Mitchell MarkHon MARK MITCHELL (National—Rodney): Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker. I am very happy to stand and take a call on the Families Commission Act Repeal Bill. I haven't been on the Social Services and Community Committee so I haven't had much to do with this bill but I'm very happy to stand today and take a call in support of it fundamentally because I'm a huge believer in and supporter of the social investment model. The good thing that I see in terms of this bill is of course we're supporting it but it seems to have largely had the confidence of the public as well. There were only eight submissions that were actually received. It looks like the committee went through those and discussed those in depth and they were able to address the concerns that were raised by the submitters through that committee process.I just wanted to refer to some comments that were made by the Hon Amy Adams who of course was driving this work in the previous Government. The new agency will replace the Social Investment Unit currently operating as part of MSD and will provide robust all-of-Government social investment advice about which people we should be investing further in and in what ways."I just want to hark back to an example. It was a light-bulb moment for me personally and that was over 20 years ago when I was a police dog handler in Gisborne. This is something that is etched into and burnt into my mind—Hon Ruth Dyson: You wouldn't have been old enough 20 years ago.Hon MARK MITCHELL: Oh thank you Ruth. I appreciate it. She's saying I don't look old enough. So I'll take that one. Thank you.But anyway for all the different things—and Greg would definitely identify with me here—with the amount of people you have contact with and the number of incidents that you might attend that you forget over the years this one has stuck with me. The reason why it has is because for me personally it was a genuine light-bulb moment. It was a young guy that was about 17 years old and he had started breaking into cars he'd started his criminal career and one night he'd broken into a car and he'd run off. I was called as a dog handler. We tracked him we caught him and we took him back to the station and we started to process him. As part of that process in the watch-house there's a charge sheet that they have to fill out and in that charge sheet there's a block there that's got "Occupation".I clearly remember him. He hadn't filled out the occupation block and I said to him "You need to put something in there; have you left school?" "Yes I have." I said "What are you doing? What's your occupation?" And he wrote in there "Unemployed". I said "Unemployed is not an occupation." He said "Yes it is; that's what my dad does." In that moment the light bulb came on for me and I realised that he'd been born into an environment where his example in life his aspiration was to go on to the unemployment benefit to go on to a Government benefit because his father who he looked up to—that's what his example was. The sad thing about it is that his first contact in terms of actually getting Government support or State help was coming into the criminal justice system. That was his first contact and already he was in trouble. So already we had a big job ahead of us—well the Government had a big job ahead of them—in terms of the investment that was needed to try and turn his life around as a 17-year-old.Whereas under the social investment model wouldn't it be better to go back in time and to actually invest in him and invest in his situation—which is very complex normally—look what support his father needed or his mother needed in terms of trying to provide a different environment so that he was on a different pathway. I didn't really understand at that point in my career what was needed or the complexity around policies or Government decisions to make that happen until I understood what the social investment model was and that's exactly what it is.The other thing that I just want to allude to very quickly is the fact that there's a heavy focus on the use of data and I'm a huge believer in that also—that good policy decisions need to be helped along with good science and good data. So I'm very happy to stand and take a call in support of this bill. Thank you."