Craig LizDr LIZ CRAIG (Labour): Thank you Mr Speaker. It's a real pleasure to speak on the third and final reading of this bill the Child Support (Pass On) Acts Amendment Bill. This bill is really important because as we've heard it removes that discriminatory policy that sees parents receiving a sole parent rate of benefit treated differently to those receiving other benefits with respect to their child support.To illustrate the unfairness of the current situation I just want to take you through a hypothetical example. If you've got a sole parent managing childcare managing work and taking care of their two children and then through no fault of their own they lose their job and become reliant on the sole parent rate of the benefit what that means is that they have to go to Inland Revenue Department (IRD) for a formula assessment of child support. But once that's done what they find out is that all of the child support that would then be paid through to them actually gets retained by the Government gets retained to the point until all the funds that went towards their benefit have been recouped and only then can whatever's leftover be passed on to them.Now just imagine this person then going and having a bit of a chat to the neighbour and finding out that the neighbour is now living with their new partner and together they're receiving the couple's rate of the benefit. But what the person then finds out is that their neighbour has all their child support being passed on to them and so none of that is being retained. The only issue is that the neighbour then has to just let Ministry of Social Development know that that's what they're receiving in child support because then it can be taken into account as income.So what this bill will do is actually remove that discriminatory policy. What it does is it removes the requirement for those on sole parent rate of benefit to apply for an IRD formula assessment. It also ensures that all of their child support payments are passed on to them. It will be treated as income but if you look at it on balance what we end up with is thousands of children being lifted out of poverty and what it means is that once all of those abatements are taken into account people will be on average $20 a week better off. That's a huge amount of money for many families in the context of current cost of living issues.One of the things that submitters raised during the select committee process was just a concern that because some parents may be receiving variable amounts of child support there was a concern that we didn't want to see extra benefit debt accruing as a result. What I was really encouraged by was the amount of work in the policy development phase that had gone into making sure that income-sharing arrangements could mean that this wouldn't happen because it was a very accurate assessment of what somebody was receiving in child support and what the implications would be for any other assistance.This is a very important bill that will as I've said lift thousands of children out of poverty. But it's not in isolation; it actually builds on a lot of the other work that the Government has been doing in terms of increasing family incomes—things like increasing the benefit but also removing the financial penalty for sole parent beneficiaries who didn't name the other parent of their child and then applied for child support. So that was something else that works in tandem with this. But also things like increasing family incomes in terms of the winter energy payment for those many families who will be receiving the winter energy payment right now—particularly down our way it is particularly cold. So that is something that many many people are really appreciative of. We've also changed the abatement threshold so that again people can actually go out earn more income and then retain more of that income to support their family. So there's a lot of things that this Government has done to increase family incomes and this is a further step in that direction. I'm very happy to commend it to the House.