Menéndez March RicardoRICARDO MENÉNDEZ MARCH (Green): It's a pleasure to be supporting the third reading of the Child Support (Pass On) Acts Amendment Bill just reflecting on how much throughout the different stages of the bill the discussions have been on political choices. We've built an income support system—and successive Governments have chosen to create an income support system—that has kept our families in poverty. We've created an income support system with sanctions that have penalised families and yet throughout the passage of this bill we've also seen the choice of language by the National Party that despite knowing that they've contributed to creating an income support system that has kept our children in poverty they now talk about their so-called concerns about families in benefit-dependent households and the poor outcomes that people in benefit-dependent households experience. They're pretending that those poor outcomes have nothing to do with the decisions that successive Governments have made to keep people locked in poverty.It should come as no surprise that of course families in poverty experience poor outcomes because of the decisions that Governments have made and today we're finally moving a bill through that will mend some of those mistakes that have been made before which was to create a system that has forced families into a traditional Western-style Victorian-era family structure that simply does not reflect families of today or traditional family structures of the past. The Child Support (Pass On) Acts Amendment Bill will go some way towards alleviating poverty and ensuring that households receive the money that is supposed to be going to the child—rather than creating a system that pretends to create some form of responsibilities for the so-called liable parent they're actually seeing material differences for the children in the first place.I want to acknowledge there were comments around the passage of this bill when it came to the time frames and urgency. It is true it could have had a more robust exchange regarding the potential for further alleviating poverty if the child support pass on hadn't been treated as income for the purposes of determining someone's benefit entitlements but the truth is that this bill will go some way towards alleviating poverty and the Greens support this as a result. I do think we'll need to have more conversations though about the child support system more broadly because at the end of the day what we are retaining is a system that still puts a child's ability to be in a household that thrives dependent on the family structure rather than on all of us rallying to say that a child's wellbeing should be unconditional and it should not be dependent on people's family arrangements—and again this outdated idea that it is only the biological parents who have responsibility to raise a child. We all have a collective responsibility to our children in Aotearoa. It takes a whole village—a whole country—to raise healthy thriving children.So the Greens will be supporting this third reading. We want to thank submitters—people who shared their lived experiences of receiving child support and who clearly communicated to us the need to have a more fair system. Again it was indeed a missed opportunity to have not done modelling to assess the child poverty reduction impacts when it came to treating that income as a potential abatement for benefit entitlement but that is all stuff we can continue exploring and I want to urge my Labour colleagues to set more aspirational goals to not just reduce child poverty but to fully eliminate it. We need to actually meet the challenges of today with the ambition that it requires. Twenty dollars' net gain for those families will help but is it enough? Of course it is not. The question is: what else will be coming from the Labour Party to ensure that no child is locked in poverty? We look forward to seeing future legislation from this Government to end poverty once and for all.