Logie Jan: Estimates Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLogie Jan: Estimates Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 01 July 2014. Volume:700;Page:19108. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAN LOGIE (Green):The Green Party loves New Zealand which is why we want a cleaner smarter and fairer New Zealand and a Ministry of Social Development. The Green Party and its MPs are absolutely passionate about making New Zealand a great place to grow up in for all of our children. When one in four children live in poverty in this country something is going seriously wrong. The Greens have been calling for action on child poverty since 1999. We will keep on calling for action and proposing solutions until we eliminate the problem. But this is not about us; this is about New Zealand.Over the last 3 years along with most other New Zealanders in the country we have been listening to the Children’s Commissioner academics doctors community advocates parents and children themselves asking us to put children first. We have been watching the documentaries and the news programmes along with the rest of the country and reading the reports from the Expert Advisory Group on Solutions to Child Poverty the thousands of submissions on the green paper the white paper and the Vulnerable Children Bill as well as the all too numerous media stories and opinion pieces calling for us in this House to address inequality and end child poverty. New Zealand we will continue to listen and carry your voices for our children into this place until we create a country where every child thrives.With the rest of the country we have been seeing the pictures of empty school lunchboxes of mouldy houses of children without shoes or raincoats. We have read recently about the young mother and her newborn baby who had to live in a car for two days after they were discharged from hospital because there was no housing available for them. Like the rest of the country I assume we have fumed at and at times cried over the fact that more than one child a week is dying of poverty-related illness in this country that we love. At times the stories feel endless and heart-breaking. How much more it must feel like that for those who are living through it. The cruelty is real. But it is not the cruelty of an individual; it is the cruelty of a Government that has chosen to prioritise token efforts over addressing the real problems of poverty-level benefits low wages and substandard housing.Of course we are being told that the Government is investing in our people helping them into work. Well last week I met with some students and tutors on a Work and Income mandated course to find out how that was going for them. The tutor talked to me about her concern that a mother on her course had had her benefit cut in half for missing 3 days of the course when it turned out that she had to go with her baby to hospital after her baby had had a seizure and she did not have enough money on her phone to be able to inform anyone of that fact. So their income had been cut in half while they were stuck in hospital. We heard from a student about how they had previously had their benefit sanctioned entirely for missing an appointment because their public transport was running late.This is happening now in our country and the sheer reality of being poor means that there are times when some people cannot afford even to meet the expectations of Work and Income to be able to get their income support. Everyone in that room of about 20 students and their tutor talked about not being able to afford to heat their house or put proper food on their table. The young ones even talked about not being able to afford the $40 to buy a blanket to compensate for the lack of heating in their house. So much for a wraparound service so much for supporting people and so much for investment!It does not have to be this way. It is not even about throwing money at the problem and leaving people stuck in inequality as this Government suggests we want to do. Even at the most basic level it is actually about ensuring people get access to their legal entitlements. Surely at the absolute minimum that is the job of this Government. Yet when we have asked the Minister for Social Development in this House how she explains the increasing number of stories that we are hearing from the community of people being denied their legal entitlements her response was: “For every one story you give me I can give you 10 of people who are getting the entitlements they are eligible for.”Well the basic point is that everyone is entitled to those services and it is this Government’s job to ensure that people are able to get enough money to put food on the table. That is what we consider a social security system. It is not in any way OK to say: “Well these 10 people are getting it sorry about those ones.” That is not doing your job. That is not providing even the bare minimum of what this country has agreed on let alone what is I believe a building consensus from academics from community organisations and from people working across our health sector our education sector and our community sector who are all saying that there needs to be more. There needs to be a living income for these families and particularly for our children because we know that if we do not invest in those early years of a child’s life then we are robbing them of their potential. That is something that every single person in this country will have to bear the consequences of.I really do want to speak just a little bit around the perception that this is too expensive to do. This is not an issue just about this Government and these estimates; it is about a framework that was put in place previously that has been consciously continued by this Government. There has been a decision to prioritise getting these families into work as the way out of poverty for these families. I think that we have missed the fact of the interaction between work and income support—that there is an interaction between those two things. I would like to point out that the Government is currently spending more on family in-work tax credits for families working 20 hours a week than what it is spending on the income support system. The analysis by the Child Poverty Action Group showed up that somebody coming off the DPB into paid work for 20 hours a week would be getting on top of their income a minimum family tax credit of $22000 a year plus the in-work tax credit of $3000 a year. So that is over $25000 a year for that family that is working less than 20 hours a week. What they would get on the DPB would be $15000. So the Government is paying a lot more for that group.The problem with that is—because it is great for people to be able to work if that is appropriate for their family and they are still able to look after their children—that this is a system that creates a disincentive for those employers to pay anything more than the minimum wage. On the minimum wage somebody who is working the 20 hours a week would have to work an additional 17 hours before being any better off financially. What employer is going to pay somebody above the minimum wage if it is not going to give them anything more in the hand? Basically those employers are not going to do that. That does not affect just that one person stuck on the minimum wage; it affects all other workers in New Zealand who are trying to get better conditions. So when the Government tells us that it is all about work being the pathway out of poverty actually what this is doing is entrenching people into poverty. When the Government took away the training incentive allowance for parents to be able to do higher-level study to be able to get a chance of getting into that higher-wage bracket of work we saw the lie of it.