Logie Jan: Support for Children in Hardship Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLogie Jan: Support for Children in Hardship Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 01 December 2015. Volume:710;Page:8418. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAN LOGIE (Green): I rise to take a call on this bill on Part 3 and look at the changes to the family tax credit. In my contribution I would like to draw heavily from the submission from Susan St John and the Child Poverty Action Group which was supported by other submitters at least in part. She pointed out that this aspect of the bill was where the Government decided to increase the discriminatory aspects of Working for Families. We have already had a case that the Child Poverty Action Group took to the Court of Appeal that established that Working for Families has elements that are discriminatory—discriminatory against children whose parents are out of the paid workforce.This bill increases that discrimination because the aspects of Working for Families that are available to children whose parents are not in work have not been touched in this aspect of the bill. So what it does is it provides an extra $12.50 not to all poor children but only to those whose parents are in 20-plus hours of paid work a week. It will increase their income from $60 to $72.50 which is just an inflation adjustment in actual fact she told us. So although the Government is telling us that here it is targeting its support and helping these families out this is an inflation adjustment. This is the extent of this Government’s support for struggling working families and child poverty.So this minimum family tax credit will apply to only 3500 families which is hardly a significant number when we are looking at the scale of child poverty in this country. I really do think that it needs to be pointed out that Jonathan Boston did say that it may—and that is underlined “may”—have a positive impact on child-income poverty rates and deprivation rates but the impact is likely to be very marginal and again that is underlined. So that is a problem. This is doing nothing really to address the absolute real tragedy that is going on in our country at the moment.But there is a part of this that I think galls me even more and made it very difficult for me in terms of our vote. It is that the Government is taking from poor families to be able to deliver this inflation adjustment. The Child Poverty Action Group was saying that by its calculations a family earning the minimum wage and working 60 hours a week on $46000 a year is about to be $2225 a year worse off in real terms as a result of these provisions. So here we are giving $12.50 a week extra to children who have parents who are working entrenching inequality and discrimination and giving just a small amount of help and that money is being taken from families who are also struggling. To me that is actually just unconscionable. It does not make sense in terms of ensuring everyone in our society is able to participate.I think also if you look at the wider perspective in terms of New Zealand’s support for Working for Families which is supposedly a large part of this Government’s policy intent—to get people into work you need to recognise that there was a 2011 OECD report that found that New Zealand’s childcare subsidies are the most tightly targeted towards low-income families of all the 30 developed nations and that we have no tax-free threshold for low-income earners. And that 2012 OECD report found that a Kiwi couple with two kids aged 2 and 3 where one parent earned the average wage and the other earned two-thirds of the average wage would lose 97.9c out of every extra dollar from the second earner’s wage via a combination of childcare costs reduced tax credits—which are being changed in this bill—subsidies and higher taxes excluding petrol and other costs. Effectively taking in the other costs of work that person is working for less than nothing.This is a Government whose policies supposedly support paid employment. This is the worst outcome for any of the 34 countries listed and is compared with an OECD average of 57c in the dollar. Did you get that? It is 97.9c in the dollar compared with the OECD average of 57c in the dollar. That is this Government’s approach to supporting our families. Rather than the Government focusing on making that better supporting these families and rewarding work where it is appropriate and making sure that we have a strong safety net it has actually made things worse. The Working for Families tax credit used to be indexed to the Consumers Price Index but since the law change was made in 2011 families have had to wait until inflation reaches 5 percent before there is an increase to their Working for Families payment. This has already saved the Government it is estimated over $1.1 billion. My understanding is that that is significantly more than the cost of this entire child hardship package.So when the Government is telling us that it cares about child poverty and it cares about the fact that there are children in this country without shoes without three meals a day without a bed of their own and without the family being able to buy them presents on their birthday and that there are children who are worried and excluded at school and who cannot afford to go on school trips or attend any events—when the Government tells us that it cares about that actually we need to look at what it is prioritising. If this bill is its main initiative and it is spending less on it that it has saved in the changes to Working for Families then I have got to say that I am struggling to find that credible. I really am very clear that this is not delivering on what New Zealanders have told us they want for their children.The outpouring of grief as I think you could describe it from New Zealanders in response to the campaigns around child poverty and even feeding children school lunches—which would not have been very expensive either but which somehow this Government could not bring itself to support—has been clear. New Zealanders want a society where every single child has the opportunities to succeed in life. This bill is not delivering that. This bill—The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Come back to Part 3—back to Part 3.JAN LOGIE: —is ensuring that those barriers are kept in front of our children. It is preventing many from succeeding and sadly it is entrenching inequality and discrimination which is not justified by any means from my perspective.