Logie Jan: Social Security (Youth Support and Work Focus) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Logie Jan: Social Security (Youth Support and Work Focus) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 17 July 2012. Volume:681;Page:3605. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
JAN LOGIE (Green) 
: 
 I would like to take this call now to speak a little bit more to my Supplementary Order Paper 78 and to address a few other comments that I did not get to last time. To start with I would like to just talk a bit more about community development and some of my concerns around the contracting out of these services. I absolutely support the Minister for Social Development’s vision of this of providing a mediator for young people between young people and Work and Income because of the stories that we hear of a lot of people in Work and Income: of refugees talking about coming out with their heads burning feeling as if they are right back in the trauma that they have left in other countries and of women leaving violent relationships describing their experiences in Work and Income as quite similar to the abuse they have experienced in their relationship. That is not an environment we want our young people to be trying to negotiate. However the alternative of having community organisations provide this service is undermining the essential role of NGOs and community organisations which is to look at what the community need is and to develop responses to help from that community base. Community organisations are not there and community development does not work when those community organisations are used as arms of the State. That fundamentally changes our democratic system and our ways of working. This system undermines what we know works and that is a real concern. Also I absolutely acknowledge the Minister’s intent and that sense of helping and being alongside young people. I do find that— 
Mike Sabin 
: Group hug. 
JAN LOGIE 
: It has felt like that sometimes. But I do think it is quite strange when the Minister has said that she finds that promotion of job creation is kind of a form of beneficiary bashing—in response to the leader of the Mana Party’s media—and in her words is belittling for people who are trying to do their best. To me that is a really strange world when job creation is seen as belittling but taking over control of somebody’s finances is not. That is a pretty strange world to me and I am sure the young people in Otorohanga would not agree with the Minister. 
So now to talk a little bit more to my Supplementary Order Paper about the training incentive allowance. Again I am disappointed to be honest. The Minister knows the benefit of university education—alongside our co-leader Metiria Turei and many other women—and knows that real benefit of getting a university education to get off the DPB and look after your kids. So I am really sad that the concept of an investment approach to welfare does not extend to the investment that they got. 
Mike Sabin 
: Well it’s investment not lifestyle. 
JAN LOGIE 
: It is wanting the best for their children. And in response to that member’s comment about it being a lifestyle I would just like to bring back into the Chamber the story of a woman whom I worked with earlier this year—a young mother with two beautiful children who discovered that the only way she could cover the costs of higher study was by doing escort work. This young woman left school with School Certificate and had been working pretty much all the way since then on stud farms but when she got pregnant and went back to work she found that she was $60 a week worse off after travel and childcare costs were factored in. So being highly motivated to build a better life for herself she found a course—a higher-level course—that would enable her to get a better-paid job in the long term so that she would not have to keep going on and off benefit which the Government has acknowledged is a real pattern. But sadly that course was a level 6 course and—