Pugh MaureenMAUREEN PUGH (National): Thank you very much Madam Deputy Speaker. It is a pleasure to rise and speak to the Social Workers Registration Legislation Bill tonight in its second reading. Madam Deputy Speaker I do beg your indulgence before I begin to talk about the bill to take this opportunity to wish communities in Tasman who are still feeling the impacts of the fire all the very best. I pay tribute also to the outstanding outpouring of love and support from within the Nelson-Tasman communities and indeed from across New Zealand and I acknowledge the exemplary work of Fire and Emergency New Zealand and the other agencies doing their very best to keep this fire under control and of course to get people back into their homes. I say thank you to them all.I also wish to acknowledge the new member of the Social Services and Community Committee Agnes Loheni and a very warm welcome to this Parliament to her. I look forward to the pleasure of her company around the Social Services and Community Committee table. It is a pleasure speaking to this bill to introduce a formal registration process for our social workers and as we've heard already tonight this will provide a professionalism to this highly valued workforce. We've also heard tonight that this bill had its first reading in this House on 17 August in 2017. And I just want to make a comment about Peeni Henare—who has just finished his contribution on this bill—who says he wants to get on with the job but it has in fact been quite some time since the rushed report date that the select committee had to meet. And while it has been languishing since that advanced report-back date you have to wonder why the committee could not have given consideration to the Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) that found its way to the Table Office late last week. But this of course is another great piece of legislation introduced by the former National-led Government. However the conversation about social workers registration actually started way back in the year 2000 and it has followed a series of reviews: one in 2007 one in 2012 another in 2015 and then an inquiry in 2016 as requested by the then Minister the Hon Anne Tolley. And it was determined through that select committee inquiry that legislative change would be required to strengthen the framework—the regulatory framework—for the sector which is of course the purpose of this bill. We've also heard tonight about the need for this piece of legislation also to protect the people that the social workers engage with—our more vulnerable citizens. This bill was of high interest to the social worker sector and their employers and as a result the select committee actually received 170 written submissions and we heard 17 oral submissions. They were very detailed and out of those submissions there came some common themes. And talking about themes tonight we are seeing another theme developing which is the habit of dumping significant SOPs—this one a 67-page one as I said delivered to the Table Office late last week at the end of the Christmas break. However we're very grateful it's not as large as the 500-page SOP that was delivered a couple of hours before the second reading of the Social Security Legislation Rewrite Bill. Notice a pattern? Notice a pattern? Hon Member: Oh yeah.MAUREEN PUGH: Yes yes she is making a habit of it. It means that this SOP is not going back through the select committee process and as I said we had ample time last year for the committee to actually scrutinise this new SOP. But no when the Minister considers herself the absolute expert and does not value the expertise of the people who work on the coalface who employ those social workers then I'm afraid that's why we end up with rushed legislation and detail falling through the cracks. And so now they don't have the ability to contribute any further to that SOP. And it's not just small detail; we're actually talking about the scope of practice for the entire industry. I would suggest that that sector—the social workers themselves and their employers—have a huge interest in contributing to the detail of their scope of practice. And had it come back to the select committee we may have found that—for instance we were told during the select committee submission process that district health boards have already developed scopes of practice. We could have aligned those scopes and we could have actually made sure that they were aligned and we ended up with the best piece of legislation or we may have even found that the scope of practice may have been better developed by the Social Workers Registration Board and didn't need to be embedded in legislation. But here we are. So because the sector has not had its opportunity to support or have input into this Supplementary Order Paper this side of the House will not be supporting it. However we will support the bill. It's a very good bill initiated by the very good National-led Government. So of course we understand the need for the legislation and will be supporting it.Now there were other things that the submitters brought up during the process that I'd like to spend some time talking about. In the initial draft of the bill there was considerable concern that the registration process and the annual professional development would be a financial barrier to some people maintaining their registration and as such some of those submitters asked that the contracts and the funding for those contracts be adjusted to reflect the added cost of compliance for the social workers. Now the social workers are also going to be required to have 20 hours of professional development a year and that will come at a cost to their employers and will be a cost to the contract. So again I ask that the Minister takes note of this request from those submitters and ensures that the social workers and their employers are not financially disadvantaged by this legislation.The submitters also raised the issue of workforce continuity and there was a little bit of tension which I picked up between social workers employed by district health boards (DHBs) and those employed by NGOs. The DHBs had a much higher ability to provide a higher hourly rate to their social workers than some NGOs did—and as we know NGOs are really the backbone of our community services and they of course do tend to run on the smell of an oily rag so the last thing we want to do is to add added tension to them. As I said about workforce continuity we need to take into account the ability of those sectors the DHB sector and the NGO sector to have a higher hourly rate and therefore enable those NGOs to maintain their workforce rather than losing them once they've been trained and have had some coalface experience to then be attracted into the DHBs.There was another issue raised by submitters and that was that when the professional development is being set up social workers have cultural competency included in that professional development and they wanted to ensure that that was also included in the legislation. So because of this bill a social worker must undertake that professional development and we are of course supporting that because we understand that we do need the very best workers out there dealing with our most vulnerable but they also need to be subject to professional ethics. Now we take note too that this is an omnibus bill and it will be making changes to the Criminal Records (Clean Slate) Act 2004 which will ensure that any convictions are discoverable during the police vetting of social workers. I thank our social workers for the work that they do in the community—I know there are some watching tonight—and I understand the value that you bring to our communities and the value that your work brings to individuals. Thank you so much.