. So instead of having 3 years to be able to stay home if you wish to care for your child the expectation here is that if there is a teen parent support unit within the vicinity of where that person lives they have 6 months and then they will have to go back. If there is not a teen parent support unit within the vicinity of where they live then the expectation is 1 year. Of course if a young person wants to return to work or study at an early stage we would support that—in fact we would create that opportunity—but forcing them to do that when that expectation is not put on older parents is unfair and in fact discriminates against them. We put that amendment up but again that was voted down. There are other issues that we have in relation to this particular bill and one of them is the fact that the Government is pushing for young people to go into work and study which is not a bad thing necessarily—as I said before we support young people being given the opportunities—but what the Government denied and what it failed to recognise is that there are fewer opportunities for young people to be able to go into employment under this Government. What it failed to acknowledge is that the number of young persons not in education training or employment is currently at 87200. That is over 26500 more than when National took office in 2008. The National Government needs to take responsibility for the fact that the unemployment rate for young people is actually in a worse state now than it was when it took office in 2008. So when those members turn round and say to us "Actually we're going to extend this programme because it's been successful." then of course we are saying: "Well hang on a second how can it be successful when we have 26500 more young people who are not in employment or education now than what we had when they took office in 2008?". They are failing our young people. The other issue that we have in relation to the Government its Youth Service programme and what has been suggested here in the bill is that there are rising concerns about the ability of the National Government services to support youth into quality stable employment given the failure of the Government to facilitate benefit-to-work transitions for the main benefits. I am not talking about youth benefits here; I am talking about main benefits. Based on the March 2016 figures with only 19730 of the 49907 benefit cancellations going into work of course we are concerned because only 7 percent of total beneficiaries were actually going into employment. We have got concerns that the Government's whole purpose is not necessarily to ensure that these young people go on into employment or on to having better lives but—as seems to be the case with the main benefits—just to get people off benefits with no actual concern for where they go on to or concern for whether or not their lives are actually better. We have got concerns that there has been very little tracking and monitoring in respect of whether or not the lives of young people or even older people who are on benefits have improved and whether or not there have been successful employment outcomes when they have left the benefit. We can see that in terms of the Government's agenda even when we look at just its Better Public Services target which is to reduce welfare dependency—not to make people's lives better but just to get people off benefits. We will not be supporting this bill. We did support it at its first reading because we wanted to give it a chance but we are disappointed that the Government was not willing to work with the other parties to actually improve the content of this bill and to improve the services that are provided to our youth in this country."