Sio William: Social Security (Youth Support and Work Focus) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Sio William: Social Security (Youth Support and Work Focus) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 17 July 2012. Volume:681;Page:3603. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Su’a WILLIAM SIO (Labour—Mangere) 
: 
 I wanted to say just in response to Mr Alfred Ngaro earlier that I thought maybe he had been listening to Peseta Sam Lotu-Iiga for too long but the more he spoke the more I recognised that the arrogance oozes naturally from him. I would just remind him of the old Maori saying that a kumara does not tell the vegetable patch how sweet he is because eventually the kumara dies and stinks. 
The reality is that I think it is good that the Minister in the chair the Minister for Social Development is attempting now to articulate some of the concerns that we have raised but there are more questions that need to be answered. I thought that the Minister was taking this bill the Social Security (Youth Support and Work Focus) Amendment Bill quite seriously but the members on the backbenches on the other side do not seem to be when you consider the bullying tactics and the personal attacks that they have heaped on us. 
If you consider clause 4 on the purpose of this legislation it is “to provide services to encourage and help young persons to move to education training and employment rather than to receiving financial support”. Let us consider that. Let us consider exactly how the Government intends to do that and ask the Minister how many of the young people whom she has identified are going to end up with a qualification at 17 years of age. How many of the young people she is targeting will at age 18 end up in a job? I asked the officials as to what happens when these young people reach the age of 18. The expectation of the officials was that they all get into jobs. At 18 years of age these young people will get into jobs. Well if you look at the purpose and if you were— 
The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch) 
: Order! 
Su’a WILLIAM SIO 
: —if I were to take the word “encourage” as a code for “coerce and bully people into jobs”—my colleague Jacinda Ardern was kinder. She said this is work testing but with a specific focus on 16 and 17-year-olds and the second focus being on sole parents. Sole parents are going to be tested. Young people of 16 and 17 are supposedly going to get jobs. But this bill fails to consider what jobs are available. It fails to consider the childcare costs that sole parents have to consider and it fails to consider whether a person has the skills necessary for the jobs that might be available. That is what this bill fails to address. So much for the work focus! All this bill will do as articulated by the Minister and the members there is to—in my words—bully and coerce people into jobs and sanction them if they do not do what the Government department is going to coerce them into. 
I want to remind the members on the other side of the Chamber who sat through the select committee that the Salvation Army which does work throughout this country and is probably the most experienced in dealing with social issues throughout the country—it has 45 units—has said that if this bill is an amendment to the Social Security Act 1964 the aim of the bill is inconsistent with the main Social Security Act 1964. Let me read for the benefit of the members on the other side what the Social Security Act’s purpose is: “(a) to enable the provision of financial and other support as appropriate—(i) to help people to support themselves and their dependants while not in paid employment; and (ii) to help people to find or retain paid employment; and (iii) to help people for whom work may not currently be appropriate because of sickness injury disability or caring responsibilities to support themselves and their dependants: (b) to enable in certain circumstances the provision of financial support to people to help alleviate hardship: (c) to ensure that the financial support referred to in paragraphs (a) and (b) is provided to people taking into account—(i) that where appropriate they should use the resources available to them before seeking financial support under this Act; and (ii) any financial support that they are eligible for or already receive otherwise than under this Act from publicly funded sources:”. The Salvation Army submitted that this bill here is so far away and detached from the original purpose of the Social Security Act that it does not deliver what the main Social Security Act was set up to do or as I have reiterated the main purposes. None of that is in this amendment bill set up by this particular Government. 
I want to reiterate some figures for the other side. My colleague David Clark has already said them but I think they are important. Let us ask the Minister to table now the exact numbers of people whom she intends to be able to support as a result of this bill. Between January 2009 and January 2012 the number of people on the DPB rose by 13.2 percent but between January 2009 and January of this year the number of people on the unemployment benefit rose by 82 percent. The Government seems to be clamping down on people on the domestic purposes benefit—mums in particular. One cannot help but consider that this Government is just trying to show us that it is acting when in actual fact it is not acting on the real issue which is job provision: the creation of jobs ensuring that there are jobs that young people can go into and ensuring that the opportunities of quality education are provided—as the bill originally states. 
I want to say that in 2009 a paper from the Inland Revenue Department found that among sole parents 67 percent of those available for work had problems getting work that paid enough 66 percent could not find work for enough hours for it to be worthwhile and 64 percent did not have the skills employers wanted. What is this Government going to do about that? What does this bill indicate it will deliver for those sole parents in terms of skill development and in terms of the jobs that these sole mums are looking for? No sole mum wants to be on the benefit. Every single sole mum that I have come across wants to be able to provide a high-quality standard of living for their children and for their family. Childcare arrangements are getting harder with the high cost of private care and long waiting times. All of that has happened under this particular Government. 
Despite the Minister’s adamant assertions that her Future Focus reforms have been working there are more people on the DPB now than there were prior to the reforms. It is expected that by 2017 we will have a significantly increased number of people on the unemployment benefit and on the series of benefits that this Minister and this Government seem to want to reduce. It is a fact that when jobs and opportunities for work are available it reduces the dependence on our welfare system. We saw that when Labour was in Government between 1999 and 2008. There was a significant reduction in the number of people on welfare benefits across the board. Why? Because there were jobs and people had incomes where they could earn a living and be able to hold their work up. 
But as I said so much for the aspiration that this Government has talked about. The only thing that I know is that the people on the ground who are struggling to make ends meet who aspire to opportunities and who aspire to better living standards for their family are leaving our shores because of the lack of activity from this Government to address the real issues. The point I have made is that despite the focus on work all that this bill does is work test coerce and bully people into jobs that do not yet exist for the kinds of skills that many young people are seeking. If the Government was serious about this it would address firstly the job availability. It would address childcare needs that sole parents have—