Street Maryan: New Zealand Public Health and Disability Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeStreet Maryan: New Zealand Public Health and Disability Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 16 May 2013. Volume:690;Page:10155. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon MARYAN STREET (Labour): That is right—age before beauty again. I rise to join this debate in the Committee stage of this bill the New Zealand Public Health and Disability Amendment Bill (No 2) because there is a need to do so. I wish that I did not have to but I do. I want to talk particularly about the regulatory impact statement which a number of colleagues have traversed already. I want to talk about it from a slightly different point of view and I want to talk also about the report of the Attorney-General.In the course of drafting legislation regulatory impact statements are made. The advice that has gone to Ministers is put out and the justification for the choice that the Minister has made is displayed—or that is normally the case. That is normally the case. So we have here in this regulatory impact statement the comparisons between the options that were available to the Minister of Health on advice from officials. There were nine options. There was a matrix of three different options with three possibilities within each of those.The option that the Minister has chosen is the medium targeting one which would pay family carers in high and very high need situations. He has chosen the third of the options in that stream which we are advised would cost between $17 million and $30 million—$17 million and $30 million. Another option that he could have chosen was option C which is that of no targeting and paying everybody—all family carers—who provides ministry-contracted home support services. The third option in that stream would have cost a maximum of $46 million. So we have a difference of $16 million between the two better options.That $16 million could have taken the scope of people being covered from 1600 disabled persons whose families would be paid to support them to 5400—everybody. And yet the Minister has chosen to take the lesser of those options for the sake of $16 million. That $16 million dollars is fairly comparable to the amount of money the Government took out of adult and community education some years ago which did enormous damage to a whole network of adult education learning opportunities acrossthe country. The Government has cut a third of the environment portfolio appropriations—34 percent out of that portfolio. It is giving $80 million as a subsidy to farmers for irrigation and yet it cannot find $16 million to do the best option for the most people—the best option for the most people.So looking at this regulatory impact statement I think to myself that if I were a Minister—and I was briefly—and I look at this through a Minister’s eyes I would want to go through these recommended options and say “OK. Where are the risks? What are the risks in here around these options and why would I not go for the best option for the greatest number of people?”. I would look for advice from officials about the significant risks. I go through the paper and I come to the bit that says “significant legal risks”. “Significant legal issues and risks arising from the preferred response” is the heading here—significant legal issues and risks arising from the preferred response.Ministers must always be mindful of the risks. They must always be able to defend why they have taken a particular policy option and what the upsides and downsides of that policy option are. And so I go straight to that section like a homing pigeon having been a Minister and ask what the risks are here. And what do we find? Here is the heading. Here is the answer: it is all blacked out. So I go over the page because I want to know some more about the legal risks. And here is the page—everything is blacked out. Here we go.How am I as a responsible member of Parliament meant to know and on what basis has the Minister made a responsible decision if this blacked-out paper is what we get in the way of consideration of significant legal issues and risks pertaining to the best option? This is not good enough. The Minister can sit there knowing that he has to just endure this period of time in the House. He has to just get through it. And if he sits there quietly and if none of the National members get up to defend the bill he knows that the time will pass—because all of this is time limited—and he will get his way in the end. So he will sit here and think: “I hope everybody who has an interest in this is at work or not watching Parliament on TV because otherwise I might have to get up and answer some questions.” But the truth of the matter is that this blacking out of the paper is not good enough and it is no basis on which this Parliament ought to be assessing the proper risks and legal issues around this.Let me touch further on the legal issues. The Attorney-General has written a report and points out the fact that clause 4 of this bill inserts a new section 70E into the principal Act that prevents a person from making a complaint to the Human Rights Commission or commencing proceedings at the Human Rights Review Tribunal. It prevents the Human Rights Commission also from taking any further action in relation to a complaint made after 16 May. What is the date on the wall today? Because we are in urgency—most of the rest of the world thinks it is 17 May—in this place it is 16 May. This is the first occasion when people have been advised that if they did not get a complaint in before today they were not going to be able to go to the Human Rights Commission.At the end of this report from the Attorney-General he says that the new section 70E “appears to limit the right to judicial review because it would prevent a person from challenging the lawfulness of a decision on the basis that it was inconsistent with s 19(1) of the Bill of Rights Act.” “On balance” he says “I have concluded that limitation cannot be justified under s 5 of the Bill of Rights Act.” It cannot be justified.Why do we not have the Minister getting up and saying “I understand what the Attorney-General has said but I reckon on these grounds Parliament should take that into consideration but proceed in this way.” We are getting no response from the Minister because he just wants to sit here and wait for the time to elapse for this to get out of his hair and for us to all sit down but it does require some response. Not only isthe blanking out of sections of the regulatory impact statement not good enough but the Government is not responding and not saying to this House why it should not take into account the point that the Attorney-General has made which is that it is an infringement of human rights in New Zealand if we proceed with this legislation the way it is. Why do we not hear from the Minister justifying why we should proceed with this legislation?Labour would like to vote for this. We would like to support it because we believe that people do deserve to be paid for caring for disabled family members. This is otherwise health care on the cheap and that I have to say is a feature of this Government also. It wants conservation on the cheap by devolving it to volunteer groups. It wants housing on the cheap by devolving it to the third sector. It wanted and enjoyed health care on the cheap by limiting the amount that it pays family members and then making people pay for it as my colleague says.This bill is not good enough. It should have gone to a select committee. There is no need for it to be passed in urgency. It raises too many points that need to be thoroughly debated and submitted on by the public of New Zealand. This is not good enough. It is the way this Minister works—simply to wield power and push his will through—but it is not good enough.