Sepuloni CarmelHon CARMEL SEPULONI (Minister for Social Development): I want to take a call on Part 1 of the Social Security Legislation Rewrite Bill. Part 1 outlines the general provisions and includes the purposes and principles of the bill. However I want to start by addressing some of the concerns that have been raised by the honourable member Louise Upston. Some of those concerns I think were responded to quite adequately actually by the member who's just spoken Darroch Ball who was on the Social Services Committee and probably has a much more detailed understanding of how we got to this point.But let me just start by addressing the complaint made by the honourable member Louise Upston that the Opposition were landed with a 500-page Supplementary Order Paper (SOP). I just want to clarify with the Opposition that this is the entire bill. Not the entire bill has been amended. There are amendments in it and the reason that the amendments are put into the actual bill is so that they can be understood in the context of the legislation. If that member had read this she would have worked out that there are only a few pages that are actually amended in here. It is not 500 pages of amendments. So that's the first issue that I want to address.The second issue I want to address that that member raised—actually I think it was raised during the second reading but I may as well at this point bring it up too. There was concern raised that there was no regulatory impact statement (RIS) or departmental disclosure statement prepared for this Supplementary Order Paper and that's correct. Officials have advised that the RIS or the departmental disclosure statement was not needed as the SOP does not include any policy changes. It does not include any policy changes because it is a policy-neutral rewrite which is what the previous Government had attempted to do or at least said publicly that they were going to do but unfortunately then we saw at least seven sneaky little policy changes put in there for good measure which we have since taken out.The member Louise Upston has also raised that she feels that the public should have had a chance to look through this SOP. Just reclarifying for that member it's not 500 pages of amendments—this is actually the entire bill with some amendments in it. The reason that we didn't feel the need to take it back to the select committee is that overwhelmingly the response from the select committee when this initially went through the select committee—and I was on it as were Darroch Ball Jan Logie and others in the Chamber. I'm sure they can attest to this too. The submissions pointed out their concern with the fact that that Government of the time had said this would be a policy-neutral rewrite and yet they slipped in about seven policy changes that had not been consulted on or been scrutinised adequately by the public. They have been snuck in to what was meant to be a policy-neutral rewrite. So by removing those there's no need for us to take it back to a select committee because it responds to the concern that was raised by the public at the time during that select committee submission process.We've been very careful this Government to make sure that we're not introducing anything that resembles a policy change. We have concentrated on making sure that this is a genuine clean-up of the legislation responding to the fact that people like Sir Geoffrey Palmer have said it was one of the worst pieces of statute in this country and so we needed to focus on cleaning it up which is what we've done.So I don't accept the criticism that it needed to be taken back to the select committee and if the member was to reflect and check the submissions during that time—I understand she wasn't on the select committee so doesn't have that detailed understanding—she would find that all we're doing as a Government is responding to what the public wanted in the first place. So I'm pretty comfortable with the fact actually that we're not wasting the public's time by taking this back to select committee.The member also said that she was concerned about the fact that this is denying the public the right to scrutinise it appropriately. I've already pointed out the reasons why that's not a valid concern at all. But I also want to point out the fact that at the time this came to the select committee we were really concerned on the select committee that they were giving it a shortened report-back time frame when it was a 500-page piece of legislation. It was going to be one of the biggest rewrites that we would have seen during our time here. The year 1964 was the last time that it had been given a decent rewrite. Over that period of time from 1964 to 2016 it has been amended hundreds of times.So we need to go back to the fact that actually it was the previous Government that was not really undertaking due diligence at their time in office by not allowing the select committee to have the full period of time to be able to scrutinise the rewrite. I suspect unfortunately that that was due to the fact that they had just wanted to get those seven policy changes through in what was meant to be a policy-neutral rewrite.I think I've responded to the vast majority of concerns that were raised. I did want to say also that the member raised the removal of the principle around social investment. I was questioned by the member Jo Hayes about our approach to social investment. I will say that we did remove it from the principles because that was a major change. There were actually 18 submissions just on that one principle being inserted into the un-policy un-neutral rewrite that the previous Government undertook. Eighteen submissions had advocated for the removal of that particular principle. Submitters had raised their concerns that the principle was discriminatory targeting certain groups; that it would entrench a punitive approach to welfare; and that it characterised welfare as a burden rather than a community and State responsibility.In fact the IHC said People with intellectual disability are already subject to a multitude of labels that have been imposed on them by others … The addition of 'long term welfare dependent' will add yet another label …". It was that negativity that we take seriously in terms of needing to remove from it our social security settings because for us on this side of the Chamber—and this is where the contrast in what social investment or investing in social well-being is—it is about maximising New Zealanders' potential seeing the absolute potential in what they have to offer as opposed to viewing people as potential long-term liabilities to the State and only looking for risk factors to be able to measure how the State may be able to avoid having to mitigate risk. And by doing that the previous Government were absolutely underestimating the potential of New Zealanders—putting a deficit lens on New Zealanders particularly beneficiaries. Unfortunately they were never going to achieve the positive outcomes for New Zealanders or help New Zealanders to realise real social well-being in the way this Government is attempting to do and no doubt will do. Thank you."