Logie JanJAN LOGIE (Green): Thank you Madam Speaker. And I know I shouldn't bring you into the debate but I do just want to commend you on your exceptional pink outfit. It really lifts the bar I think for all of us. Just to take another call on behalf of the Green Party on the Income Insurance Scheme (Enabling Development) Bill 2022. I do recognise that there's a bit of a difference in debate and the Government members are bringing it back to actually some of the content of the bill. But I do think it is fair to debate a bit wider around the income insurance scheme even though the Government hasn't made a commitment to going ahead with it yet just because the Minister's first reading speech was talking about the problems it was intending to solve and the development of it being through unions and Government and business and that we do recognise as a country that we have a problem in terms of the impact of sudden job loss whether that be through redundancy or sickness or disability and the lack of structural support and active labour market policies in terms of supporting people to retrain. I do need to remind this House though that this was actually a topic that was actively considered by the Welfare Expert Advisory Group (WEAG) who spent a really considerable amount of time looking at our whole social security system and a large chunk of their report was around active labour market policies and how despite the rhetoric of the National Party saying you know we need to support people into work and workers the pathway out of poverty ignoring all the barriers to work and actually the fact that caring for children and those who are unable or need support is actually good important work possibly the most important work—despite all of that their rhetoric that actually the previous welfare system basically just left people with zero support in terms of finding good work being able to work out what the opportunities were and being able to support them into training or the pathways to get those good jobs. It was all about any job or nothing and that served a low wage economy. It kept our queues for jobs long but people were demoralised and their pay packets were skimpy. So the WEAG considered all of these things and they very clearly said that we needed to look at overseas models and that there were things that we could learn from countries that operate a social insurance model of unemployment support with strong and entrenched social partnership employment relations. But the clincher is after all of that consideration looking at all that information they said Although we do not recommend changing our social welfare system to a social insurance model New Zealand can learn much from the [active labour market component] of such models." So the Greens still retain a concern that this is moving ahead at such a pace while as at this point not one of the Welfare Expert Advisory Group's recommendations has been implemented in full and that has been years that we've had those recommendations on the table. They are about addressing the fundamental pain in our society of people not having enough to be able to sustain themselves and the fact that we have horrific levels of preventable diseases and illness in this country because of poverty and precariousness. It undermines productivity it undermines opportunity and it undermines wellbeing. While this policy which we are moving ahead at speed will address some of the aspects of that it also creates more complexity and embeds potentially more inequity. One of the aspects that we're concerned about in particular—and we notice wage scarring is one of the things that this policy is meant to be addressing. But for women at least the major cause of wage scarring—and for people who don't know that term what it is is when you leave a job on a particular income and then are out of the workforce and you come back in at a lower rate or without the same trajectory that you might have had in terms of pay. So there's been a scarring from that disrupted time outside of the paid workforce. But the major reason women experience wage scarring is through our role doing caring work that women are still the primary people doing that work. When we compare what's in the current proposal around the income insurance scheme it will provide up to $2517 a week for up to 28 weeks for people receiving the income insurance if they leave for reason of a redundancy or sickness or disability. We compare that to the paid parental leave scheme which has a cap on it of $621. That's like a fourth of what this scheme will provide and yet we know that that is at least a significant part of the major cause of scarring for women's wages. So we do have a concern around that inequity. And there's nothing for people—well there's our welfare system—who are doing the caring work for our elderly. We know that more and more people are ageing in place in their homes and that that often requires support from family members usually from women and that saves us collectively as a country a huge amount of money. But when we're forcing people out of paid work to be doing that caring and putting them on poverty wages and a benefit then actually they are bearing a disproportionate burden of that cost and we don't believe in the Greens that that serves our community. So we're hoping some of these issues are going to be resolved out of the consultation and that we get a two-track forward process around welfare and any income insurance or a decision that actually our welfare system is the best way to do this and that I'm sure we would be very on board with. So just to touch on the specifics of this bill there's a couple of things I wanted to point to: one which has a recognition clause in it of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. That has been co-written or developed between the iwi leaders group and ACC. I've got to say I think that is a fantastic initiative. It's kind of a little bit—I don't mean to be churlish about this but it just sits a bit uncomfortably the fact that we've got ACC legislation in front of select committee at the moment around birth injuries and other matters and submitters have been calling for a strong Te Tiriti amendment to go into that bill and we've been told it's out of scope from the legislation. It's fantastic to see it coming in in terms of this part of the design and the recognition of the importance of it. I just wish we could get it across all of ACC and our other Government agencies because that is the way forward. That is the way to ensure that any policy actually delivers for everybody as opposed to what we've been doing for ever in this country which is the Government designing policies based for the mythical average person who's almost always white and Pākehā and actually it reaches them and nobody else and definitely not Māori. So it's fantastic to see that partnership in there. I was a little bit concerned to read in the explanatory note though—and I'm sure this was not signed off by the iwi leaders group where the framing of it recognising the Crown's commitment to the Treaty of Waitangi / Te Tiriti o Waitangi principles. I'm sure Margaret Mutu did not approve of that presentation of Te Tiriti or the Crown's requirement to honour Te Tiriti o Waitangi. However the actual substantive provisions in the bill around requiring ACC to as far as reasonably practical take into account the views of Māori in the design of the systems and processes to ensure that the scheme is accessible and responsive to Māori and that the scheme will have the capability in the context of the scheme to contribute to improved Māori economic and labour market outcomes. Thank you Madam Speaker."