Logie Jan; Williams PotoJAN LOGIE (Green): Thank you Madam Chair. I just rise to take a relatively short call. It does feel as if quite a few of the concerns that are being raised from the Opposition are being repeated and it's a concern I've heard from the community—understanding around the qualifications and whether the scopes of practice will be limiting or not. Personally sitting here and listening I have had the conversations with the Minister for Social Development. This is an area that I do think deserves scrutiny. I have heard responses from the Minister though that don't seem to me to have been acknowledged by the repeated speakers. The point has been made that the legislation doesn't introduce these scopes of practice. It's an enabling piece of legislation to enable the community—the profession—to develop that scope because they are best placed to do that. Rather than having the Government and legislation directly putting down where those lines are it really needs to be owned by the profession and this legislation creates the opportunity for that. The development of this was through the Social Work Alliance which was the representation of the key range of organisations. We've heard some agencies mentioned in terms of the Māori perspective around the Council of Christian Social Services both of whose representative bodies were participating in the process of developing this Supplementary Order Paper 187 to be able to hand the power over to the profession. I think it's also important to remember that the initial call for registration—it's a very very long history that's brought us to this place. The legislation that was brought in by the last Government that introduced the possibility of registration was welcomed but deep concerns were raised about the lack of scope of practice and that might have meant that employers could actually just change the job title to be able to pay people less. We wouldn't have got the professional oversight or the ownership of the profession from the profession itself and actually we'd drive down the wages and conditions of an already I would argue significantly underpaid workforce that does an incredibly difficult job. So another issue that has been raised has been around qualifications and why it does not say what the prescribed qualifications are. My understanding of this legislation—and I leave it open to the Minister to correct me around this—is that this futureproofs this and the initial intent and understanding is that the profession will develop a very broad scope of practice that will basically provide the parameters of what it is to be a social worker in Aotearoa today in the broader sense and that over time this legislation enables the possibility of specialist social work scopes of practice to be developed and there may not yet be the qualifications in existence that match to that. So if we wanted as a country to develop a specific family violence qualification within our tertiary sector this legislation enables a specialist scope of practice that would have that as the prescribed qualification for that scope of practice. But it doesn't exist at the moment so you can't put it in legislation. So it gives us the flexibility to futureproof it. But I would also say for people that my understanding and the question that I've asked is again essentially that the control remains in the hands of the Social Workers Registration Board—so that is the profession. Questions have been raised about why that's Government-appointed and I do think the Greens will be watching that really carefully in terms of ensuring professional ownership. But there is also the level of parliamentary scrutiny over the registration board that there isn't of other kinds of professional bodies. So that's another avenue for the profession to come to us and to ask us to ask the questions to provide that scrutiny to ensure that the ownership and the intent are delivered. CHAIRPERSON (Poto Williams): Let's have Dan Bidois but just before we do that I can inform members that Parliament TV has resumed its normal transmission.