Turei Metiria: Corrections (Social Assistance) Amendment Bill Customs and Excise (Social Assistance) Amendment Bill Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation (Social Assistance) Amendment Bill — Third Readings 
Turei Metiria: Corrections (Social Assistance) Amendment Bill Customs and Excise (Social Assistance) Amendment Bill Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation (Social Assistance) Amendment Bill — Third Readings 
[Volume:646;Page:15383] 
METIRIA TUREI (Green) 
: 
 I am pleased to speak on behalf of the Green Party and my colleague Sue Bradford who is away on select committee business in opposing this legislation. The Green Party will be voting against this legislation—the three bills that have been split from the original Social Assistance (Debt Prevention and Minimisation) Amendment Bill. We originally offered our support for that bill on the basis that one of its key goals was to prevent beneficiaries who are in prison from having their benefits overpaid. In itself that has merit as an idea but there are some surrounding contextual issues that have caused us to change our position since the original bill had its first reading in August last year. 
This legislation is geared to enable the Ministry of Social Development the Department of Corrections the Customs Service and the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) to share more information between them in order to stop people receiving benefits accident compensation or student loans while they are in prison. This is to be done by data matching personal details held by the ministry against those held by other departments. A secondary purpose of the legislation is to provide the ministry with information held by the Customs Service and ACC so that Work and Income can more easily and readily locate debtors who are no longer in the country or who are on accident compensation. 
What the Green Party finds particularly offensive about this legislation is that its whole thrust is actually about the machinery of the State grinding down into the lives of some of our most vulnerable people in more and more detail in a way that people who have never been on a benefit or even worse in prison would find hard to imagine. In itself improving the efficiency of the administration of the welfare system is fine. However the Green Party would find this legislation a whole lot more palatable were it accompanied at the same time by legislation and other policy measures that improved the welfare system. For example we would find it heaps easier to support these changes if the Government was to reintroduce a third-tier discretionary allowance like the old special benefit so that people on very low incomes who just cannot make ends meet have a final safety net. With the introduction of temporary additional support several years ago that safety net for our most vulnerable people has been lost. 
The Government should be doing more to ensure that people who apply for benefits receive their full entitlements from the time that they are eligible for them and that front-line staff at all offices are trained to understand it is not their money they are giving away but is actually income support to which citizens of this country are legally entitled. People like the sole parents of young children and invalids beneficiaries should not be subject to constant harassment by the State to get off the benefit by any means possible. Above all benefits should be restored to their pre-1991 levels. On Tuesday benefit rates went up just slightly in line with CPI increases but it was by nowhere near enough to match true rises in the real cost of living or to recover what was lost in 1991. 
On top of that as the Wellington People’s Centre pointed out the accommodation supplement which many beneficiaries rely on to help with their housing costs will drop for almost everyone who receives it as a result of the benefit rate increases. For those who are on income-related rents their rents will increase because of their increased income—and they are not eligible for the accommodation supplement at all. The Wellington People’s Centre considers that the real increase in benefit rates on Tuesday was around 1.5 percent to 2 percent for many beneficiaries. That is a very far cry from what is really needed at a time when the costs of transport housing heating and food are going through the roof. Many beneficiaries are sinking further and further into debt just to survive. One might consider the introduction of online Lotto gambling where one has to use a credit card—debt—in order to gamble as an example of this Government’s ridiculous policies on managing and assisting low-income people to get out of the poverty trap. However I digress. 
Beneficiaries and prisoners and their families continue to be disproportionately Maori. All this matters in relation to the collection of small bills we are discussing today because the Government’s legislative efforts are symbolic of its priorities. If legislation such as that put forward today was linked to any or all of those other measures or to some of the many other positive reforms that could and should be made to our welfare system then the Green Party would have a very different attitude. But what we see is the Government being focused on making sure that the very last dollar is extracted from the maximum number of beneficiaries accident compensation recipients and students while completely failing to extend any generosity or respect from the State in the opposite direction to them. 
All of that is at the macro level. At the micro level we still have other concerns about the impact of this legislation and what it will do to those most affected by it who are very vulnerable people: prisoners and their families. When the Social Services Committee discussed that the main concern of one of my colleagues Sue Bradford and of other committee members was the fact that it is often not just a prisoner who is affected by the immediate loss of his or her benefit but is also the prisoner’s partner and children who are affected as well. 
Although the committee received assurances from officials that families would receive plenty of notice of any benefit suspension or cut-off the Greens are not reassured on this point being far too aware that the benefit system in practice is very different from the benefit system in theory. Often mistakes are made by either Work and Income or beneficiaries or by both. Sometimes benefits are cut when they should not be; sometimes there are time delays in getting benefits put back on. At the moment the fact that there is a 9-day period before a benefit is suspended as currently permitted under section 103 of the Privacy Act means that there is some albeit small protection for affected individuals and their families. But that buffer will no longer exist once this legislation goes through. 
On balance the ill that this legislation seeks to correct—the issue of prisoner overpayments—is potentially less damaging than the very serious risk of the dependants of prisoners their families their partners and their children finding themselves suddenly without any income or of innocent people having their benefit cut because of errors in data matching. For all those reasons the Green Party has withdrawn its support for these bills. We look forward to the day when we can stand in this House and vote for some progressive and forward-thinking welfare legislation rather than for yet another bill with the primary purpose of further refining the level of State interference and harassment in beneficiaries’ lives.