Tolley Anne: Social Security Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Tolley Anne: Social Security Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:640;Page:10047] 
ANNE TOLLEY (National—East Coast) 
: 
 I stand to speak on the title and commencement of the Social Security Amendment Bill following my colleague Judith Collins’ excellent discussion of the never-ending planning and discussion phase of the single core benefit. Perhaps we should have called this bill something like the “Social Security (Pre - Single Core Benefit) Amendment Bill” or the “Social Security (Phase One and a Half) Amendment Bill” because we have had phase one and we are looking forward to phase two. We are not quite sure where it is at. We seem to be dealing with amendments to the social security legislation in a piecemeal fashion prolonged by this Labour Government’s interminable fiddling with the unemployment benefit. 
We are told that this bill will focus on changes for youth and that the goal is to have all 15 to 19-year-olds either in employment in training or in an educational institution of some sort. 
Judith Collins 
: In prison! 
ANNE TOLLEY 
: Hopefully not in prison. Yet we find that according to the household labour force survey 27000 youth are unemployed. So they are not in employment they are not in any form of sensible training and they are not in an educational institution. That number has grown under this Government by just about 10000. We have to ask this Minister the Hon David Benson-Pope what this bill will do to get those 27000 youth into either employment training or education. I have looked through the bill and listened to the debate in the House and I really cannot see anything stunning that will move those figures in the opposite direction. 
We are told that this bill focuses on providing the right services and support for people to enable them where appropriate to find or move towards finding employment. I ask the Minister what that actually means. I know there are sanctions in this bill for those for whom work is made available but who do not turn up. 
I say to the Minister that I recently got some figures from a kiwifruit pack-house in my electorate that had provided people on the unemployment benefit with work. The employer tells me that the work provided would be for approximately 9 months of the year. I would have thought that was pretty good. There are plenty of career opportunities in the kiwifruit industry. Good training is provided and there are footsteps through to some excellent prospects of full-time work. This pack-house provided me with some statistics that it had kept on the workers that WINZ had provided it with. Twenty-one names were provided and there was an 18-week course of employment which began with 2 weeks’ training. Let me say that by the end of those 18 weeks out of those 21 people in the last week one worked 11½ hours two worked 8½ hours and the rest were no-shows. When one looks through the 18 weeks one sees that the no-shows grow and grow until as I say by the end 18 out of 21 people are not bothering to turn up for work. After all the training that had been put into them after the company had provided vehicles to go round and pick people up from their homes—the drivers knocked on people’s doors waking them up sometimes—many of them said the work was too hard and they could not be bothered. In many cases they were just not prepared to take part in any work. 
The question I have for the Minister in the chair is what sanctions will be placed on those people through this bill. I rather suspect having read through the bill having listened to the expert advice from the officials and having listened to some of the submissions that were made that the sanctions are very sparsely applied. Certainly none of those people were sanctioned by WINZ despite very good evidence that they had not bothered to turn up. Two of them had not bothered to turn up from day one. Four of them did not bother to turn up from week two and the numbers just grew. I would really like the Minister to tell us just what in this bill will address the issue of people who are offered good jobs with good training good career prospects and the possibility of working for 9 months of the year in a good industry but just do not bother to turn up for work.