Shanks Katrina: Social Assistance (Future Focus) Bill — Second Reading 
Shanks Katrina: Social Assistance (Future Focus) Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:665;Page:13068] 
KATRINA SHANKS (National) 
: 
 It is my pleasure to take this call and support the Social Assistance (Future Focus) Bill in its second reading. Firstly I would like to acknowledge our hard-working Minister Paula Bennett who is the member for Waitakere. She put a lot of work into getting this bill into the House and into the Social Services Committee. It is a bill that will make a difference to the people of New Zealand. I would also like to thank the officials for the hard work they put into our select committee and for the time they gave us. We continually sent them back for more and more information and they kept on coming back so I thank them very much for the hard work they put in; we really appreciated what they did to get this bill to the state it is in today. 
It is interesting being out in the electorate of Ohariu. People may think it is a slightly richer suburb and certainly there are areas that are well off but there are also areas that are hard up in that electorate. I have my office based in Johnsonville. I have many constituents who come into the office who have lost their jobs in the recession and they are finding it really tough. All they want is to get back to work and get their lives on track again. I have constituents who come in who have been on benefits for a very long period of time. They like this Government and I will tell members why. They come in and they say: “It is because you are a Government that is aspirational for us. You’re not going to let us stay where we are. We want to have some choices in our lives.” and that is what this Government is about. We are about allowing people to have choices in their lives and to get off the welfare system. 
I know that the Opposition struggles with the fact that people want to get out of the welfare system have some options and have a future for their families. They want to be a little bit aspirational; they do. That is why this legislation is something that New Zealanders are asking for. Let us put a focus on helping people get back into work. 
Carmel Sepuloni 
: That member should be ashamed of herself. 
KATRINA SHANKS 
: It is interesting that that member says I should be ashamed of myself for having aspirations. You should be ashamed of yourself for wanting to keep people on the welfare system— 
H V Ross Robertson 
: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. I am sorry to interrupt the member but I have let this go for some time now as I thought that the member might have come to order. Standing Order 103 says that when a member is addressing the Speaker: “A member on being called to speak addresses the Speaker and through the Speaker the House.” For the last minute or so this member has used the word “you” indicating that she is bringing you Mr Assistant Speaker into the debate when she should not do so. I think she needs to be brought to order. 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Rick Barker) 
: The member is correct. I invite the member to continue and to not address her comments to the Assistant Speaker. I am here to chair this meeting not to be the subject of any comments on this bill or otherwise. 
KATRINA SHANKS 
: My apologies for that. 
It is very interesting that those Labour members sit over there and have no aspirations for New Zealanders. This legislation will address that. I will give members a few facts to just throw out there. Currently this legislation will affect 345000 beneficiaries including: 43000 domestic purposes beneficiaries who have a youngest child of 6 or over; 12000 unemployed beneficiaries who have been on the unemployment benefit for more than a year; 29580 sickness beneficiaries who have been on a sickness benefit for more than a year; and 85000 people who receive the invalids benefit. That is a big group of people that we are talking about. So that members can see the big numbers we are talking about I tell them that the cost of paying these benefits in the 2008-09 year was $4.8 billion in total $1.8 billion in additional support which includes hardship grants and accommodation supplements $1.5 billion for domestic purposes benefits and $586 million for the unemployment benefit. That is a huge amount of money that we are talking about which we are putting into a group of people who want to go out work and help themselves. That is what this legislation is doing. 
I will just touch on a couple of points to finish off in terms of what this legislation is doing. It says that if someone is unemployed every 12 months we want that person to go back be reassessed go through the criteria and be refocused again instead of just automatically rolling over on the unemployment benefit. We say that we would like those mothers on the domestic purposes benefit who have a child who is 6 years or older to go out and get a job for a minimum of only 15 hours a week so that they can still do the school drop-off and the school pick-up every day. But they can go out there and get a pathway towards getting some work and getting ahead in life. 
We all know that welfare is not a way of life; it is a really really hard way of living. We want people to live better than that. We want them to have a really good living standard and to go out and give their children the things they got when they were growing up as well. There are a whole lot of things that are in this bill that I will touch on in the second reading. Thank you.