Bradford Sue: Families Commission Bill — Third Reading 
Bradford Sue: Families Commission Bill — Third Reading 
[Volume:614;Page:10690] 
SUE BRADFORD (Green) 
: 
 As anyone who has been following this debate will know by now the Green Party is completely opposed to the establishment of the Families Commission. We believe that it simply represents an unnecessary duplication of the work already being done both by a number of community sector agencies and by the Ministry of Social Development. It is also a waste of the $28 million over 4 years that has been allocated to it. That money could be spent far more productively on supporting the community organisations that carry out the same kinds of functions as will the Families Commission. Part of that money could also be put with good effect into providing adequate resources for existing bodies like the office of the Children’s Commissioner which is severely underfunded at around $1.7 million a year and has only 12 staff despite the critical work it attempts to carry out for New Zealand’s children. 
The Families Commission is purely and simply a creation of political expediency—the result of a post-election deal between Labour and United Future. There is nothing inherently wrong with such deals and I would be the first to acknowledge that they are likely to always be an integral part of MMP parliaments. However it seems a pity that at a time when many children and families live in daily poverty and barely survive from one crisis to the next we should as a result of electoral expediency be committing resources to something of such nebulous value. There was no public outcry for a Families Commission prior to the rise of Peter Dunne and the “worm” in the 2002 election campaign. It was not something that community organisations were ever organising around. The church and community groups that I worked with around the country in the late 1990s were and still are on the whole much more interested in whether they have enough funding to survive the next 3 months so that they can continue to provide services for children and families than they are in the establishment of a Government commission to carry out more research into the New Zealand family. Those groups already know a lot about the realities of life right now for parents and children and for wider whanau—after all they work with families every day. 
A lot of research has already been done and continues to be done into the true situation for families in all sorts of difficult circumstances that result from 20 years of structural unemployment low wages low benefit payments and an ever-widening gap between rich and poor. Research or no research groups like the People’s Centre Homebuilders the Waipareira Trust the Downtown Community Ministry (Wellington) Inc and many others know what is going on with families a whole lot better than most of the MPs sitting in this House and better than most of the public servants busily analysing policy in their Wellington offices. We do not need to have a whole lot more research and analysis or between three and seven family commissioners to help to direct research operations. What we do need is a Government that is prepared to read the reports listen to people understand the results of the research that has already been done—including research from the Ministry of Social Development itself—and then to take action on the recommendations from all that plethora of research. What families need is action and solutions not more paralysis by analysis. What families need is a Government that is prepared to take the drastic step of committing more of its annual budget to measures designed to bring families out of poverty rather than to continue to give national priority to channelling billions of dollars into Budget surpluses debt repayment and the Superannuation Fund. 
I can hear supporters of the Families Commission respond that its core functions include far more than research—and that is quite true. The commission’s functions also encompass things like acting as an advocate for families generally encouraging informed debate on matters relating to the interests of families increasing public awareness of matters relating to the interests of families—such as the importance of parenting—and facilitating the development of Government policies that serve families. All of that is well and good and there is nothing wrong with any of it. But surely all of that is already being done by a diversity of organisations and various parts of the public service. 
Organisations ranging from the Plunket Society and Parentline through to Unicef New Zealand and Barnardos New Zealand and literally hundreds if not thousands of others advocate constantly and well—in their local communities and nationally—in the interests of New Zealand’s parents families and children. The Child Poverty Action Group and a range of associated individuals and organisations continue to do an amazing job on very limited resources of researching and championing the needs of the nearly one-third of the country’s children who still live in poverty. The Children’s Commissioner has just had a whole new bill passed in this House to strengthen the functions and powers of that office—with a particular commitment to working with the Government to enact the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child—without the funding increase that office needs in order to really get moving. The New Zealand Council of Christian Social Services—which represents the social services of the Anglican Baptist Catholic Presbyterian and Methodist churches and the Salvation Army—continues not only to offer hands-on assistance for families and children from over 550 locations around the country but also to carry out research and make policy recommendations in the interests of families and children. 
Just to take the work of the New Zealand Council of Christian Social Services as one particular example it would be far more useful if the Government were to spend $28 million on implementing even some of the specific recommendations from its latest report issued a couple of weeks ago on preventing the cycle of debt than on establishing the Families Commission. That report uses a literature survey and case studies to highlight the growing impact of debt on low-income families both in and out of work. It identifies key issues that are causing the debt crisis to escalate and provides a whole series of recommendations through which this or any Government could begin to address the problems. 
Those suggestions are wide ranging and include among them raising the minimum wage to $10 an hour calling for a public campaign to inform low-wage workers of the income support entitlements that are available to them an increase in childcare availability and a lowering of childcare costs investigating ways of providing casual workers with certainty of income setting benefits at levels adequate to ensure a decent quality of life extending the child tax credit to all families and amalgamating it with family support adjusting all family assistance payments to account for past inflation and indexing them for further inflation ensuring that all those who are eligible for benefits receive their full and correct entitlements allowing Work and Income the discretion to waive or reduce stand-downs in cases of hardship and more discretion in granting non-recoverable assistance increasing the investment in State housing and in third sector housing initiatives investigating and implementing ways in which the Government can stop being the driver of unsustainable debt investigating and implementing ways in which the Government can do more to help and protect people who are excluded from mainstream credit looking at methods of improving the financial literacy of ordinary people and much much more. 
I present this long list—in itself just a partial one—because I think it is time that MPs political parties and the public service woke up to the fact that there is already an enormous amount of knowledge experience and passion out there in our communities geared towards advocating for and solving the problems that confront New Zealand families today. I have used only one example here of a report with recommendations that has been carried out on one particular aspect of family life: families struggling with low incomes and debt. There are of course many other areas of activity around families from domestic violence and abuse through to parenting problems and solutions and from mental illness and its impact on children and families through to the special needs of families whose members have major physical or intellectual impairments—and many more. My point is that in each of those sectors there already exists a multiplicity of organisations with their own in-depth specialisation research and knowledge. In every case I am sure that one could quickly find any number of well-thought-out and useful recommendations for action that any Government could pick up on without having to go through the extra expense and bureaucracy of establishing a Families Commission as an extra layer on top of all the other work that is already happening. 
If Labour and United Future are really serious about supporting families I hope that over the coming year and a half they will do everything they can alongside relevant Government departments to pick up on the recommendations I have just outlined and others that are coming out of different parts of the community and voluntary sector. I also hope that they will consider supporting my member’s bill next year to establish a universal child benefit as a signal that they are genuine in their desire to do something a lot more real for the families of this country than this Families Commission can ever hope to offer.