Maharey Steve: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
Maharey Steve: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:627;Page:22016] 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY (Minister of Youth Affairs) 
: 
 I thank Mr McNair for his contribution to the debate. One of the good things about MMP obviously is that we have younger people coming into Parliament and that means we have a spread of interests around the kinds of portfolios we have to debate. The fact that we have a lot more younger people here in Parliament means that we have an interest in youth policy. So I thank the member for his interest. 
I am delighted that he went to see the Conservation Corps. I visited a branch myself just recently in Christchurch. They were a group of young people all of whom said they had no idea what they were going to do with their lives. They came from churches and groups around the city and they had all somehow become connected with the idea of the Conservation Corps. They had just come back from a programme of looking after kiwi around the Canterbury area. They had gone off into the hills and camped. They had not actually seen kiwi but they had heard them. The young people were out there basically to try to trap stoats and all the predators that get into kiwi in their particular area. I spent about an hour chatting with that group just as no doubt the member did. I came away totally impressed with a group of young people who clearly had a whole lot of issues going on in their lives but right then they were focused they were doing something practical and they were all beginning to get a sense that when they came out of that course they would go on to something else because they wanted to do that. 
One of the interesting things though that I want to suggest to the Committee in terms of these estimates is that members will notice some changes to Vote Youth Development. It has come across to what is called the Ministry of Social Development platform. That means that the nine people who do policy and the 14 people who are involved in administration are now part of a much bigger organisation. That has given them reach right across the country so in each of our areas around the country youth development will now have a presence in a policy sense. Our aim is to get out and talk particularly to young people so that they can be heard in terms of the issues that they feel impact on them. 
It is interesting talking to young people I find. The issues that interest them are often not those necessarily that I think they should be interested in but that is what we should be doing—finding out what is on their agenda and what they are talking about. The Ministry of Youth Development is doing that and on top of that it is looking at what it might do with its programmes. 
One of the things we have found with areas like the Conservation Corps is that the number of young people who are available to come along to those kinds of courses has shrunk because the rate of youth employment now is higher and people are often in tertiary institutions. There is not that same big pool of young people who are available to come into those programmes. So members will also notice in the estimates that there is money available for youth development to respond to what members hear around their regions in terms of new and interesting styles of programmes that young people might be able to identify which might make a difference. 
One of the things we do find as we sit down with different groups of people is that some will say: “Yes the Conservation Corps is exactly what I want to do; I would love to get out there and do something out in the hills and so on for my community.” But others say that they would not mind doing a leadership programme or learning how to run something. So one of the things we will look at is how we can use that money within the Ministry of Youth Development to respond to what we hear from young people in terms of programmes. So I am impressed with what we have and I am grateful to hear that Mr McNair and I guess other people around Parliament are also hearing good things about what the Ministry of Youth Development is doing. 
But I say to people in the Committee that there are opportunities to have a look at new things that might be done. That will be one of the things that MPs like Mr McNair who are connected to younger people around their communities might like to make a feature of in the next year. They can feed back through the Ministry of Youth Development and hopefully we will end up with some more programmes that are very interesting. 
Shane Ardern 
: I would be very worried now if I was in the Green Party. 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY 
: Mr Ardern who has long parted company with young people intervenes there but Mr McNair is somebody who is connected and I was interested to hear him say how he enjoyed being in contact with that programme. The invitation is there to look at how money might be spent on new programmes that respond to young people. 
Vote agreed to.