Ngaro Alfred: Social Security (Extension of Young Persons Services and Remedial Matters) Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeNgaro Alfred: Social Security (Extension of Young Persons Services and Remedial Matters) Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 23 July 2015. Volume:707;Page:5289. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]ALFRED NGARO (National): I rise to take a call in this first reading of the Social Security (Extension of Young Persons Services and Remedial Matters) Amendment Bill. As the chairman of the Social Services Committee it is an honour to be able to receive this bill because again it is the vision and direction of this Government to ensure that we provide every opportunity for our youth our young people and particularly for those who are vulnerable to I suppose achieve their dreams their moemoeās their sense of vision for the future.The previous speaker Carmel Sepuloni has continually talked about the concerns. What I want to put forward again constantly and continually is the sense of vision and intent of this bill which is to provide opportunities for the future of our young people especially those who are in a vulnerable state. One of the comments of the previous speaker was about using the predictive assessment tool in a way to create a sense of judgment and to look at the I suppose long-term dependency rates and issues. I just want to make it really clear that the figures that are being used are actually by fact. They are taken as in a sense the average of those who are actually on long-term dependency on the benefit.So if we look at that here is what the figures say. If we look at the numbers 18 to 19-year-old youths on jobseeker support will spend on average almost 13 years on benefit. That is not a judgment; that is purely a fact. It clearly states here too that a 19-year-old sole parent on average is likely to and will spend almost 18 years on a benefit. The outlook for them and their children is not bright and this Government believes in them and wants them to succeed and recognises that some of them just need some support and extra help. Again that is not a judgment call; that is a fact.So the question that needs to be put there is around this: in the previous Labour Government all we saw was the benefit rates continue to increase and increase. So what are we saying? That judgment upon the leadership of a Government of a nation is in the fact of how we have treated our young and our old. So in particular if we talk about our young when we saw that more and more of our young people were actually being dependent on benefits the initiative for us was to ask what we were to do about this. That is what this bill is about. This bill is about saying simple things like this: you do not have to allow your circumstances to dictate or define your sense of destiny. In other words we all make mistakes; we all make choices. But just because we have an increase—and we have had a decrease as of late under the National Government—in teen parents we do not allow their being parents to be something that will burden them and hold them back from achieving their dreams and their aspirations as well. So clearly what this bill is looking at is that we want to ensure that we make sure those opportunities are available to them.Let us just talk about that. I just want to highlight some areas of the bill that we believe head us in this direction as well. Nineteen-year-old parents will now be eligible for the young parent payment as the age of eligibility will now increase from 18 years to 19 years. Young parents receiving this payment will continue to have an educational focus. This is absolutely important. We have an indicator that we call “neets”—not in education employment or training. We know there are a number of our young people who are in this situation as with young teenage parents. So we know what the goal and the focus is—that education is a key for their success as well.Not all 18 and 19-year-old beneficiaries without children will be referred to Youth Service. In particular only 18 to 19-year-olds who are considered at significant risk of long-term welfare dependency and who have work obligations will be referred. These young people will continue to have a work focus. However some who do not have National Certificate of Educational Achievement level 2 will have a deferral from work obligations or exemptions from the work preparation and obligations to be able to study full time. This part of the bill again makes recognition of the needs at times. It allows for variance. It allows for flexibility of the needs. Again the focus is an educational focus. The focus is to continue to have those building blocks to succeed in the future of our young people. This is different from youth payment recipients who will have an education focus.As with current youth services young people who are referred to Youth Service will be required to undertake a budgeting course and have budgeting conversations with their youth coach. This is not about the sense that people may feel we are micro-managing. Yes young people are able to budget but there are young people who also have asked and requested that they have that support. Those who are running our teen parenting units know that the need to have support around budgeting is absolutely important. We know that under the Commission for Financial Capability—and I attended and spoke at one of the summits there. The whole issue around financial literacy is an issue and a need right across New Zealand so it is no different here. This is not a judgment call; this is purely about saying that actually managing your affairs is something all of us may need some support and help with and all this is doing is providing that wraparound support that is absolutely important to those young people in that regard as well.The second thing and part of the bill is also that parents will be required to undertake a parenting course and have other social obligations related to their child’s well-being. Again we have got a number of courses. There are courses like The Parenting Place. There is Roots of Empathy. They go right across. They are both mainstream and they are right across in other parts of our community. Again this is not a judgment call. It comes under the aspect of social obligations. It is around providing that wraparound support.Previously in the work that I have done actually in the community—parenting is something that is absolutely critical and a need. People just assume that once you have a child you automatically become a parent. That is not the case. We know that we need lots of support. All of us have required advice and support which comes along from family members and friends and sometimes we have attended courses as well. So this is no different from us again providing parental support to those young parents. In particular if you think about it young teenagers who are 16 to 18 to 19 years old are at an age where often you would sort of say they are children having children. Therefore even more so there is a need to have parental support and guidance to help them along the way to be able to deal with these issues.We are often dealing with young people who are in a vulnerable state. For no fault of their own in many circumstances they have found themselves vulnerable because they do not have the support that wraps around them: family and whānau and aiga who would normally be there and friends who would normally be there. Again I want to reiterate that this is not to be put on as a burden but simply as a means of support for our young people for our rangatahi as well.They will also be eligible for incentive payments of between $10 and $30 a week for meeting these obligations or for 6 months of participation in education and in training. We believe this is important. This is the same as for existing participants and it is expected that fewer young people will be on long-term welfare dependency. Again I want to reiterate our intent as the Government. We make no bones about that. We are unashamedly saying this: we want our young people to move off that sense of dependency and into an opportunity where they can be self-determining for their future and for their direction as well.I want to make some comments around Youth Service. This becomes quite important because although we talk about the social obligations the benefit wraparound support that we have we also want to talk about the initiative of Youth Service. In 2014 the Youth Service evaluation showed that Youth Service is having a positive impact on helping young people on a benefit to be independent of welfare support. It is also reducing benefit liability. At the end of March 2014 the number of youth payment recipients moving to a working-age benefit dropped eight percentage points from 38 percent to 30 percent compared with previous young beneficiaries. We see that this is a positive thing. I know that the previous speaker talked about how we track them and what we should do. We know that this has been a long-held tradition for many years and that this department’s role of responsibilities as stated in its statement of intent is very clear. It is to provide the opportunities to move off the benefit and into some form of work. That is where its roles of responsibilities lie. We believe this is important.The last point I want to make is that Youth Service has been very successful with 86.5 percent of participants engaged in education training or work-based learning at the end of March 2015.We look forward to this bill coming to the Social Services Committee. As the chair I look forward to also hearing the submissions. We think they are important and yes we are up for a robust debate. I want to reiterate very clearly the direction that both the Minister for Social Development and this Government are taking. Our belief is this: the longer our young people who are both vulnerable and at risk stay on a benefit and are dependent on a benefit the less likely they are to achieve their dreams. The vision that is held by this Government by the Minister and by those of us who are part of the caucus is very clear. We want to provide every opportunity available so that a young person’s circumstances do not have to define their destiny so that they have the opportunity to achieve their dreams into the future. I commend this bill to the House.