Logie Jan: Support for Children in Hardship Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLogie Jan: Support for Children in Hardship Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 01 December 2015. Volume:710;Page:8433. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAN LOGIE (Green): I am pleased to take a short call on the title and the commencement of this bill the Support for Children in Hardship Bill. I would like to reinforce initially before going on to make other points the point made by the Labour Party’s Sue Moroney about how sad it is to see the concept and the acceptance of so many of our children living in hardship being put on to the statute book.That is not the Green Party’s vision for New Zealand. Our vision is for a country where all of our children are able to thrive and that does not include living in hardship. We know that when a child is living in hardship and is living in poverty their lifetime opportunities are being taken away from them. Childhood poverty impacts on your ability to learn on your health and on your ability to succeed in life for the rest of your life. To accept that and to put it on to our statute book is a sad thing and it is a sad day to be doing that.I would like to also focus on the fact that this bill is suggesting that there is support for children. Just coming back to some of the submissions that were made on this bill I note Unicef’s contribution. Unicef noted that it felt that we have been so focused on work that we have lost sight of children. To me that speaks a truth that is quite reflected in this bill. The bill might be better named the “Support for Parents Into Further Work Bill” because that does seem to be the main thrust of this bill. It is again removing parents’ choice in the way to parent and is putting more people into the job market even though we have still very entrenched and I think unacceptably high levels of unemployment. Over 100000 people who are in part-time employment are still looking for more hours. This is just flooding the market with another group of people when we know we do not have enough jobs to go around. So the bill would seem even to be better named the “Stick of Ideology Bill”.I note also in the Unicef submission where it talked about the fact that children say that they want their parents around and that they want them to stop being angry and that children in this country are really affected by the stress that their parents are experiencing—and these are parents in work and parents out of work. If we were focused on children and supporting children then actually we would be looking right across the policy levers to improve that situation.I was at the launch of the living wage in Porirua recently when there was a young man who got up and spoke. He talked about running away from home at the age of 6 to go down to the local shops to ask for a job because he was so upset and feeling so bad for his parents who were working so hard and were struggling so much and were so stressed that he just wanted to be able to help them out. That is unnecessary and unacceptable. To quote the words of the great Russel Norman Governments cannot mend a broken heart but they can put food in a kid’s belly and they should.If we were looking at supporting our children in this country that is what we would be focusing on. We would be focusing on making sure that all of our children had enough food and that they all had a stable roof over their head—something that is increasingly unlikely for so many of these children. We would make sure that they were able to attend sports activities and cultural groups that they could get to different places to visit different people and experience different things that they would have warm enough clothing in winter that when it is raining they would have shoes on their feet and raincoats—things that when I grew up in Invercargill in a family with lots of friends who were working-class families were just completely taken for granted.