Prasad Rajen: New Zealand Public Health and Disability Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumePrasad Rajen: New Zealand Public Health and Disability Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 16 May 2013. Volume:690;Page:10183. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr RAJEN PRASAD (Labour): Namaste Mr Chairperson. This clause 4 of the New Zealand Public Health and Disability Amendment Bill (No 2) is really where most of the substantive provisions are and there is lots of space for argument and—Sue Moroney: Debate.Dr RAJEN PRASAD: —debate and indeed for change. Of course I am always reminding myself that this in effect is the select committee process. So again we expect members opposite to get up and explain—to get up and explain—why they take this particular view and the Minister in the chair to take calls and answer questions. So far we have had nothing—absolutely nothing—which is a travesty.We know that the Government has brought this bill before the House because of the Human Rights Tribunal decision. That is the only driving force. There is no principled position that the Government has taken—certainly none that it has explained—as to why this is important and why this Parliament should consider this bill with these provisions at this time in this way. It is clearly borne out of necessity sandwiched in the middle of a post-Budget parliamentary session in urgency and that says something about the principles that members opposite and this Government take towards how they treat this particular area and indeed this House.The fact is as the provisions of new Part 4A in clause 4 show that it is a complex area and the problems are complex. But this House is quite smart. We have lovely select committee processes. We have very good advisers we have very good officials and Parliament has very good legal advisers as well and they are able to help us work through what it is. This problem has been over 20 years in the making members opposite have been reminding us. They might say that Labour did nothing in 9 years but for 11 of those 20 years they have been in power and they have done nothing as well. I am not crowing about that but the fact is that that demonstrates only the complexity of the problem. The real issue is that the time has come to solve this problem and this Government’s process to do that is flawed as I have been arguing. The provisions under Part 4A are flawed because they have not had the advantage of a full and open debate. Indeed we have not even had the advantage of seeing the regulatory impact statement unredacted—as written. Parliament ought to have the right to see the regulatory impact statement in its entirety but that does not happen under this Government because it does not care about the democratic process so we cannot fully debate it.Let us go to section 70A(1). Here we have probably the most important principle that is identified and written out. As I said earlier in my reading this is the first time it has been stated in this way. I may be wrong but I said this to the Minister of Health when debating an earlier part of this bill. He did not take a call to say I was wrong so I simply take that to be the case. Members opposite may have a different view or some other information. If they do I would ask them to share it with us. But the principle in section 70A(1) says: “in the context of the funding of support services families generally have primary responsibility for the well-being of their family members.” That is the principle. That is stated so boldly and it is almost glib to mention it. When I practised as a practitioner in the field in the early years there was a principle like this that every conservative held and whenever you tried to do something as a practitioner that required State support for the most vulnerable this is the principle that they would chuck out. We would fight with head office in those days case after case where sensible decisions could not be made about very vulnerable families because somebody in Wellington had adopted this principle and said: “No the State cannot be helping people like this because it is the families’ responsibility.”But when a Government as it does in this particular bill takes the responsibility of writing that in a clause—in section 70A(1)—then it has the express responsibility to explain what it is what it actually means and it is not explained. And what is the context? How is anybody to interpret this? These things get interpreted by lawyers and judges in all kinds of ways. So what is the guidance that this debate is giving to anybody in the future who might look atHansardto see what Parliament intended to do with this particular provision? There is no explanation. There is no context. There are no caveats—