Ball Darroch: Social Security Legislation Rewrite Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeBall Darroch: Social Security Legislation Rewrite Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 10 May 2016. Volume:713;Page:10909. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DARROCH BALL (NZ First): It is a pleasure to rise on behalf of New Zealand First to speak on the Social Security Legislation Rewrite Bill. Before I do I would just like to take a second to acknowledge the life and work of the pioneer of modern social work in New Zealand and former Palmerston North City Council councillor Merv Hancock who passed away on Saturday. He was the first president of the New Zealand Association of Social Workers and he was appointed to run the first New Zealand undergraduate degree in social work. He truly made and will make a difference across many generations and future generations.New Zealand First will be supporting this bill’s referral through to the select committee but we do have some reservations. We do support the fact that as the Minister for Social Development and other members mentioned the legislation has been full of amendments for 50 years. There is an intent to clarify the legislation for ease of reading which New Zealand First supports and obviously there is an aim to improve the administration of the legislation. I would like to actually mention I agreed with Carmel Sepuloni when she said this was a promised rewrite not policy changes and that is exactly what has happened here. Although the Minister has said they are somewhat small changes they will have effects. New Zealand First although we do agree with most of the small changes the Minister spoke about would like to see through the select committee process submissions and evidence to go with it.We do have one large concern and it has been mentioned by both Labour and the Greens also. All you need to really do is look into the regulatory impact statement to see how it actually stands out in regards to the writing of the policy proposals in this bill. Under the policy proposals—there are five of them. If you take four of them you are looking at the removal of an unused provision and it states there are no changes provided; another one is about the enabling of redirections to be applied to certain groups where again there are no changes to the support; merging the orphans and unsupported child’s benefit where we are talking about a name change; and renaming the emergency benefit as the exceptional circumstances benefit. Those are four of them. Then the other one you have got is including support for an investment approach in the actual purpose of the legislation.Those are two very distinct and different things. You are talking about small practical changes that the Minister was talking about—small changes. But that is versus the inclusion of the investment approach in the purpose of the legislation which is actually the overarching National philosophy in the umbrella—that is the purpose. What that means is that every piece of legislation in the social security legislation and every decision every deduction and every inference has to be tied back to the investment approach. The question is what the investment approach is. When it boils down to it it is first and foremost National mantra and philosophy and modus operandi. But it is also about data collection predictive modelling and targeting of people who are at high risk of becoming a liability to the State. That is about the financial liability to the State. That is what National wants to put into the overarching purpose of this legislation.What that states is that it is all about the financial approach and it is about numbers and not about need. In theory really it works quite well in business but not when you are dealing with people. This is a country; not a business. We are dealing with people; we are not dealing with stock and we are not dealing with money. But given that is the National stance and pathway into the social services legislation rewrite you would assume—hopefully quite rightly—that if it is being put into the purpose that National would know that it will work. But it is actually the contrary to that. Not only do we have evidence that it does not work which the Government itself comes up with but we actually have international evidence that the investment approach does not work.Going back to the regulatory impact statement I would like to highlight the fact that the investment approach is actually not a small change. Putting it into the purpose of the Act is not a small change. The Supreme Court has said “Even if the meaning of the text may appear plain in isolation of purpose that meaning should always be cross checked against purpose in order to observe the dual requirements …”. That is not the minor change that the Minister spoke about. In fact I would like it highlighted that the Minister did not even talk about the investment approach being included in the purpose of the Act in her entire first speech. The regulatory impact statement also goes on to state in the very first sentence of its definition in supporting the investment approach that it “applies a long-term liability perspective to the cost of the benefit system.” It talks about client outcomes and overall liability. Again as I mentioned it is about the financial liability to the State and it is a new approach to welfare that is not well-supported in the current wording of the bill. It is not supported in the current wording of the bill because this is new and it is a social experiment that National wants to put into legislation.The regulatory impact statement talks about the key building blocks. A few of them which I will mention talk about the actuarial evaluation which I must mention has not been done yet especially in regards to the Child Youth and Family overhaul and identifying “clients who we should focus on based on how long they might stay on a benefit …”. It is based on how long they might stay on a benefit. That is written in the regulatory impact statement. Why is it not based on the need of the individual? Why is it based on how long they may stay on the benefit? It talks about the fact that it is actually trialling new approaches and seeing what works best. National is still trialling new approaches to see what works best. It does not know whether the investment approach actually works or not.Then it starts talking about the goals and how it measures them. It goes back to talk about the Better Public Services target that this Government implemented in 2012 and has not yet evaluated. It has not had an independent review or evaluation of the Better Public Services targets since their inception. The Government made the target it reviewed the target itself it changed the target itself and then Government members come out to the House and to the public and say how well they are doing. The Government tests it itself. Obviously that is not a good position to be in.It was highlighted not too long ago by the Salvation Army actually when it talked about moving targets—Moving Targets was the actual title of its annual report. It said the title is: “an allusion to the way in which some government agencies appear to be using targets and the numbers behind them in a less than straightforward and reliable manner. … While the targets may not change with such practices the meaning behind them can.” It is not actually “mindless criticism” like the Hon Christopher Finlayson said but there are very reputable organisations that have evidence that it is not working. When it boils down to it this is a social experiment currently being run by the National Government.Let us look at some of the international research and what the Government says itself in regard to data collection because if we are talking about the investment approach we are talking about what the targets have been measured with and we are talking about the data that needs to be collected to maintain those targets. Statistics New Zealand on the Government’s website itself says that “Some of the methods used are exploratory so results are indicative only and not accurate estimates or forecasts of the outcomes and costs that will be incurred in the future.” This is from the Government’s own website.Statistics New Zealand is talking about Social Investment Insights. “The scope of the data is limited by the information collected in agencies’ administrative systems … data provides only a partial picture of childhood adversity service use and service costs.” This is information that the Government has available to it and it is still making the decision to put this in the entire purpose of the Act so that every piece of law that has been implemented in regard to social services has to rely on that purpose but the Government does not even know whether it works in the first place.I would just like to finish by quoting some international research on the investment approach and data collection. Stanford Social Innovation Review says: “Beyond the infrastructural impediments that social sector users of big data face data itself can be a problem. Oftentimes data are missing and incomplete or stored in silos or in forms that are inaccessible to automated processing.” What it is saying is that even though the investment approach is based on data the data is limited in itself—the data is limited in itself. You run the chance of focusing on the data that you have and ignoring the data that you do not have. You would be focusing on the victims and not on the situation that they are in and what caused them to be victims in the first place.We will be supporting this bill through the first reading to the select committee but we have massive reservations. Hopefully those questions can be answered and the concerns can be mitigated later on through the process. Thank you.