Bradford Sue: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
Bradford Sue: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:632;Page:4338] 
SUE BRADFORD (Green) 
: 
 In looking ahead at the Government’s plans for the Ministry of Social Development over the year ahead one of the biggest questions the Green Party continues to have is around what exactly the proposed single core benefit is going to look like. Since 2000 the previous Minister for Social Development and Employment Steve Maharey and the current Minister David Benson-Pope have been promising a total overhaul of the social welfare system in this country. At the Social Services Committee this time round the latest news is that legislation for the new system is currently being drafted and that Cabinet will make its decisions in the next few months. I have lost count of how many times the Social Services Committee has been told that but I look forward with interest to seeing exactly what the Government does have in mind sometime before the end of this year—maybe. Meanwhile the Green Party continues to have considerable anxieties about what exactly the new single core benefit system will look like especially in light of what has already happened with the special benefit and temporary additional support. 
As part of the original Working for Families package in 2004—much lauded by the Government as the solution to family poverty—the special benefit was abolished to be replaced by temporary additional support. This change has come into force only recently but already the impacts are starting to seep through. For example last week I was contacted by a beneficiary whose benefit had been cut by $37 a week when she was put off the special benefit and on to temporary additional support despite the Minister saying that existing recipients would have their income protected by grandparenting provisions. The change from the special benefit to temporary additional support is a benefit cut carried out by a Labour Government and the impacts of that cut are only just now starting to come through. 
As it beds in the sort of deep and hopeless poverty referred to in the recently released  
New Zealand Living Standards 2004: The Report 
 will only get worse. That report showed that those worst affected by inadequate incomes between 2000 and 2004 were income-tested beneficiary families with children Maori and Pacific Island families and people with large families. The proportion of all children in severe and significant hardship increased from 18 percent to 26 percent in that period. The cutting of the special benefit and its replacement with temporary additional support will only make things worse for those people especially as it comes on top of the discriminatory in-work payment which means that beneficiary families miss out on an income top-up that is available only to those homes where at least one parent works 30 hours a week or more. 
Although the Government shrugs this off as being an excusable part of its welfare to work strategy the Green Party says it is inexcusable that a Labour Government continues to structurally entrench discrimination against the children of the poorest people in our country—and I hope Labour members read Chris Trotter’s article last week. We are delighted that beneficiary numbers are coming down and that unemployment has fallen to its lowest level in decades. We are pleased with the genuine work that the Ministry of Social Development is doing in helping a lot more people move from benefits into work and that it is doing that work better than it did in the past. However what we in the Green Party are not at all happy about is that those remaining on benefits because they cannot get work due to being sick injured or disabled or because they are sole parents should be pressed even deeper into a cycle of hopeless poverty despair and alienation. It is imperative that the new single core benefit regime if it is actually going to happen in this term of Parliament does not make things any worse. 
The Minister does give constant assurances inside and outside Parliament that the new system will not involve benefit cuts. However after what has happened with the special benefit I remain dubious. I fear that what will in fact happen is that there will indeed be a single core benefit bottom rate but it will be set at the level of the lowest work-tested benefits rather than at the higher rate that applies to for example invalids beneficiaries. The Government may then say that no one will lose out because it will grandparent existing beneficiaries so that their income does not go down but this only disguises an actual benefit cut for people who come into the system after the cut-off date as has already been done with the move to temporary additional support. 
Labour is at a turning point right now. It can choose to continue down the benefit-cutting path that it has already embarked on or it can take this opportunity to genuinely reform the benefit system so that it not only is simpler but also is fairer and actually pays enough for people to live on. The Shipley-Richardson cuts to benefits in 1991 were never restored. Benefits like wages remain far too low. Those who live on high wages and in warm homes and who have cars that go have no idea what it is like living in a freezing overcrowded house bach or garage without enough money to get from one end of the week to the other yet that is the reality for tens of thousands of New Zealanders in July 2006. I call on the Minister and his department to take this opportunity as they continue to work on the details of their new benefit system to end discrimination within Working for Families to reverse the impacts of the abolition of the special benefit and to use the single core benefit reform to lift rather than lower benefit levels and make the system a lot fairer for everybody. 
When the Social Services Committee looked at the estimates for the Ministry of Social Development this year we also heard evidence about the merger of the Ministry of Social Development with the Department of Child Youth and Family Services. This has now happened and I would like to acknowledge what I believe is the serious intention of the Ministers David Benson-Pope and Ruth Dyson and the chief executive officer Peter Hughes to do everything they can to build Child Youth and Family into a far more sustainable and sustaining organisation than it has been for the past decade. I still cannot help but feel aggravated by the virulence of National’s criticism of Child Youth and Family Services at times knowing that it was National that deliberately underfunded it in the late 1990s and doomed it to fail through the chimera of private sector management philosophy at that time. The Ministry of Social Development is still picking up the pieces now. 
But it has been a long time since then and I am sure that the staff of Child Youth and Family more than anyone else are heartily exhausted by endless restructurings and reviews. Each year at the select committee many of the same questions are raised and dutifully answered yet the same problems continue. This has all been made much more acute this year by the heightened awareness of child homicides in our community and the unresolved Kahui murders sitting sombrely in the back of all our minds. I do wonder to what extent Child Youth and Family and the Minister are looking at how they are going to deal with the ever-increasing number of referrals that result from heightened public and professional sensitivity to violence and neglect of children without blowing the Government’s Budget. How will the new differential response model actually work in practice at the interface between non-governmental organisations and statutory social work practice? Will the non-governmental organisations which increasingly carry out critical work on behalf of the State actually receive the funding they need to do their work properly or will they start off with a bang and die with a whimper as funding is gradually cut back as has often been the case in the past when the State devolves big hunks of its traditional functions to the third sector? I hope that apart from anything else Child Youth and Family and the Ministry of Social Development will have the capacity now to learn from the more successful models such as the SKIP programme that operate from a more community development orientated approach and that they will transfer that learning to the way they work with groups at the frontline of non-statutory intervention with the new differential response model. 
I would like to take a moment to congratulate everyone involved with SKIP—that is the short name for the Strategies with Kids - Information for Parents programme. During the process of debate and hearings around my bill to repeal section 59 of the Crimes Act we have heard many individuals and organisations speak glowingly about what is being achieved in terms of providing practical information and support to parents and caregivers of children under 5. The Green Party is right behind SKIP and hopes the Government will continue to fund and in fact extend it so that it can provide even broader coverage than it does now. 
In terms of Child Youth and Family the Green Party also has some big questions about staff salaries and conditions following this latest restructuring and about the balance and resourcing between what goes into the various layers of management and what goes into the frontline. Social workers and those who work supporting them are the lifeblood of Child Youth and Family’s actual work yet their salaries are still well below what they should be. It is no wonder that we lose so many social workers overseas and that not enough new people are coming through our social work training courses. 
The Green Party will be watching developments with the Ministry of Social Development - Child Youth and Family Services merger closely over the coming year. We wish all concerned well with their steps forward but I do hope that by this time in 2007 some of the questions I and my colleagues on the select committee have raised here will be visibly and substantively answered so that the work that Child Youth and Family does is maximised for the benefit of all the children and young people it is there to serve.