Lole-Taylor Asenati: Vulnerable Children Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLole-Taylor Asenati: Vulnerable Children Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 14 May 2014. Volume:698;Page:17886. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Le’aufa’amulia ASENATI LOLE-TAYLOR (NZ First): Fa‘afetai lavaMr Chair. I am going to take a very brief call on Part 3 of the Vulnerable Children Bill. I know that last night when we talked about Part 1 and Part 2 I felt that there were very important contributing factors to Part 3 when it comes to the caregivers and permanent guardians or special guardians for children. I am going to take a bit of a different approach to this. There are three areas that I really want to look at. One is the situation of social workers engaged by Child Youth and Family. The other one is cultural identity as in section 5 amended by clause 102 of this bill and also the suitable placing of children who are often in a situation of vulnerability or risk.You see there is a young man aged 14 in Whangarei who fell through the cracks of the current legislation and I am talking about New Zealand’s current legislation. This young man of 14 years of age stopped going to school. The mother had lost control in terms of guiding him in the right direction and the grandmother had also tried reallyhard and was not able to provide this child with the right approach in order for him to get back on the right path. Both the mother and the grandmother had been trying to seek help both from Child Youth and Family and also from the police. I was called to go all the way up to Whangarei to try to attend to this poor family. What I discovered was that this young man started having his problems from the age of 6. He experienced the issue from the age of 6. The young boy was faced with challenges and there was no way of knowing what the challenges were. One would hope that this bill will address situations where the mother and grandmother can identify and pick up what those issues would be at that age.The influence of negative behaviour aggressiveness and violence became obvious at that time and it was at the age of 7½ to 8 that this child’s name became a regular name in the police records. Often the police would pick him up. It also started when the police actually advised the mother and the grandmother that perhaps the child should be moved out of the family because he would no longer listen to his mother and grandmother. The sad thing in this situation is that both the mother and grandmother are loving people. They really care about this 14-year-old boy. The 14-year-old boy at the same time was actually manipulated by other people. These other people were very heavily involved in drugs and were heavily manipulated by outside influences to serve their own needs. The system in New Zealand had actually failed to provide a safety net for people like this 14-year-old and also his parents. The education of this particular child had actually suffered. Education in New Zealand should be made available to every young child in New Zealand yet this was one child whose own school in Whangarei could not bear to see coming to school because of the issues that the child created in order to be seen to be the man in the school environment.When I look at Part 3 of this bill the part that talks about the responsibility of Child Youth and Family and also the engagement of the social worker it is one area that I would like to put a very strong emphasis on. That is it is all very well for us to appoint and engage so many social workers put a lot of money into them and have to look at them as an investment and I accept that there is a need for that to happen but there is another fundamental part to this and that is the specialised area where it deals with—and I am really using that word “specialised”—cultural perspective. It is not—