Chhour KarenKAREN CHHOUR (ACT): Thank you Madam Speaker. It's a pleasure to stand on behalf of ACT and speak to the Social Workers Registration Legislation Amendment Bill. When I first read this I was a little bit concerned. It appeared that we're just kicking the can down the road because we can't meet an obligation by a certain time frame. People have known that this time frame has been coming and we've known that this was going to be repealed in 2024 for quite a while and it just feels that the Government has not come to the party to make sure that we have filled this gap in the time frame that they wanted—especially seeing as since 2021 the requirement was made that it was compulsory to be registered with the Social Workers Registration Board.So we knew this was going to cause an issue for people who were working within the industry from 2021 who didn't have a formal qualification and who were working with life experience—which is on board with the educational process but unfortunately now you are required to register with the board and you must have this qualification. And so going through this experience pathway seems like quite a convoluted process. It can take a very long time from what I've heard. Sometimes they can get quite far through the process and can be denied anyway and then may have to go through the education sector to become qualified.My concern is that according to—well how I see it is since 2021 these people haven't been able to work within the sector in social work practice. So that's two years already. And then we're going to extend this out to 2024 so we could have people that have not worked within the sector for up to six years. Things change very quickly within the sector. I spoke at a panel last week the social workers' panel. The concern is that social work practice has got quite bureaucratic-al. There's a lot of processes to follow and now a lot of red tape and it's quite complicated. Unless you know what you're doing you can actually get yourself into quite a bit of a pickle. They're spending a lot of time doing paperwork and doing admin rather than actually doing their jobs. The admin side may be something that social workers who haven't practised for four or five years may not have the knowledge of and they may need to go through their educational sector to build up their skills.I'm glad that we've been doing the pay equity within the social services sector because these people do amazing jobs. They're out there and they're in our communities and they're dealing with sometimes the most vulnerable people within our communities. But they're also dealing with some of the most volatile situations where they can walk into quite dangerous environments and have to have the skills to know how to cope with that and how to de-escalate situations and how to work with families and with children and with the sector and make sure that they're following all these complex rules in the background as well. So I feel we need to be making sure that they've had this option.But there comes a time where kicking the can down the road isn't actually going to make much of a difference. Is the education sector ready to take on board the new people wanting to go through the social worker qualifications and if not is that something we also need to acknowledge—that this may be a problem that we're not set up within the educational sector to bring on the 700 shortfall of social workers and that by just looking at having these experience pathways coming in isn't actually going to fill the gap of the 700 shortage? I'm not quite sure it will.The prices to actually go through this experience pathway are quite high. I was looking and you're looking at around $3500 and that's a lot of money coming out of someone's pocket to go through a process where there's actually no guarantee that you're going to get to the end of that process and have this qualification. So the educational sector pathway deal we need to be promoting a bit more upskilling people a bit more. In the modern era of where social work has gone—because it may not be the same as it was 10 years ago—are we actually making sure that these people are prepared and ready and we're not setting them up to fail going into an industry that they may not be able to cope with now?We have gone through some of the hardest times in the last few years where families have been through turmoil times. We have communities now where mental health services are not available and social workers are going into situations that sometimes could be quite dangerous for them could be quite dangerous for the people working alongside them. And we need to support the whole sector. In the education system we have children that just aren't coping anymore; that are socially behind about three or four years. In the health sector we've got people that can't find a bed and that can't find a home. And these social workers are actually going further than what they had been for quite a while. So we need to make sure that they do have the skills to cope with these new issues that have come forward. And with the floods that are happening in the Hawke's Bay and Auckland and Northland and just the devastation that we've seen over the last few years this sector really needs to be backed a lot more than what they have.The four years just seems a long time to push this along. I'm looking forward to hearing from the select committee and hearing from the sector as to why we're looking at the four years and hearing from the sector about why this has become an issue and why it's taken so long for some of these people to actually go through the experience pathway. What were the barriers? What's going to change now that's going to make a difference that those barriers aren't actually there anymore? And are there other things that we need to actually be looking at and hear from the social sector to hear what the problems actually are to getting registered through that experience pathway?ACT will support this bill with reservations but I'm really looking forward to hearing from the sector and hearing from the people that were working on the ground have had years of experience but haven't gone through that experience pathway. I'd like to know why they haven't done that and why this will make a difference for them to do that in the future. So thank you Madam Speaker.