Moroney Sue: Vulnerable Children Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMoroney Sue: Vulnerable Children Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 14 May 2014. Volume:698;Page:17893. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]SUE MORONEY (Labour): I thank the Minister for Social Development for her contribution. I also want to make a contribution on the title of this Act as it is called the Vulnerable Children—sorry; the bill which will become an Act as it is called the Vulnerable Children Bill. When it becomes an Act I think that my only real reservation about the title is that I think it gives an impression that it deals with many more issues than it does.I am going to come back to where we really started on this debate. I know that it drew an angry response from the Minister at the time but it also was the view not just of the Labour Party but of most of the organisations that actually took part in the consultation over the White Paper for Vulnerable Children and then the green paper—I think it was the other way round: the green paper and then the white paper—and that was the very strongly held view that if we are really going to get to the bottom of this issue we do need to recognise that children living in poverty is an issue that makes children vulnerable. So to have a Vulnerable Children Bill and action plan for children that does not recognise that at all seemed to a lot of the people involved in the consultation on the action plan and all those processes—and it seems to the New Zealand Labour Party—to be denying that a significant issue exists.So I guess that although we see that there is progress on dealing with a group of children who are vulnerable there are—I do not even know how many—thousands or hundreds of thousands probably of children who are vulnerable and whose needs are not addressed at all by this bill and will not be addressed when it becomes an Act.What I want to say to the Government is that on at least three occasions today in question time I saw representatives of the Government deny that poverty exists in this country. If that continues then we will see a growing number of vulnerable children in our country because unless the Government fronts up to that issue recognises that it exists and deals with the causes of it then we will not get to the bottom of these problems.We may start to feel OK about ourselves for passing a bill like this one tonight that deals with some of the issues—and it does deal with some of the issues—but let us not kid ourselves. I think that the Minister just said that it might deal with 25 percent of it. I would suggest that it is a great deal less than that actually because we are not recognising the breadth of the issue and the vulnerability of children who live in poverty in this country. However I am ashamed to say that it exists in this country because it ought not to—it absolutely ought not to.Think about the resources of this country. We are actually a wealthy country. We are a food-producing country for goodness’ sake! We are a food-producing nation. We have children in our country who go to school hungry. They go to school hungry and they find it difficult to learn because of that. That is a disgrace Minister. That is adisgrace in this country. We ought not to have that problem. We do have the problem and the Government—