Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Thank you Madam Chair. I have to commend the Prime Minister—or at least in this case the Minister for Child Poverty Reduction—for bringing this bill to the House and making child poverty a priority in the way that she has. It is an enormous shame that we live in one of the wealthiest societies in human history and yet we still find ourselves with stories every day of children brought into this world who do not have adequate clothing housing often dignity access to education shoes and children who are admitted for dental surgery—not just a trip to the dental nurse we're all used to but surgery—to have the stumps of their rotten teeth removed because they have been subsisting on a diet of Coke and Sprite. That is one of the most extraordinary things about New Zealand in 2018.I want to commend the Minister for bringing a bill that I'd describe as measurement legislation"—legislation that measures how we're doing. It doesn't force Governments to do any particular thing; it just allows the public to see how the Government's doing. We have great examples of that which passed through this House: the Public Finance (Fiscal Responsibility) Act almost completely put an end to deficits when Governments had to open the books before each election—funny that. The Reserve Bank of New Zealand Act has stopped Governments flooding the country with cheap money before each election because it required Governments to put their inflation expectations in writing.So child poverty is important and putting in place infrastructure as the Minister called it or "measurement legislation" as I would call it is a powerful tool for changing the outcomes that New Zealanders get—so far so good. But I thought when I read through the bill that it has within it the danger of being a monumental own goal because with the exception of the hardship measures it is overwhelmingly focused on income. It's not a direct measure of all those questions that you might ask about shoes and food and clothes and physical safety and access to education and housing and the things that actually give kids a future. It is overwhelmingly focused on the questions of what proportion of kids live in a household that has more or less than 40 or 50 or 60 percent of the median household income. That's a real problem for a couple of reasons. One is that it doesn't actually capture the real question of how kids are being looked after. Are the kids all right—this is not captured by this particular bill for the most part.Secondly it introduces perverse incentives. If we agree that this infrastructure or management legislation is designed to change the behaviour of Governments in the future—just like the Public Finance (Fiscal Responsibility) Act just like the Reserve Bank of New Zealand Act—then what's going to be the effect of this legislation on future Governments? Let's say that the Minister in the chair Jacinda Ardern gets her wish and it is taken seriously by Governments of all stripes well into the future. What will happen is this: for the most part under this bill future Governments will be able to absolve themselves of responsibility and claim to have solved all the problems of child poverty if only they tax and spend more. If only they tax people at or above the median income and redistribute it to people in the lower half of the income distribution the gap closes the percentage of children in poverty under the measures in this bill reduces and the Government can say that it's substantially reduced the problem under the measures in this bill.Of course we know that there are households with very high incomes with very delinquent activity and behaviour and we know that there are households with very low incomes and real thrift who manage to bring up kids who become world-beaters. There are exceptions at both ends. Income alone does not capture it. But there's a second problem. Not only will this legislation so focused on income distribution be ineffective at capturing how kids are really looked after; secondary to that it actually introduces perverse incentives for Governments because if Government's incentive is to tax and transfer more money one of the effects of that for people who are near the poverty line as defined by this bill is that if they work and if they earn more and if they improve their lot then they're going to lose the redistribution that Governments put in place to get them above that line.There is an unfortunate dynamic in this bill. I predict one of its likely effects is that it will encourage Governments to tax and transfer it'll make the poverty trap steeper to get out of and ironically it will keep more children in poverty than would've happened had the bill not existed at all. That is the perversity of it and sadly that is the logical conclusion of introducing a bill that says Governments can reduce poverty by reducing relative income gaps because relative income gaps are reduced by Governments using tax and transfer and tax and transfer increases the marginal tax rates and makes the poverty trap harder to get out of. So that's the first problem with this bill: its overwhelming focus on income statistics and relative incomes is actually going to make poverty worse in the first instance and fail to capture what it is in the second instance.So in the spirit of—nearly—Christmas I thought I would help. I've brought and tabled a Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) which substantially reforms the bill to focus it on what really matters. This Supplementary Order Paper does two things. Number one it removes the part of this bill that is disagreeable: all of that focus on income distribution that has the risk—in fact sadly I predict the reality—of increasing poverty and of allowing Governments to avoid the real issues. But number two it strengthens the part of the bill that's actually very agreeable and that's the part of the bill that says the chief statistician should ask real questions about whether kids have a separate bed whether children over 10 have a bedroom free of opposite-sex siblings. It tells you whether or not kids have access to two pairs of shoes warm winter clothes etc. That's the admirable part of this bill and what this Supplementary Order Paper 155 does is it codifies exactly what should be done and sets out how it should be done.What should be done and how? It should instruct the chief statistician to borrow from the world-famous Dunedin study and actually interview kids between six and 17 and their families and actually ask the questions. Those questions come in three basic categories. Are the children provided with the essentials—all the things we've talked about that are sort of glanced on in the bill but not really defined. Do they have warm winter clothes and a house that's safe warm and dry? Do they have the ability to have friends around for a birthday party usually once a year? Do they have those basic essentials—material well-being.But secondly are they accessing education? That's the only way you really get out of poverty. So there's a series of measures that 200 kids per cohort per year would have to be interviewed about—and it's from six to 17 so you get about 2200 kids in the study at any given time. Are they going to school regularly? Have they been attending co-curricular activities? These are the kinds of things that most people would want for New Zealand's children. Those are the questions that the chief statistician would have to ask by law of a random sample of New Zealand kids—not "Where are you on the income distribution?" or "What do the relative statistics look like this year at a macro level?" but what's happening for actual kids. And that's the second category being education.The third is safety. We need to know how many kids for instance referred to Oranga Tamariki have parents who are visited by the police have been living in a place that is unsafe structurally in terms of housing. This bill would introduce another set of measures which are all about the child's physical safety.So I put it to the committee that this is a noble effort using good legislative technology but it measures the wrong things and it gives Governments the wrong incentives. It's going to make the problem worse. This SOP 155 on the other hand would instruct the chief statistician to ask randomly selected kids—200 per cohort per year—the questions that most New Zealanders really want to know about when it comes to child poverty. If this amendment was to be adopted then we would achieve so much more of what the intentions of this bill are. I hope that the Minister and my parliamentary colleagues will give it some serious thought. Thank you Madam Chair."