Logie Jan: Social Security Legislation Rewrite Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLogie Jan: Social Security Legislation Rewrite Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 10 May 2016. Volume:713;Page:10907. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAN LOGIE (Green): The Green Party will not be able to support this bill. We absolutely supported the need for a rewrite and we may have been able to support a completely policy-neutral rewrite of this legislation.When we were considering previous welfare reforms passed through this House I remembered the submission from the Legislation Advisory Committee complaining about the state of the legislation noting that since it had been introduced in 1964 it had been amended—this was in 2012—131 times that there had been 54 new sections added and that the Act as it existed included over 50 points of discretion. Nobody would argue—and I have not heard anybody arguing in this House—that there was not a need for a simplification to make sure that the legislation that applies to some of the poorest people in this country and protects their ability to put food on the table on a good day should be simple and easy to follow. Nobody is arguing against that.What we are upset about with this legislation though is that the Government has taken this shared concern and used it as an opportunity to entrench its world view and its policies and attitudes towards welfare—which were not in legislation—and has them put into the legislation and it has gone even further and applied some of its sanction regimes to people who were not covered by them previously. That to us is actually a bit of an abuse of the process and it is a shame because people in New Zealand deserve better than that.I do want to put on the record that we oppose the entrenching of the current practice for several reasons. One is we believe it is punitive and the second core reason is that it is not working. Actually unemployment is not going down at the rate that labour force participation is going up by. Under previous legislation without sanctions and without this punitive approach unemployment went down at a much faster rate as labour force participation went up. So the approach is just not working and people are suffering.We had the news last week about 161000 people who have potentially been sanctioned since these new regimes were introduced. That is probably over 100000 children living in households that had their already below-poverty-line incomes cut with a result of not actually changing the unemployment figures to the extent that we would have expected to happen naturally. So this is an approach that is not working and the Government has taken the opportunity to extend that failed approach under the auspices of simplifying the Act which was something that we absolutely supported.I want to speak to some of the specifics in this because I am aware that this is actually quite a large piece of legislation and I do want people who are affected by this legislation or might have a need for this legislation in the future to be able to have an input on it. So far I have not heard all of the provisions in it mentioned by anyone yet so I would like to outline some of our concerns to give people a point to consider for themselves and hopefully submit on the bill. I would also say that we will be supporting the amendment to extend the consideration period rather than having the 2-month shortened period that MinisterTolley has offered to support people doing that and participating in this process.One of the things we oppose is that this will entrench in legislation—where it does not exist in legislation at the moment—the investment approach changing the purpose statement of the bill. The regulatory impact statement noted that a point for doing this is to avoid accusations of discrimination—to head off any legal challenge on the basis of discrimination is the justification for putting this in the purpose of the Act. Sadly in this House I have become quite familiar with the Government justifying discrimination and saying: “Well you know it’ll have a short-term pay-off for us in terms of our welfare payments. We think it’s justified.” The Green Party is never going to support that view and we do not support putting an investment approach into the purpose of this Act when its reason is to head off any legal challenge on the basis of discrimination.We also want to point out that this investment approach is at the moment highly critiqued and people are not exactly sure what it means. There are some concerns that what it means is that the Government can provide services to a group of people whom it thinks will get off the benefit quicker whereas those services will not be available to people who will not be in a position to go into a paid workforce. The Government is really denying some people services on the basis that they may not be able to enter the workforce.Then we have this situation with this legislation in front of the House at the moment of punitive services being provided as an investment in one group of people as well. That has a real potential to actually heighten stigma and entrench discrimination as it exists at the moment. This kind of provision has the opportunity to actually give more support for those kinds of policies and that is definitely not something that we would want to see. I note a kind of I think very measured concern in relation to the investment approach from Bill Rosenberg from the Council of Trade Unions. Critiquing the investment approach he said: “It is better viewed as a one-dimensional performance indicator rather than a systemic approach to policy and evaluation.”So this is a highly debated approach that the Government has and we are not ready to see it in legislation.I also want to raise the point that has been raised already that the bill formalises a new power to make regulations for benefit redirections without the beneficiary’s consent. Currently 80 to 85 percent of beneficiaries who are tenanted in Housing New Zealand properties have a benefit redirection in place and community housing providers have had this ability since 2014 but case managers use their discretion to decide whether to do a redirection or not. A mandatory redirection can leave families without enough to meet essential expenses and no individual discretion to meet those challenges. Given that benefits are often not enough to survive on as it is this will make things harder for those who are struggling.There will be changes to the emergency benefit which will be renamed the exceptional circumstances benefit and will require work testing and open people up to sanctions. That is not appropriate and that is a significant change in policy and an extension of the Government’s work-test regime.There is also another policy in here that will require people accessing the unsupported child’s benefit to use it for the benefit of the child and that will be put into legislation. In the regulatory impact statement that is justified by saying it is to empower Work and Income staff to discuss with carers issues that fall below the threshold for Child Youth and Family involvement. It is trying to make Work and Income staff—who are already underpaid and under-resourced—social workers. They are not social workers and they should never be empowered to be taking a social work role particularly when it is in relation to people being able to get their money and being able to feed themselves.The bill will also enable both parents when they are in a split-custody situation to be able to get the sole parent’s allowance. There is something potentially positive about that. That is when parents have one child each and that has been decided through the courts potentially or separately. But there is also the potential for this to be a perverse incentive for parents when breaking up to split the children into each parent’s care so that both parents can get a certain amount of money. I doubt anyone in this House would want to see that eventuate. When people are living below the poverty line you could not blame them for that but that is not at all going to be for the benefit of those kids.The bill will also remove the requirement for notices to be sent by letter. Although we totally support the reduction of paper use we need to ensure that people get these notices because it can affect their ability to feed themselves. We cannot support this bill.