Bradford Sue: Urgent Debates — Ministry of Social Development—Job Cuts 
Bradford Sue: Urgent Debates — Ministry of Social Development—Job Cuts 
[Volume:655;Page:4823] 
SUE BRADFORD (Green) 
: 
 The Green Party shares the concern of colleagues in the House that the Ministry of Social Development is cutting a total of 558 positions in the very ministry that is responsible for dealing above all with the effects both of unemployment and of child neglect and abuse. It is a deeply ironic situation. I am aware that the chief executive officer Mr Peter Hughes has gone to great efforts in terms of identifying where the job cuts can most effectively and with the least damage come from and in terms of providing support to staff who are sadly in that position. But at the same time the Green Party believes that the Ministry of Social Development is the last department where there should be a net cut in jobs. 
On the question of child abuse particularly the Minister Paula Bennett was at the Social Services Committee just the other day telling us that over the past year there has been a big increase in terms of reporting child abuse and neglect from 9000 to 12000. It is good that this is being picked up but surely at this time with this sort of increase this is the very point at which skilled people should be right there not only on the front line but also backing the people on the front line. Child abuse specialists should be out in the community working with the people in the schools working with the social workers and working with the health professionals. This problem has not gone away sadly. It is continuing in communities around the country and this is not the moment for cutting back on the people who are doing this very difficult sensitive and highly skilled work. I sincerely hope that the Minister and the chief executive officer might think again about where exactly they are making the cuts in this area. There is also the issue that the towns where these jobs are being stripped out of include places like Whangarei Tauranga Hamilton Napier New Plymouth and other places where often these skilled people who are being made redundant will have a difficult time getting a job again. Often they are women—often older women—who despite their skills and experience will have difficulty securing alternative employment. So again we have the Ministry of Social Development putting some particularly vulnerable women workers into the dole queue. 
Looking at the bigger picture of course we see that unemployment is going up. As of last week the Minister informed us that a net 1100 people a week are going into the dole queue. We are seeing more lay-offs daily in retail manufacturing the clothing sector—as we have seen with Line 7 going under—plus of course what is happening in the Public Service and this will just continue to deepen. The Minister and Treasury give us various predictions about what is going to happen with unemployment. The other day the Minister said she expected that by 2010 up to 80000 people would be on the unemployment benefit and that will go up to 90000 by 2011. I think these figures are likely to be an extreme underestimation of the reality. Of course as more and more people who are finding themselves without work at the moment are realising just being unemployed does not mean that you are counted in the unemployment benefit figures because so many people today who are losing their jobs are actually those who have partners who are still in work; therefore they cannot register as unemployed. So although the Government boasts about how low the numbers on the unemployment benefit are in New Zealand compared for example with Australia a huge number of our newly redundant and newly unemployed people are those who have no eligibility for the benefit because their partners are in work. 
As I said yesterday I believe that the Government and this very ministry should be looking closely at the regulations around the income limits above which people cannot get any unemployment benefit when they are in a relationship. Our level at around $534 a week is way too low—the Australian level is much higher—and the Government should be looking closely at that right now because a lot of families are finding themselves in extreme stress. In fact the continuation of this very low limit is only going to lead to more and more couples coming under such pressure that they will find themselves breaking up either deliberately or by default putting even more strain on our welfare system and more strain in the end on their children leading to poor educational housing health and employment outcomes in the long run and actually costing the Government a lot more than it would if it dealt with this problem now. There are many many jobs that could be created with and through the Ministry of Social Development that could be usefully done. For example the Green Party would really like to see the Government look closely at our proposals for a green new deal. We have many ideas about how jobs could be created through things like energy efficiency programmes investment in public transport investment in protecting rural waterways increasing the rate of housing construction—both in the State sector and in the community sector—and waste and recycling programmes. 
We would love to see a community economic development function restored to the Ministry of Social Development. With the loss of the Enterprising Communities scheme we have seen the last vestiges of community economic development gone from the Government. This is very sad. Although that was in the end a comparatively small programme at least it existed and groups like the Mayors Task Force for Jobs apprenticeship scheme and many other programmes around the country are very focused on helping the vulnerable unemployed—helping them to upskill and helping young people working in places like Otorohanga Dargaville and other rural and provincial communities where jobs are hard to come by. That scheme is gone and I do not know that the Minister and her Government quite understand the roll-on impact of that loss. Although they may prop up one or two of those programmes because they have been lobbied and they understand that a particular scheme is really good they forget that a whole lot of other programmes will go down the tubes. That is tragic for those communities where the good work has been done and it is tragic for the vulnerable unemployed people and the people who have been helped through those programmes who will lose their jobs or for whom the opportunities will no longer exist. 
I doubt that the Ministry of Social Development or the Minister for Social Development and Employment understand the point of community economic development. I heard the Minister talking in the select committee the other day and tried to talk about it with her. She said that the main reason that the Government is cancelling the Enterprising Communities scheme is that after 3 years its programmes are not fully self-sustaining. Anyone who has worked in the community economic sector—as I did for 16 years before I came to Parliament—knows that it is impossible to get this kind of scheme to be totally self-sustaining. It is simply not possible. The fault lies with the Government not understanding the realities of the community economic sector and the efficient way in which these programmes can create and promote jobs. I would love to talk to the Government if it would like a few lessons about this. I can talk from years of raw experience. Without any outside help these kinds of programmes are almost doomed to fail yet we have only to look at a very current example—the Clean Stream Waiheke Ltd waste programme. This created 23 jobs on Waiheke Island and many of those jobs with the vulnerable unemployed. This is not an Enterprising Communities programme but it is a scheme that is sadly going under because of the Auckland City Council decision to transfer out that contract. 
But these sorts of community programmes that do really good work in this case with waste and recycling and with job creation are where the Government should be investing and not withdrawing money. The Ministry of Social Development should be employing people who understand community economic development and about working with communities to create jobs. The Government should not be getting rid of jobs; it should be putting more effort into changing our benefit system so that it works for people in a time of recession. The Government should not be leaving it in the kind of mess that it is in right now. It needs to have a greater focus on helping unemployed people into work. It should be looking at real job creation rather than the kind of job creation we were talking about earlier this afternoon: 7000 jobs in McDonald’s over the next 5 years. Is that the kind of future that National wants to prioritise? Is this the kind of place that it wants to put Ministry of Social Development money into propping up a multinational company that made $23 million profit in this country last year? Why are we subsidising McDonald’s when we are cutting Enterprising Communities? We should be putting the money that we are putting into McDonald’s into groups like Clean Stream Waiheke Ltd and like all those programmes that have been funded by Enterprising Communities. We should be creating jobs for the long-term unemployed and do really useful environmental and social work. We should not be funding a multinational company.