O'Connor SimonSIMON O'CONNOR (National—Tāmaki): Excellent choice if I could say so modestly. Can I acknowledge the Minister for Social Development for answering those questions. Actually it was good to go back through a number of them and particularly I think around the nature of how the board is going to interact with the New Zealand Qualifications Authority to prescribe legislation is useful. There are a couple more questions I might return to there. Touching on the nomenclature between perform" and "provide" I accept what the Minister is saying of course first and foremost. It is the Minister's prerogative not mine but I found that useful.Fortunately the Minister has been working as I have very systematically. I remain at this point on Part 1 clause 5(2) moving on to the last points of definition which haven't been touched on yet. The last area we were talking about is scope of practice and Minister—just following the alphabetical order—I have some questions around social work service.In this Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 187—and as my colleague Louise Upston who's just resumed her chair noted—we haven't as a fresh SOP dropped on us had a full chance to engage it in the Social Services and Community Committee. But social work service here is defined as "a service provided for the purpose of"—and it begins to list a number of qualities: to assess support improve and understandably to protect the well-being of individuals families groups or communities. I suppose Minister the question is that clearly those who have drafted this decided to begin using—and I think "begin" is the important word—the full breadth of the English language to try and encapsulate what social service work entails but I suppose I posit or put to you Minister—and a response would be welcome—is it wide enough?As I've touched on a few times social work is incredibly broad. In fact a colleague from the other side of the Chamber Anahila spoke about her own work. I would be interested if she takes a call to expand on whether or not simply "assessing supporting improving or protecting" is broad enough. I wonder whether or not words such as "changing" "understanding" "encouraging dignity" or "encouragement" itself would have been not words to replace what's there but should also be there.So I suppose fundamentally Minister we're in a situation where a journey to use some pastoral language has begun to encapsulate in words what social work service means. But by choosing some words—in this case like "supporting" and "improving"—but not including words such as "encouraging" or "understanding" are we becoming a little bit exclusionary? I notice as well that we talk about "individuals families groups or communities" but I've noticed there's been a bit of a penchant for the new Government to make sure that Te Reo Māori—[Interruption] Yeah French. It's been a penchant for applying extra language.It's been quite important to this Government to make sure Te Reo Māori is integrated and I know that in other pieces of legislation we've often referred to whānau just as we're referring to families. I know that in this current drafting young people aren't mentioned but often if we do we bring in rangatahi. I feel a bit disingenuous Minister because it's been your Government who tends to blend the languages but we don't have that here. So I suppose it's a twofold question at the moment of why we don't have further words such as "dignity" "encouraging" "changing" or "understanding" to describe social work and why we're not echoing other legislation which recognises the importance of Te Reo Māori.The other element that we have if I could move on from there is the very definition of a social worker. It's quite a particular legal question that needs to be addressed. Then if I get a chance we'll move on to clause 5A(1) of SOP 187 about the practice of a social worker. I'm a stickler for these things but "social worker" it says "means a person who's registered under [the] Act". Intuitively that makes sense but there is a question in law of whether we're talking about a natural person or a legal person. So when this definition talks about a person who's registered are we talking about as I say a natural person which is a human being—living breathing like myself although perhaps some on the other side would question whether that could be true—or are we talking a legal person? In other words could "social worker" actually encapsulate effectively what is a non-human but a legal entity a legal person? It's quite usual in a whole lot of legal frameworks so it's important that we begin to—[Bell rung]CHAIRPERSON (Poto Williams): I call Simon O'Connor but before I do I know that the members of the committee will be distressed to know that we've got some technical problems with the feed on Parliament TV so your names may not be showing underneath. So I just need to tell you that. We're working on rectifying that as soon as we can.SIMON O'CONNOR: Madam Chair do you want me to repeat the first question until they fix it?CHAIRPERSON (Poto Williams): I would prefer not but I'll call you to continue.SIMON O'CONNOR: Thank you very much. So for those watching at home Simon O'Connor is my name—the excellent MP for those who don't know including maybe my family.I was touching on the notion of "social worker". It would be very helpful for the Minister and through her officials if that's possible to clarify that "person" by definition in this clause 5 is absolutely and definitively talking about a natural person and not a legal person. I suppose it would be hard if one was to do a thought experiment—to use a bit of German "gedankenexperiment" just to keep the languages going—to what a legal person might be. But arguably a group an organisation providing social work could be determined to be a person in the legal sense. So it would be helpful to have that discussed there.Look moving off clause 5 which I've now spent 16 minutes on—it's amazing actually because we have a number of other parts to go through as well. Clause 5A of Supplementary Order Paper 187 subclause (1) talks about to "practise as a social worker" meaning to do so within the person's individual scope of practice. Again intuitively when one reads that it seems fine until you take a moment to step back Minister and go "Well hold on a moment." If we're taught about scopes of practice it implies that that's a scope. It's an earlier point of mine of where we're talking about individuals or the collective. Scopes of practice when we think in other pastoral medical or legal fraternities is a scope a set of definitions which goes across a wide range of people. If you will the scope is defined and then applies to an array of individuals. Here we seem to have a rather odd situation—but I'm always happy to be told otherwise—that the scope of practice really is whatever the individual comes up with.So we may be running into a difficulty right from the start that as we're about to get into Part 1A where scopes of practice are to be defined clause 5A has said really the practice as a social worker means to do so within the person's individual scope of practice. So would someone like myself be able to go back and argue with the board and say "Well I really appreciate that you've put together a prescription of qualifications and so forth but it's really clear under clause 5A(1) that actually I as a social worker"—if I were to be one—"really do so within my person's individual scope of practice." So are we running into a little bit of a problem there around who finally gets to decide and then do we also have a problem Minister of well again if it's a scope of practice as broad as it needs to be that singular scope of practice with its many heads many definitions will get applied to an array of individuals? This seems to me to flip it on its head that we could have thousands of individual persons—I'm assuming natural persons—practising their individual scope of practice and really importantly here too within a scope of practice each individual can bring their unique perspective if you will on that scope of practice. [Interruption] Well it's sort of ipso facto that it is their penchant—Latin now; very good. So what we're dealing with here is fundamentally if it's an individual scope of practice does that not make nonsense—if I had to be a little bit assertive—of actually saying we're going to prescribe an overall scope of practice? I know it follows on as it does in clause 5A(3) to begin defining what scope of practice is. But the quirkiness that we have here is that it's implied in just about all the other clauses—and I won't go beyond Parts 1 and 1A but it's using it in the general sense a sense that these are the scopes that will be applied singly to an array of individuals yet we start clause 5A(1) by again saying to "practise as a social worker means to do so within the person's individual scope of practice". I suspect some clever wording would be able to remedy this. It's probably bringing the words "scopes of practice" into the primary and active element of the clause so "practise as a social worker means to work within one's scope of practice as an individual"—that begins to change the meaning and takes out what I think are some contradictions.So look on that I will leave my contributions and I'm sure it's a great sadness to the Minister that that's the end of my calls on this Part."