Mahuta Nanaia: Social Assistance (New Work Tests Incentives and Obligations) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Mahuta Nanaia: Social Assistance (New Work Tests Incentives and Obligations) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:665;Page:13177] 
Hon NANAIA MAHUTA (Labour—Hauraki-Waikato) 
: 
 If this debate was really about getting beneficiaries into work then the Government should be showing us its plan to create growth and grow jobs. The reality is that it is all very well to talk about the Social Assistance (New Work Tests Incentives and Obligations) Amendment Bill but the context in which the Government promotes beneficiaries into jobs has to have the other part of the equation which is to ask where the jobs are. 
People who are listening to the debate want to know what the Government’s plan is to create jobs in small communities so that beneficiaries have real choices for real wages and real jobs and a fair go. We on this side of the Chamber know that yes beneficiaries want to work but no the Government is not doing anything to create jobs. There is nothing simpler than that message so I ask why the Government does not get it. Everyone else gets it but the Government does not get it. This bill should not just talk about opportunities for beneficiaries without creating those opportunities which are jobs and employment. 
The Minister for Social Development and Employment was quick to get to her feet and talk about all the good things that are being done to support mums on the domestic purposes benefit into work. Like her I too have visited a number of teen parent units throughout the country. I want to know why the Minister has cut the Young Parent Childcare Payment. Why did she cut it? Why did she take away an allowance that goes to young parents to enable them to get their children to a childcare centre and to study as well? That is what she has done. That is the little glimmer of light that she has snuffed out for those young parents. Often the aspiration of those teen parents is to go into higher education often to polytech or university. 
I ask why the Minister cut out the entitlement for the training incentive allowance that funded courses at level 4 and above. Yes teen parents want to work but they know that they need to get a better and higher qualification to create a better opportunity for them and their little whanau—a better quality of life. There has been no answer to that from the Minister. 
What is worse is that the Minister has failed to come up with a plan for teen parents to tell them where the jobs are. She is all one-sided in the debate. She says that the Government wants to get beneficiaries off the benefit and into work—we agree with that—but there has been no response about where the jobs are and that is really important. 
The member who spoke before me Hekia Parata talked about work testing sickness beneficiaries. A lot of people who know how the system works know that people who have come from full-time employment on to the sickness benefit will not stay on it for long. They want to get back into full-time employment. They are not who we are talking about. 
I suspect that we are talking about a high proportion of sickness beneficiaries—and this is the feedback from many Work and Income offices—who have some form of mental illness. The difficulty is that even if those people are medically assessed to work for 15 hours employers are not flexible enough to respond to their needs in the workplace. We are talking about highly functioning people who may at times have bouts of depression or some type of mental illness that prevents them from working a full part-time 15-hour shift. The question to the Minister is that although those people can be medically assessed as being able to work for 15 hours the workplace may not be responsive enough to deal and to cope with the challenges that some people face in their everyday life to work a full 15-hour period. We have had no response whatsoever from the Minister on that simple point. They are real people who face challenges and who are medically assessed to work but they cannot find a job or an employer that is responsive to their needs. They cannot find an employer who says he or she will accept that a person will work for 15 hours one week because the person may ring up the next week to say that he or she is having a bad week and just cannot make it. Will the employer will be responsive? I suspect not. 
We are treating some of the most vulnerable people in a way that I think is unfair and that could actually be detrimental to their ongoing quality of life and well-being. We are not talking about the proportion of people who are on the sickness benefit for a period of time who then go back into full-time employment. Most people who come from full-time employment will want to be on the sickness benefit for only a short time because they know there is a full-time job there. I suspect we are talking about the greater proportion of people on the sickness benefit those who are in the category that I have already spoken about.