Williams Poto: Support for Children in Hardship Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWilliams Poto: Support for Children in Hardship Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 01 December 2015. Volume:710;Page:8400. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]POTO WILLIAMS (Labour—Christchurch East): Let us look first at the primary legislation that this bill seeks to amend and that is the Social Security Act 1964—1964. It is a long time since the primary legislation was enacted. There have been many and significant changes to it over that time and one would argue that in terms of its ability to continue to deliver the intent it may be time to be looking at it much more widely.I want to refer to some of the comments that the member Alfred Ngaro made about the number of children in hardship or the number of children in deprivation. However you slice it or dice it you cannot get past the fact that there are 305000 children living in poverty and Unicef—which Mr Ngaro did quote from to the Committee—on the very front page of its website quotes that figure. So whether you are talking about hardship or poverty or deprivation or whatever you are talking about you cannot get past the fact that we are talking about 305000 children living in poverty. Are there children who are more deserving than those living in poverty?This bill obviously is going some way to address some of those families but we are talking about a small percentage of children who live with poverty every single day. That includes not being able to have their nutritional needs met not being able to have their housing needs adequately met and probably not even being able to have their educational needs met. That is a significant proportion of our future that is dealing and struggling with these issues every single day so although Mr Ngaro might have a point about slicing and dicing the numbers it does not go past the fact that we have hundreds of thousands of children who are living in poverty.When we look at this bill clause 10 gives us the enabling provision for the $25 a week per family. It has already been said across this Committee that in actuality that probably amounts to about $23 in the hand. We are talking about $25 per family. The size of your family does not determine how much money you get so if you are from a family of three or four or five children you are looking at a couple of dollars for each child per week extra which is really what? A loaf of bread but probably not even a bottle of milk. So we are not talking about a huge amount.Do not get me wrong. I am very very happy that there are families that are going to get a little bit extra but if we are actually going to deal with the issue of children in hardship we should be making significant resource available to those families and it should not just be about money. We all know that the level a mother’s education reaches has a significant impact on how well her children do. However there is no provision within this bill to actually support parents mothers to upskill and to utilise the time on a benefit to do further training to provide themselves with better skills which actually at the end of the day would probably have more impact on the well-being of those children and those families.But I want to get back to the point of paying $25 or $23 in actuality to that family. When we are talking about some families we are talking about beneficiary families tending not to be one-child families but families with two three or four children. So if we are looking at supporting those families in hardship better why have we not looked at the recommendations from other experts in the field who ask us to consider amounts of around $60 to $80 to around $100 per week for families as opposed to $25? What would that do? That would make a significant difference particularly if you were then requiring those beneficiary families to get out and get to work. It would make a significant difference—