Woods Megan: Social Assistance (Living Alone Payments) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Woods Megan: Social Assistance (Living Alone Payments) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Sitting date: 11 December 2012. Volume:686;Page:7441. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram) 
: 
 I am happy to take a short call on this bill the Social Assistance (Living Alone Payments) Amendment Bill. I do not think there is anyone in this House—and the speeches that we have heard this morning have indicated this—who does not think that it is a very sensible idea for us to enact this legislation. It will make life much easier for many people. I think there is no one in this House who thinks that elderly people who find themselves in circumstances where they need to receive the single person’s allowance need to go through any bureaucratic hassle in terms of accessing that payment. 
Labour is happy to support this bill and it is happy to congratulate the Government on what is sensible legislation and to make sure that this is no longer an issue for our elderly people. It is really good to see that we have taken this sensible approach and that our elderly are protected and that we have policies in place that have ensured that we have seen the hardship rate for older New Zealanders in fact remain relatively low and relatively flat. So it is not only the relatively low bit but also the relatively flat bit that means we have not seen hardship increasing for our elderly people. The hardship rate has remained relatively low and flat at around 4 to 5 percent. 
Unfortunately this has not been the case for children in our country. Their hardship rate has risen from 15 percent in 2007 to 21 percent in 2011. So we would actually like to see sensible approaches that would address issues that would mean that our children were not living in hardship. It is a matter of working together like we are seeing with this legislation. 
We have heard some chipping across the House—I guess it is the last sitting day for the year—and we have been accused of cherry-picking legislation and told that we must have some consistency on what we support. Well there are a couple of responses to that. One is that we are the Opposition. We are not going to agree with everything you do. Secondly we are happy to support sensible legislation when you put it up. In fact we would welcome you putting up more sensible legislation—Mr Speaker we are sure you would put up only sensible legislation. We would welcome the Government putting up more sensible legislation that did address many of the hardships we are seeing in this country. We would welcome the Government putting up legislation that did something to address the ever-climbing unemployment rate we see in this country. Unfortunately too many New Zealanders are heading into this Christmas period with no job and they are not seeing a merry time for themselves and their families. And they have a Government that has done nothing over the last 12 months to address those issues. 
But like my colleague did after talking about some of the broader issues of our economy I will return to the legislation and the reasons why we are happy to support it. We are happy to support it because what we have seen is a good approach to it and we have also seen that some of the concerns that have been heard at the Social Services Committee need to be taken into account. We have heard that there are real practical things we can do to improve this legislation. 
One of the issues we have heard about is around student allowances and the way in which we need to clear up whether there are distinctions that will have unintended and unfair consequences. We need to take a very practical approach to that where for example a child is over the age of 18 but may have an intellectual disability and could be classified as dependent or when a child is temporarily unable to support themselves. Also this policy is inconsistent with the student allowance policy which I mentioned earlier where a young person is still means-tested on their parents’ incomes until they are 24 years of age thereby classifying them as dependent. We do not believe that these issues are adequately addressed in this bill. We would like to see some of these other issues addressed. We also have some other concerns about this bill and we are putting forward amendments at the Committee stage. The issue of student allowances is one of them but we are also concerned that a provision in the bill relating to dependent children may not take into account the diverse range of situations. But on the whole Labour is happy to support this sensible piece of legislation.