Moroney Sue: New Zealand Public Health and Disability Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMoroney Sue: 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:10186. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]SUE MORONEY (Labour): Clause 4 is the part of the New Zealand Public Health and Disability Amendment Bill (No 2) that actually gets to the detail—or the part that we would hope would get to the detail—of what the changes actually are and of course this will need some substantial level of debate. In lieu of a select committee process due to the Government’s decision to rush all parts of this legislation through in urgency new Part 4A in clause 4 is what we really need to understand the detail of. I think as colleagues have already pointed out that if we leave this parliamentary session and this bill is passed what will members of Parliament be reporting to constituents? We really do not have the amount of detail that we need. The whole point of the Committee stage with the officials in the room—particularly when there is not going to be a select committee process—is that the Minister in the chair would actually use the advice from the officials to answer the questions that are being raised by this side of the Committee. So far the questions that we have raised have not been answered. Many of them have not been answered.I want to talk about new section 70D in clause 4—and yes as my colleague the Hon Ruth Dyson pointed out it is called 70D because it is the tail end of a very large Act the New Zealand Public Health and Disability Act. It is getting towards the tail end of it under something that is kind of loosely known as “miscellaneous provisions”—that is we shove everything there that is not really substantive and is not really substantial. That is where these amendments are going. This substantial change is so important to those seven families who have been battling this issue for two decades. Again I just want to take the opportunity to congratulate those families on their tenacity. It has not been easy. I know that at least one of those families is from Hamilton because they have come to see me to talk about the issue. They have battled for this. Here we are under urgency going through all stages of the bill without the completeness of the detail.So we know that new section 70D is going to cancel arrangements that district health boards may already have in place in terms of paying family carers. That is what I believe new section 70D says—that some district health boards may already have thesearrangements in place. I am not sure whether members opposite seem to think that any of them have but why then would they have drafted this new section 70D that says if they have got them in place then they are cancelled? We need to know the impact of that on the families who may currently have those arrangements in place through their district health board. There may be families who already receive this payment or a different type of payment—a greater payment in fact—for taking care of their family members with disabilities. New section 70D actually cancels that arrangement. So these are the reasons why we need if not a select committee process—and I would argue we absolutely need that select committee process so that those families who are having their arrangements cancelled could come and warn us about what that impact is going to be on them. In lieu of that can we at least have the Minister of Health on his feet consulting the officials and answering the questions that have been raised?I want to refer to Catherine Delahunty’s very good speech earlier about the young man she was referring to. We do not know whether he will be included or not whether his family will in fact receive a payment under these changes in this clause or not because we do not know what the definition of “high needs” is. We know what the definition is of the various family members who will meet the criteria. That much is clear—at least I think it is clear. We know what those definitions are but we do not know who is defined as being of high need. We know what age group it is going to apply to: only those over 18. We have not had any explanation about why the age of 18 has been chosen or what is going to happen to those under the age of 18 who may already be getting these payments from district health boards under the arrangements that new section 70D cancels. But we do not know even for those over the age of 18 who will actually qualify for this payment and we do not know actually how much the payment will be. We do not know what the level of payment will be. We know that it will be lawful—it will be made legal—for it to be below what non - family members are paid for caring for exactly the same person but we do not know how much lower that might be.The Government has said it will not have the details available until September. That is when the Government says the details of how this will operate will be known. Well if that is the case why are we debating this in urgency now? The Government is not even planning to enact it until 1 October it will not know the details until September and it has the House in urgency today going through all stages of the bill without that level of detail. That is where this is going to go wrong. I think many of us have had experiences in this House where legislation has been rushed through and it has been poorly thought-out and then we are back within a matter sometimes of months or sometimes it takes a few years taking up more parliamentary time going through and fixing up the things that went wrong the first time.I want to raise an issue that I raised earlier in the debate because I still have not had an answer from the Minister. It is incredibly important because this is a fundamental human right we are about to extinguish. This Parliament—well more properly that Government—is about to extinguish the right of a very important quite vulnerable group of people in our society to actually take a case through the Human Rights Commission about their ability to care for their loved ones. That is what one of the paragraphs of clause 4 is about to do and yet we have no reference to the Human Rights Act in the legislation that is before us. There is not even a consequential amendment that is happening to the Human Rights Act 1993. Why is that? What is the impact of having the New Zealand Public Health and Disability Act say one thing and the Human Rights Act 1993 say another?As it stands at the moment the Human Rights Act would allow all of those families to actually put their case before the Human Rights Commission. That is one of theproblems that we have. If we were having a select committee process then we would actually be able to get some official advice on that. We would be able to find out what the implications were of those two Acts saying something quite different from each other and I think we would get to a logical conclusion. That is the point of having a select committee process.But instead this document I am holding is what we have. It is not a piece of abstract art as some might think it is on the TV screen—I am sure that it is what it looks like. This is designed to be the regulatory impact statement. It is supposed to tell us what the impact on regulation is of this piece of legislation. So not only have we not got a select committee process but we have a completely inadequate—I would say actually a disgraceful—regulatory impact statement because most of the information is hidden. Some people thought “Oh look it’s a mistake. In their hurry what’s happened is the Government’s used a highlighter you know to highlight some sections and then they’ve photocopied it and it’s come out black.” Well that is not what has happened. It is a deliberate attempt to actually—The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Order! We have had the debate on that. We are on clause 4.SUE MORONEY: The detail of clause 4 might be here in this regulatory impact statement for all we know. It might be here for all we know but who will ever know?As the Opposition spokesperson on women’s affairs I am concerned to know what the impact is on women because in this area it is mainly women who are providing this family care—not always but in the main it is women. Yet we have not enough detail in clause 4 for us to actually even ascertain what that is going to mean. We do not know what the pay rate is going to be for example. We just do not know what the pay rate is going to be. And because it is going to be mainly women to whom this pay rate actually applies then that is a major issue that we need to know about. Is that Government even interested in knowing what the gender impact of this legislation is? It does not appear to be at all interested in that. Certainly this regulatory impact statement tells us nothing about the impact on gender—well it might but who would know? It might be hidden under one of these—