Newman Muriel: Social Security (Social Assistance) Amendment Bill — Instruction to Committee In Committee 
Newman Muriel: Social Security (Social Assistance) Amendment Bill — Instruction to Committee In Committee 
[Volume:624;Page:19582] 
Dr MURIEL NEWMAN (Deputy Leader—ACT) 
: 
 I take a call in the final part of this debate on the title and commencement clauses of the Social Security (Social Assistance) Amendment Bill on behalf of the ACT party. I would like to make a few points about the bill. It is a scandal that it took 5 long years for this bill to come in front of the House. When this issue was first raised with the Minister not long after he became the Minister there were growing numbers of women who were refusing to name the fathers of their children. There are growing numbers of kids who do not know who their dads are. I think it is just a dreadful shame that 35000 children in New Zealand do not have a father named on their birth certificate. 
As we have said in this debate a lot of the causes of the problem come back to a very unfair child support law which means that people decide to collude with one another in order to avoid paying up. That is a huge problem for everybody not least for the taxpayers of New Zealand who as we have just heard are now paying $23 million a day in welfare payments. That is $1 million an hour. Rather than try to address one of the big problems—the Child Support Act which is very unfair—the Minister has come up with this bill which will hide the numbers. It will provide exemptions for women who refuse to name fathers because those women claim rightly or wrongly that they know the fathers are violent or else that they are deadbeat dads who will not be prepared to pay anyway. Therefore instead of addressing the fundamental causes of the problem so that we end up with a better society we have this Clayton’s bill that will come into force in May and July I see as I read the commencement dates. 
I also want to make a comment to the Minister who has claimed in his contributions to this debate that the welfare department now tells parents of their obligations and because of that more of them are naming fathers so that the problem is starting to reduce as they accept their responsibilities. I would like the Minister to take a call to tell us whether when welfare staff tell single parents about their responsibilities they also tell them about the Government research that finds that long-term welfare dependency and sole parenthood damage kids. Does the Minister ask his department to discourage single parents from going on welfare till their youngest child is 18 and to encourage them to get out there get a life get a job and have a better future for themselves and their children—not on welfare? Does the Minister accept responsibility for realising that children do better if their parents are in the workforce—if children have a working role model in their family? Or does he sit back and say it does not matter whether we have more single parents going on a benefit—that it is OK and the Government does not mind about it because they will be Labour Party supporters? 
I say to the Minister that he has a moral obligation to make sure that anybody who goes on welfare in the long term and who is able-bodied realises that all the research the Social Policy Agency did which went back over years and years is absolutely conclusive that welfare in the long term is damaging to children. Any Minister of the Crown has a responsibility to make sure that families on welfare know that. I can tell the Minister that taxpayers out there know that. They know it is wrong for people who could work and who should be working to be stuck on welfare. What I would like to be seeing today is our debating a bill to bring in welfare reform that would support people to move off welfare and go into work a bill that would provide support for families children and so on. But that bill must be one whereby we actually help children to have working parents—not parents on welfare because no matter how well or how hard beneficiaries try it is not the same as being in work.