Cunliffe David: Child Support Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Cunliffe David: Child Support Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 27 February 2013. Volume:687;Page:8308. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE (Labour—New Lynn) 
: 
 We are here to debate the title and commencement of the Child Support Amendment Bill. It is an opportunity for members to draw together the overall themes of the debate in the Committee stage. The title is often the focus for that tying together of ideas. I think the bill should be called the “Child Support Almost Amendment Bill” because it has been an almost process over the almost 5 years that this Government has been working on it. It almost created a meaningful reform but it did not quite and that is why we are voting against this bill. 
It is a huge lost opportunity. It is a lost opportunity to address the plight—and I got this wrong in earlier contributions—of 133000 children who are dependent upon child support. I thought there was a proportion of that total of dependants who were in sole parent families but I now know that that is the total number of children dependent upon child support: 133000 children. That is a staggering amount of vulnerable kids in our community and our country who are dependent upon what this Committee does tonight. The problem is that the Government is not doing enough. It is just not doing enough. It could have written the interests of those children into the law for good and always. It could have reflected the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in this law but it did not. It almost did but it did not. 
It could have restated that the overriding goal in the event of a separation is to provide for the well-being of the children of the partnership because the adults are the ones making the decisions and the children have no choice. The adults have choices. The children are dependent. The adults created the problems. The children pay the price. So to the 133000 youngsters who are in that challenged situation Labour members say we are sorry. We worked hard in the Social Services Committee to bring the Government to the point where it could include their interests as a legislative priority but National members voted against even consulting their Minister on that international best practice. I find it so disappointing that they would be prepared to march in lock step with the executive rather than represent in this Parliament the interests of 133000 faultless vulnerable young New Zealanders. 
It could be called the “Inadequacy of Payments Bill” as that issue is another part of the “Child Support Almost Amendment Bill”. Submitters raised concerns about the adequacy of payments because of the formula in the legislation particularly given the fact that the baseline here is that so many of those children are living in poverty. What we do know about when families break up is that most often despite the fact that these laws exist the mother who is usually the custodial parent and the kids are the ones doing it tough. Most often the dads are able to recover financially and find it easier to move on with their lives because they do not have the primary burden of childcare. 
And worse than that the system that we have had—which is only partially only almost addressed by this bill which we cannot yet support—has locked out parents who may have had the best of intentions but were unable to keep up with their payments and have then been slammed with penalties that have locked them out of the system. Too many of them have left huge holes in the hearts of their kids and ruined their own lives by fleeing the country. It is a human tragedy on a vast scale. This Parliament could have almost fixed it but it did not— 
Hon John Banks 
: A late leadership bid. 
Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE 
: —“Mr Dotcom” it did not. It did not. 
There is no pass-on mechanism in this bill. It could almost have fixed the problem of pass-on but it did not. The select committee was confronted by extensive international evidence that liable parents—international best practice is very clear on the point that where parents know that the finance that they are providing goes straight to the children they are more likely to pay it. They are more likely to meet their obligations. That has also been set out very clearly in the Labour Party’s and Green Party’s minority views in the select committee report. We hope that the public and the courts will have regard to those minority views. The adequacy of the payments is not strong enough. 
National members say that—this has been their overriding rebuttal I suppose—this bill is not about child poverty. Well hello! For 133000 New Zealand children this bill represents their lifeline. Because if it was not for this bill they would be entirely dependent on the taxpayer whom this Government says it is thrifty and frugal to protect. It cannot have it both ways. This bill contains a $42 million extra price tag to the taxpayer and less money going to mothers and dependent children. It is a conjuring act of such stupidity that it is hard to credit that it took 4 years to get there. So no wonder we cannot support it. 
The implication for women of this “Child Support Almost Amendment Bill” is that as on average women earn less than men they are more likely to be the primary caregivers they are more likely to be vulnerable and they are more likely to struggle in a post-separation environment many women will be worse off as a result of these changes. 
It was almost a reform bill in the sense that the Government almost had the opportunity to come up with a formula that people could actually understand but it did not. This House has not. It has come up with a formula so opaque that I am told it took an extensive whiteboard session with multiple explanations by officials to the highly qualified members of the select committee who after a while could almost grasp it. If it took a bunch of tertiary qualified members of Parliament half a day to get their heads around an arithmetic formula—even investment bankers like the “Earl of Otahuhu” over there—then it is no wonder that parents would find it extremely difficult to see their way clear to voluntary arrangements that would protect their families when the counterfactual requires a crystal ball to stare into to be seen. 
Thirdly it is an opt-out system replacing an opt-in system. That matters because it was almost an amendment that could have protected natural justice but it was not. And it was not because this bill requires people to be proactive in telling their employers why they cannot have access to their personal financial details. It should be the other way round. Every working New Zealander knows it should be the other way round. Our personal information should be private until and unless we choose to make it not. Otherwise you get the Paula Bennett phenomenon where people’s personal Government-held information is put in the public domain for the purpose of suppressing dissent and that is a shame. That is almost as good—and I may be slightly tangential to the title of this bill—as the Prime Minister’s memory when he has meetings with casinos. But we will not go there in this debate. 
The adequacy of the Inland Revenue Department’s computer systems is the next issue with this almost amendment because if we could almost get the community’s head around the formula if we could almost see our way clear to the interests of the children and if we could almost protect the women of the country the Inland Revenue Department’s computer could not deliver because it needs $1.2 billion worth of upgrades. 
Finally this was almost consistent policy making. I say “almost” because my mind is drawn back to 2005 when Judith Collins said writing off debts sends the worst possible message to absent liable parents and 2007 when she demanded that action be taken against parents so that they are stopped at the border if they have an outstanding liability. Then she went further because she does not like being too subtle apparently. She supported making avoiding child support an arrestable offence and now the Government is writing down penalties. Almost consistent.