Naylor JonoJONO NAYLOR (National): Tēnā koe e Te Mana Whakawā tēnā koutou ki ngā hoa o Te Whare Pāremata. He ture pai rawa tēnei ka whakatutuki Te Reipa he mea pai mō te rangatahi.[Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker and to you fellow colleagues of Parliament. Labour concludes that this is a good legislation for young people.]This is a good bill and it will do some good things for our young people. It is a positive bill for our young people quite simply because as a result of this bill more young people are going to get more services wrapped around them to enable them to achieve more qualifications to get more of them into work and to build better lives for themselves and for their families. That is what this bill is about—it is about getting them into a position where they can build better lives for themselves. I think ultimately that is what we want for them. How will they achieve this? More of them will have access to those 44 youth services that are operating around the country and those over 300 youth workers who are working within those youth services to be able to give them the confidence and the assistance that they need to be able to build better lives for themselves and for their children. We know that this is successful because actually instead of burying ourselves in reading reports—instead of burying ourselves in reading bits of paper—some of us have actually got out and talked to some of those young people who are in those services and who are in those teen parent units. I can tell you that the ones whom I have spoken to think this is great. They actually love the fact that there is a youth mentor who believes in them who is prepared to spend time with them and who believes in them enough to invest in them. I have been a little bit saddened to hear from the opposite side of the House some of the things that I have heard said in other readings and today. Those members have used words like stigma" and "deficit" and they have used words like those to say that we are going to leave these young people where they are. We have heard people say that in the almost 10 years they have been involved in youth work they have used the strengths-based approach or otherwise. Well in the 18 years that I spent in social and youth work working with young people I can tell you that every youth worker whom I have ever come across and the ones I see working within our youth programmes now—of course they use strengths-based approaches. Of course they work with young people on their strengths and say: "We believe in you. We can take you further. We can assist you and we will assist you to go further and build better pathways for your life." Every service that I have ever worked in or ever had any association with has a threshold for you to get into that service. When I was a school guidance counsellor it was pretty open—you could walk in the door and sit down and have a chat. The threshold was not too high to access that service. But that said if they were wasting my time and theirs they did not stay there very long. When I worked in child and adolescent mental health for a tertiary mental health service people had to meet certain thresholds in order to receive service from that particular service. In the same way there will be some thresholds for people to access this Youth Service. They will be teen parents and the ones who are there now are 16 and 17—we are just looking to extend that up to 18 and 19-year-olds. They will be teen parents or they will have been identified as being at risk of long-term welfare dependency. The social investment approach that we are taking is not simply saying that we are going to do something with these young people so that they will cost us more money. No the social investment strategy says that actually we are going to invest in these people up front so that they can have better lives. The social investment strategy uses words like "long-term dependency on welfare"—it uses those criteria. But let me tell you something: when you are 17 or 18 years old if the Government has to spend lots of money on you it is probably because there is not going to be a lot of opportunity or good success there for you later in life. The social investment strategy is about investing up front to give those people better lives and that is exactly what we are doing. I will tell you now if I were in their shoes I would not want to be sitting back and having the Government spending money on me for ever and ever and ever because guess what? The Government generally spends money on people when the outcomes for their lives are not as good as they could be. So we are going to invest in them. When those youth workers—those 300-odd youth workers in those 44 services—keep working across those young people they will believe in them. It will be strengths-based; it will be focused on the positive things that they can contribute to society. We believe in those young people—we are aspirational for them. That is what this bill is about. It is about getting behind young people who need some help to help them to do better in their lives. Thank you for this opportunity. Nō reira tēnā koutou tēnā koutou tēnā tātou katoa."