Wall LouisaLOUISA WALL (Labour—Manurewa): Kia ora e Te Māngai o Te Whare. Thank you very much for the opportunity to contribute in this the first reading of the Children Young Persons and Their Families (Advocacy Workforce and Age Settings) Amendment Bill 2016. I am not a member of the Social Services Committee but I am Labour's youth affairs spokesperson so I take particular interest in this piece of legislation. I immediately want to focus on one of the main features of the bill which is about extending the age of State care and protection to a young person's 18th birthday. There are some questions that I have already. It seems that in increasing the age to 18 there has been a lot of discussion about what that age should be. Some people think it should be 21; some people think it should be 25. I found a piece of research that is associated with ActionStation and its petition which is currently wanting to increase the age of foster care to 21 years. It is interesting to note that one of the key findings was actually Why 21?" because actually when we look at young people today on average they stay at home until they are 23. Young people today actually need the continued support of their parents and so it is one of the rationales from ActionStation and its campaign partners—and I want to list them all: Dingwall Trust Lifewise Youthline Child Poverty Action Group Wesley Community Action Christchurch Methodist Mission—for why they are currently engaging in a public process to say that the age should be 21. So I do want to say to the Government that moving the age up to their 18th birthday which I guess technically is when a person stops being a child and becomes an adult is a step in the right direction. I can understand some of the rationale for that particular age but actually when we look at the specific cohort of young people I think that we should already seriously start looking at that age. From the perspective of a lot of organisations involved in the care and protection of our children they think that that age should be 21. One of the other questions I have in relation to that first point is why the age is increased only in respect of children in care and protection. Why does that particular statutory responsibility on the State not extend to young people in the youth justice sector? It has been really baffling to try to determine why the Government has chosen to do this. The bill states that its purpose is "reforming the system of services for responding to the needs of vulnerable children and young persons". So what do you do when you get a purpose like that—actually look at definitions? Well I do. The definition of "vulnerable" is "People who are in need of special care support or protection because of risk of abuse and neglect." So you start working through a process about why the Government would have excluded young people in our youth justice system when they are going to be providing for young people in our care and protection system. Then you actually look at the Modernising Child Youth and Family Expert Panel: Interim Report. Its vision for New Zealand children is "that New Zealand values the wellbeing of our children above all else." When it states the role of the State in caring for children it says: "The purpose of the care protection and youth justice system is to ensure children and young people are in loving families and communities where they can be safe strong and flourish." When you look at the principles that drove the Government's expert panel they said that the place of the child or young person had to be at the centre of everything they did. This piece of legislative reform is supposed to meet the needs of the most vulnerable young people who are in our Child Youth and Family Services (CYFS) system. They are either in our care and protection system or they are encapsulated within our youth justice system. So it is interesting or baffling as to why children in the youth justice sector are not included—and explicitly—in this piece of legislation. One can only assume that there is some political issue about including young people in the youth justice system that possibly means that the Government is going to be soft on crime. Who knows? But we are hoping that some of that motivation for excluding young people actually comes to the fore and that we can actually understand what this Government is trying to do. On the face of it it is contradicting recommendations from its expert panel. For somebody who is incredibly interested in this piece of legislation I will be trying to determine like the rest of the country why that is the case. The other two points that I want to make are around the Government's rationale for the bill being to ensure that the views of children and young people are taken into account as part of decision making at an individual level and in the development of services and policies. What I want to note is that actually in the Children Young Persons and Their Families Act 1989 section 21 it states that it must "give effect to the wishes of the child's or young person's family whānau". Already engrained in the current Act is a commitment to listening to children and ensuring that the voices of the whānau are incorporated in any care planning so I find it again interesting that we have chosen to ensure that the views of children and young people are taken into account because they already should have been. The fact they have not been beggars the question about how the new processes and the new systems are going to ensure that not only the young person's voice is going to be heard and be paramount but also the communities' voices. Those communities are actually the communities of interest associated with the child who is in care and protection and I contend in youth justice facilities. Specifically any formation of advocacy groups or any input has to at the core of it ensure that Māori voices are front and centre because the appalling statistic that we all have to face is that 57 percent of the 3844 children in care are tangata whenua. That is not a random phenomenon. It has happened because over consecutive years the system has failed to meet the needs of Māori. The intergenerational transmission of children in care is actually something that we should all be—what is the word—committed to addressing. The only way we can address it is if we have Māori around the table—and many Māori not one Māori. In fact if we look at the beginning of this process there were no Māori and so I question the integrity of this whole process given Māori have not had many more seats around the table when trying to look at the system that has continued to create and generate a situation where Māori children have been encapsulated in our CYFS youth justice and care and protection system. I cannot not mention the wonderful Judge Mick Brown in my contribution. It was Judge Mick Brown through his work as the first Principal Youth Court Judge who actually brought in family group conferences. He ensured that whānau were intimately involved in trying to deal with youth offending. As a second principle they did make a concerted effort to not charge our youth offenders unless there was a public interest required. I think if you look at the legacy of Judge Mick Brown what he tried to introduce was actually about recidivism—to nip it at the bud—so that we could actually assist those whānau to assist the young people and ensure that they got all the services that they required to address the actual context of some of the behaviour from our young people. I think that is where we have failed actually. We have failed to give our young people and our families the support that they need to provide them with different opportunities in life different pathways different visions different—I guess—life outcomes. So when we look at this piece of legislation I will be scrutinising how involved Māori will be in this process how involved our young people will be because if we end up again like last night creating a prescriptive system that is going to tell our young people and families what to do then we already know that that will fail. I hope that on this side of the House we will think of some amendments to this particular piece of legislation that will make it work for all of our young people. Kia ora."