Brown SimeonSIMEON BROWN (National—Pakuranga): Thank you Madam Chair and I wish you a happy New Year. It's my first time to speak in the House this year so thank you very much and happy New Year to all members of this House. It's great to be here.I'm taking the opportunity to take a call on the Social Workers Registration Legislation Bill and I have a couple of amendments which relate to the issue of qualifications for social workers and I have a number of questions for the Minister in the chair Carmel Sepuloni which relate to the new section which describes The Board must by notice in the Gazette prescribe the qualifications for each scope of practice that the Board describes"—this is in new Part 1A inserted by new clause 6A. It describes the qualification—well it doesn't describe the qualifications and my amendment here is to propose to delete new section 5A(2) of Supplementary Order Paper 187 to reinstate recognition of New Zealand qualifications for the time being recognised as being appropriate for social workers in New Zealand.The questions that I have in relation to these clauses here is regarding what qualifications are currently being used by social workers and what qualifications will be required in the future for social workers because it seems by reading the bill that the board must by notice in the Gazette describe the social work services that are prescribed and then the board must prescribe the qualifications but there seems to be a lack of clarity around what those qualifications will be in the future. So my question is: how will those social workers who do an excellent job in our community—how will their qualifications be recognised? Are we going to be losing people who have exceptional experience who may not have the prescribed qualifications which will be prescribed by the Minister in the Gazette? What will those qualifications be and what are the numbers? I'd like the Minister to provide to the House some information in regards to what advice she has received from officials around those qualification issues so that social workers can have that information provided to them.I think it's important that we think about the—what seems to be—retrospective nature of this legislation. It says that the board must prescribe the qualifications but then we aren't told what those qualifications might be and we're also not given assurances as to what will happen to social workers who currently may have qualifications or will have some experience. I think that does raise some questions around the process which the Minister has undertaken in putting forward a Supplementary Order Paper which hasn't had the opportunity to go to a select committee and to be scrutinised properly by the select committee and even potentially to take some submissions from the sector on it. I think you know this is something which the Social Services and Community Committee could have well done in a very short period of time to look into these issues and also to be able to ask officials directly as to what their opinion on these matters could be. I think it's important that Parliament is putting legislation forward which does provide as much certainty and as much clarity as possible when it comes to giving the board powers to put things in a Gazette that give powers to another body to be able to make those decisions. That raises further uncertainty around what those decisions might be.That also means that that's going to take additional time and it seems odd that the Minister's found the time to be able to put together quite a substantial Supplementary Order Paper without having the time to actually go and really put in legislation the parameters of what the board will be deciding and what that might look like. I think that again goes back to the process issue. Again it goes back to the retrospective nature and to around how we're going to ensure that the experience that our social workers do have in the community the amazing work that they've done—how is that going to be recognised? It's not just the qualifications that they've received and not just the qualifications they've got over their time but also the enormous experience that they've got from working in the sector."