Sharples Pita: Social Assistance (Debt Prevention and Minimisation) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Sharples Pita: Social Assistance (Debt Prevention and Minimisation) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:641;Page:10858] 
Dr PITA SHARPLES (Co-Leader—Maori Party) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Deputy Speaker. In my electorate of Tamaki Makaurau moneylenders have become as much a part of the environment as the old kai cart in Ruatoria or the big carrot in Ohakune. The promises of easy finance flexible mortgages and ready money are on the lips of money-pushers preying on the good people of Hunters Corner of Mangere of Otara and of Manukau. These so-called loan sharks offer extraordinarily high interest rates commonly around 30 percent plus all the additional fees on items such as cars and appliances. 
Predominantly the people who are preyed upon by what John Minto has termed the “parasites of poverty” are Maori and Pacific Island people. The Ministry of Social Development’s living standards survey found that 20.6 percent of Maori families were likely to have fallen behind with hire purchase credit card or store payments. It is a big difference from the 8.7 percent of European families in the same position. Debts on cars furniture and appliances now comprise the biggest amounts of debts accumulated accounting for some 38 percent of all arrears owed by clients of the Federation of Family Budgeting Services last year. The debt levels are even higher for Pasifika. In 2000 24 percent of Pasifika people 16 percent of Maori people and a mere 5 percent of Pakeha had fallen into arrears with rent and mortgage payments. 
But this Social Assistance (Debt Prevention and Minimisation) Amendment Bill is not about families who have plunged into debt. This bill is not concerned with financial pain and the widening disparities between the different sectors in our society. This bill is about a Government agency the Ministry of Social Development which has an estimated actual forecast for 2006-07 of $1124430000. The bill is to enable this agency to recover debts by targeting the vulnerable specifically the prisoner population. It is a population of which the great majority 60 percent of all inmates are either Maori or Pasifika. 
As well as focusing on jails the bill also makes a target of the student allowance and student loan systems by broadening data-matching provisions. Again this is an area where Maori are overrepresented in the debt ledger. Maori are more likely to have an outstanding student loan; the figure is some 26.6 percent against 18.8 percent of Europeans. 
The final focus area is to enable officials to better detect the misuse of social security payments. In this respect it is a case of “Play it again Sam.” We have been down this road before with the Housing Restructuring and Tenancy Matters (Information Matching) Amendment Bill which made similar proposals for Housing New Zealand Corporation tenants. That bill unashamedly targeted a particular population—the population of beneficiaries—and attacked their rights. 
So rather than respond to the desperate situations that are being increasingly experienced by poor families in large households this bill sets off another process. It is a process to undermine the stability of beneficiary households by increasing surveillance and information-matching processes. We have enough evidence in front of us to know that low-income families are becoming more and more vulnerable as their bills for essential services such as water power and transport rise yet total gross family incomes are stagnant. 
One of the key areas for the Maori Party is all about the priorities that our Parliament considers most worthy of attention. The Social Services Committee estimates revealed that in the year to April 2005 benefit fraud was detected in 68000 cases amounting to $36 million in non - data-matching activities mainly from the benefit control programme. The estimates also reported an additional 50000 cases amounting to $24 million from the data-matching programme. In essence then information matching within the Ministry of Social Development could already be seen to be very effective. A massive $29.4 million has already been established from overpayments as a result of these matches in 2005-06. 
Let us be clear: the Maori Party is happy to support any proposals that aim to improve the efficiency and the efficacy of the administrative systems operating within Government agencies but our overriding concern with this bill is to ask whether we have our priorities sorted out. What will be the long-term impact of targeting prisoners students and beneficiaries? Will it produce fewer or more victims fewer or more offenders? Will it enhance general societal well-being and the health of the community? Or is this another case of the Government bringing in an unseemly and hasty patch-up of a problem while under political pressure to be seen to be doing something which in effect perpetuates a perception that certain groups of the population are worthy of being snooped on? 
We remind the House of the irony that the key department to be snooped on the Department of Corrections was painted out with a new name last year: Ara Poutama Aotearoa which the department translated as being “Towards Wellness and Wellbeing”. How will wellness be attained by introducing new techniques to encourage the disclosure of prisoner information in order to ensure that prisoners are not receiving benefits or student allowances while in jail or to enable debt recovery? What risk is there that escalating levels of surveillance and monitoring will compromise the basic human rights of prisoners? Although we are pleased to see the commitment that the Ministry of Justice will work with the Ministry of Social Development to resolve any associated human rights concerns we wonder whether adequate attention has been given to privacy concerns in the first instance. 
I think the prevailing concern for the Maori Party is about the type of society we are creating if we persist with the new measures to increase surveillance rather than trust and with the new proposals to up the monitoring regime rather than to encourage behaviour or attitudinal change. We need to ask ourselves what the future is for prisoners students and beneficiaries. What will they become and what might we become as a result of the actions we are imposing on them today? 
We know that the snooping culture has become a looming presence over our lives alongside the political agenda of getting tough on crime come what may. We believe that the ideal of a fair and just community is a far more appropriate focus to advocate for. We want to see the operations of our welfare system and the functioning of our justice system reflect the set of values and processes that lead to social harmony. 
As part of that we believe that there are important ways in which institutions can help to encourage families and communities to assume responsibility for the well-being of their members without using the crackdown punitive hard stick approach. We believe that all inmates are entitled to receive custodial services in a safe secure humane and effective manner and that human rights for all New Zealanders are worth fighting for. It is because of these values that we stand to oppose this bill. Kia ora.