Warren-Clark AngieANGIE WARREN-CLARK (Labour): Thank you Mr Speaker. It is indeed a real pleasure to take a call on this the Social Security (Financial Assistance for Caregivers) Amendment Bill. I'd just like to acknowledge the previous speaker Maureen Pugh for her good words. She's made a really good summary of the bill but there was also the collegial response that we all had to making something better. I'd like to acknowledge the Minister Kelvin Davis for bringing this bill to fruition and also extend my acknowledgments and thanks to the Hon Tracey Martin who came and submitted—and it was quite lovely to see her speaking about the original intention. It was lovely to catch up with her again but it was also for her seeing a piece of legislation through as well.Look this is a very simple bill really in terms of equity. If we think about what this bill's policy intent is it is essentially that those who receive the unsupported child's benefit or the orphan's benefit didn't receive the same amount as those children under State care under the foster carer's benefit. So essentially the work was as the Minister has said the same work. Essentially the value of that good work was exactly the same depending on where you were but the entitlements were different.Before I speak more specifically about the bill I do also want to acknowledge those carers out there. Now some of us here on this side of the House have been carers and have done some of the work that is needed. Often these children are the children of our own families or they're the children of close family members or friends. It's about us putting our time and our energy into—and indeed I acknowledge raising children giving them the love the attention and the care that they deserve when things haven't gone quite right at home. So I would like to acknowledge all of those carers out there. The member who just resumed her seat Maureen Pugh talked about 22000 children so that's roughly 15000 caregivers. We had a really good process. We didn't have a lot of submissions on this bill and I think it could be fair to say that pretty much everyone was very much happy with our direction. Some were asking for further changes and of course that moved beyond the scope of what we were intending to do.As I have said the disparity between children in foster care and those who are under State care was something that we all simply agreed needed to change. The bill itself extends the eligibility for the OB and the UCB. So I hope that I've explained what they are: the orphans benefit is the OB and the unsupported child's benefit is the UCB. It extends this. Previously it was for those expected to provide care for 12 or more months and that meant that some families who were caring for children weren't certain for how long that child could come or be with them and as a consequence they weren't actually eligible to receive this support even though they were in fact taking care of those children. So we basically removed the 12-month rule as others have said—essentially we loosened it up to ensure that family members or other people could get access if they were taking care of children and were expected to do so for some time.We did discuss at some length what would happen if—like for example when I was a child I spent about six weeks of every year at Christmas holidays with my family in the South Island. We made sure that that was not covered in this part of the legislation. So when you are just going for a holiday and there is no intention that you stay for good there or stay for a while then that is in fact covered.So that made it very clear to ensure that people couldn't get an allowance for having a child for a couple of weeks—say grandparents etc. So we included a new definition of temporary caregiver" to ensure that they're eligible. So again it could be children turning up one night unexpectedly—it extends for a week it extends for another week an agreement gets put in place and then there's that eligibility.And this is really important because often it's kin or whānau that are caring for these family members. But sometimes it's not and we recognised with this policy change that the family members were themselves going without and their own children were being affected. So when the report came out it was very very clear that families were putting their hands into their own pockets for something that wouldn't necessarily be fair if you looked on an equity basis.As I said there are 15000 caregivers out there supporting approximately 24000 children and we had 31 submissions eight of them oral including from the Hon Tracey Martin. As the previous speaker stated we did have an issue with the orphans benefit. The definition of orphans benefit was parents who have died or are missing or not able to care for them—for example they have a long-term serious disability. So we really struggled with this. We really struggled with the fact that these children weren't necessarily orphans and this is a little bit of antiquated language. But quite honestly we weren't able to come up with an alternative. I think that that's a reflection of the fact that it is quite a difficult situation but we didn't feel that calling someone with living parents an orphan was appropriate. Nevertheless we really couldn't come up with an alternative.We also established the birthday and Christmas allowance to be able to be paid directly. So as previously stated we recommended that the Christmas allowance not be called a Christmas allowance. It gets paid on the 25th or before 25 December but it is a holiday allowance. So the family who may not celebrate Christmas may celebrate the holiday or save it for another time when they have a significant event.We also looked at the birthday allowance and it was quite cute. We have a specific piece of legislation which enables children who are born on a leap day of a leap year to have their birthday recognised on 1 March when it is not 29 February. I have to acknowledge our officials for raising that with us because it wasn't something that naturally we thought about—I guess none of us have children born on 29 February but it was a very small but also useful piece of change.I'm running very short of time so I will say that the final thing that we ensured was that when a family member or when a person receives these entitlements and they are not entitled to them we also ensured that there was an ability to raise a debt and to have that money come back. And that's really basically to enable some flexibility in the system for when these children are moving between families. So it's a great piece of legislation. It is very little but also extremely meaningful for those families. I commend the bill."