Williams Poto: Social Security (Fraud Measures and Debt Recovery) Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWilliams Poto: Social Security (Fraud Measures and Debt Recovery) Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 08 April 2014. Volume:697;Page:16951. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]POTO WILLIAMS (Labour—Christchurch East):It is my pleasure to take a call on the Social Security (Fraud Measures and Debt Recovery) Amendment Bill which is about fraud measures but it is also about debt recovery—the recovery of debt from our most poor and vulnerable and the recovery of debt from beneficiaries who actually owe their most significant amount of debt to the Government. It is very interesting that we are talking about recovering debt by the Government when it is actually looking at recovering debt from those who owe the Government the most.We supported this bill with some grave reservations. The reservations we talk about are really around the principles of general law. I want to talk about a couple of specific clauses within the bill itself. However I do want to frame my discussions around one or two principles. The principle of the New Zealand Law Society that many of my colleagues have already talked about—and I want to quote what was said—is that “in the absence of a positive act which would normally provide ground for criminal liability the justification for making partners and spouses criminally liable is not apparent.” So we are taking a departure from the general principles of criminal law. Normally a positive act is required to ground that within criminal activities. So what we are in essence saying is that the person who has actually committed the crime—the responsibility for that crime has actually shifted to another party. I do not know of any other legislation—perhaps my colleagues can help me on this—where in the committing of a crime the responsibility is actually held by another party. Perhaps that does exist; perhaps it does not. But I do not believe that we are talking about something that is consistent with the principles of criminal law.I am pleased that the Associate Minister for Social Development is back in the chair because I wanted to say that it is lovely to see you again Minister Borrows. We have seen you a bit in Christchurch recently along with other Government Ministers and Government MPs. I wonder whether that is because Christchurch is of course one of those touchstone places where the Government realises that it has actually done a terrible terrible job and it is sending the troops in to actually try to recover some of that. It is lovely to see you again. I have seen you quite a bit over the last few weeks.I wanted to comment on something the Minister said around fraud—that it is all about fraud. What I want to question is how much of the actual investigation is around fraud when a large component of what is found is actually administrative errors by the Ministry of Social Development itself. We are talking about quite a significant percentage of error. When we are talking about this percentage of administrative error that occurs we are talking about having the right paperwork within the right time frames and signed in the right coloured ink. We are talking about barriers that are put in the way for beneficiaries to actually find and have access to benefits that they are actually entitled to under legislation. They are entitled to these benefits. However we put all sorts of barriers in their way. When we as the administrators get it wrong they are the ones who have the penalty and I do not think that is right. It is another example of us vilifying the beneficiaries and actually as my colleague puts it beating our beneficiaries yet again.There is no clearer example of this Government being out of touch with what is happening with beneficiaries than—I do not know whether many of you saw the news reports on Sunday of the Young Nats ball where we had the Auckland Action Against Poverty outside protesting. There was this fantastic shot of the Young Nats on the balcony sipping their champagne while they were looking down at the protesters. I mean that is classic “Let them eat cake.” is it not? So here we are with this Government completely out of touch with what is happening with our most poor and our most vulnerable.I want to go to one of the specifics of this bill and that is recovery from the spouse or the partner. I know that there is some debate over what is the definition of partner or spouse. I have not actually seen it clearly articulated. I would like to know what defines a partner or spouse in this type of environment. I know that this has been part of the debate in the past. However we are talking about people cohabitating within the same space within the same house. Who is actually going to define what is a partnership or what is a spousal relationship? Are we going to leave that to the ministry? More forms I guess and more tests.Many of our colleagues have already spoken about the issue of domestic violence in relation to this bill and said that those people—women particularly—who are impacted on by domestic violence will be able to provide a test and then will not be responsible for the recovery of fraud debt. I remember a member across the House speaking about this the last time we were talking about this particular bill. Well here again I want to know who is going to administer this test. What is this test going to look like and will it require the further filling in of forms? Will it require affidavits to be supplied by the women concerned and who is going to be responsible for that? Is it going to be Work and Income which we know by its very culture is very caring and very concerned for our population! I would hate to think of vulnerable women turning up at Work and Income to disclose domestic violence to some of the folk who we have working within our Work and Income environment. I think that is actually an appalling way to treat people.I want to talk about new section 127A inserted by clause 12 regarding a “spouse or partner … knowing or being reckless about whether it is obtained by beneficiary’s fraud”. Here I want to quote my learned colleague Jacinda Ardern when she spoke during one of the readings where she said: “this spouse can still be found liable if they ‘ought to have known’ that they were in receipt of a benefit fraudulently. That is quite a hard test and so it was probed to quite a high degree”. I understand that the Social Services Committee came away with two questions: to what degree the test could be applied to other forms of fraud and whether it should be. I do not think that we have heard sufficient evidence or had sufficient discussion on whether we should be applying this consistently across the whole environment when we are talking about fraud. I want to go back to my initial statements about the general principles of criminal law and the shift of responsibility from the person who actually perpetrates that criminal act to another person and whether we are talking about a real shift in our legislative thinking because who is to say who may not be in danger of falling foul should we want to use this particular principle in another piece of legislation?So just in summing up I would like to know about how we are going to get through this process of disclosure whether there will be organisations that work with vulnerable people that will grapple with the notion of disclosure and whether when they are working with people and these disclosures happen we will require people such as our social workers and our support staff to then disclose the criminal behaviour of people whom they work with. This particular piece of criminal law has the opportunity to impact on many many other pieces of legislation and I for one do not think that is right. Thank you.