Cunliffe David: Support for Children in Hardship Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeCunliffe David: Support for Children in Hardship Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 01 December 2015. Volume:710;Page:8409. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE (Labour—New Lynn): It is a pleasure to take a call in this Committee stage of the Support for Children in Hardship Bill. I have got a couple of points to make on this small part Part 2. The first is one of construction and drafting and the second is a general point about Part 2’s interface with student support in tertiary education.Firstly it is a common feature of this debate that the Government’s moves here have been designed to give the impression of relief from poverty rather than necessarily being the best-designed actual impact. When we review the drafting of clause 12 in Part 2 we see partly how this smoke and mirrors is constructed. If I read from subclause (1) which inserts after section 303(3B) a new subsection (3BA)—and people at home may have an interesting time trying to follow this—this relates to beneficiaries who are on a student allowance. It is designed to transfer the $25-a-week increase to their allowances and to avoid double-counting which you might say is a reasonable aim. But the way this is drafted is just—arcane would be the nicest way to put it.It says: “Despite subsection (3B) if any rate of student allowance is increased on 1 April 2016 by regulations (regulations A) not being the regulations required to be made under subsection (3B) that come into force on 1 April 2016 [which of course are] (regulations B) then—(a) regulations A come into force immediately before regulations B; and (b) the adjustment to the rate of the allowance required to be made by regulations B is to the rate as at 31 March 2016; and (c) the amount by which the rate of allowance is increased by regulations A is added to the adjustment made by regulations B.” I am sure everyone at home has followed that—it is complete gobbledegook.It may be logically and semantically correct in that it does partition the time periods and applies the increase but my goodness me if this was a Government committed to plain English drafting and transparent policy it has got to fail that test unless everybody has got a PhD in legal semantics. But of course that belies the broader point which is that this is a bill that in the same spirit of obfuscation gives and takes away at the same time. It ostensibly gives $25 a week but as our colleague Jacinda Ardern has rightly said it would have been better to put that just straight into the base rate. As my colleague Sue Moroney has said the net impact on poverty reduction is actually minuscule and therefore this is a fairly expensive glossy public relations piece but does nothing much to achieve its aim.But I want to draw out the implication for tertiary education because of course this applies to solo parents struggling—as I think we would all commend them for—to get a qualification so that they can get a job and get off the benefit. The fact is that some 90 percent of children who are in severe hardship are in solo parent families—single income families and often beneficiaries. That is just the reality. We all know that costs for solo families are harder to afford. You have got only one income earner but most of the same costs such as the roof over your head the groceries—kids eat a lot—school fees uniforms project costs you name it. Now of course you really need a computer to take to school. So those costs seem to be going up and up and up and parents are finding it harder and harder and harder. So that is one thing.The second thing is that in terms of this application in Part 2 to part-time students there are going to be more people in that category because we all know in terms of the future of work as has been studied by Labour’s Future of Work Commission that jobs are changing. We are not going to see people with one career for the whole of their lives. We are going to see people with five 10 15 different jobs just because the nature of the job market is changing. This is not to mention the fact that solo parents are often casualised vulnerable in part-time employment with no protection from employment rights. The law changes under this Government have made that so much worse. Solo parents have become so much more vulnerable.What is the Government’s answer to that problem? Well it is right here—it is right here. You get the twenty-five bucks a week but the solo parent now has to go to work when the youngest child turns 3 not 5—3 not 5.