Logie Jan: Vulnerable Children Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLogie Jan: Vulnerable Children Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 14 May 2014. Volume:698;Page:17884. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAN LOGIE (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Chair. I would just like to echo the speech before me really from the member Poto Williams. It is not all the time that I feel that a speech from a member of the Labour Party is like one I could have given myself. That was a speech where I really agreed with a lot of what you were saying and I thank you for making those points around family violence. Again I do not think that most New Zealanders realise that Child Youth and Family does not as a matter of course look to intervene to protect children when there is family violence present. I do believe that it would be an expectation of our public that our systems work to protect those children because regardless of whether those children are physically abused when there is intimate partner violence they are harmed. There is harm from witnessing violence between parents. As a country that is trying to grapple with this issue we need to havethe systems to respond in order to protect them and to change our society and get rid of this curse that we have at the moment.There are a few points I would like to speak to in Part 3 of the Vulnerable Children Bill. This part does contain quite a few policy points and there are questions I would like to ask of the Minister for Social Development. I have not been the primary MP for this bill so I am not sure where some bits are and I have been trying to find them in reading the bill. One of them—the primary point that I would love for the Minister to provide some clarification on—is whether this bill is fixing the concern that has been raised by the Human Rights Commission and various disability groups. This is another area where I think most people in New Zealand would be surprised to find out that we have a differential provision in law for the treatment of children with disabilities and the ability to take them from their family and put them into placements into care.We have been asked by most of these groups to delete sections 141 142 and 144 of the Children Young Persons and Their Families Act which enable children to be taken from their homes. It was pointed out that children are often being placed outside their local community sometimes in really lengthy placements without a clear point of review and sometimes those communities are not even a good social or cultural fit for that child. As we have heard there are definitely some struggles in New Zealand about providing the right support for those families that are taking children in. We know actually that attachment to the family of birth—and from a really early age to a parent at least—is really important for the development and the opportunities of all children and that includes children with disabilities.The Human Rights Commission as well as specific disability groups have asked Parliament to give consideration to this issue and to the need for more to be done to actively increase the opportunities for disabled children to be supported in their homes including as the commission said “facilitating tailored and creative solutions that are properly resourced and which enable a child to safely remain with their family or to retain a strong family connection.” I could not find this in the bill and I am really hoping that the Minister will point out to me where it is because it may well be there but I just could not find it. To me if we are talking about vulnerability then to be explicit about the needs of our children with disabilities and what we can do to support them and families that may be struggling in order to enable them to have that parental attachment is incredibly important. It is hard to see how their needs could not be right up there at the top of the hierarchy of the most in need.Currently the Children Young Persons and Their Families Act—this is from the Human Rights Commission—gives disabled children “lesser rights than others”. It allows disabled children unlike non-disabled children to be placed into full-time residential care for an indefinite period and the provisions that enable non-disabled young people to have a say in their care are not extended automatically to disabled young people. That seems wrong. If a child has a disability it does not mean that they do not have needs and that they cannot communicate. I believe that the onus should be on the State to create systems for those children to be able to communicate their needs wherever possible. Also we have been told that our law enables children with disabilities to be sterilised and that we have no protection in our law to prevent that from happening. That seems just so horribly wrong that I am hoping that the Minister will tell me that this bill is correcting that.Another issue that I would like to talk to around this is the requirement for consideration to be given to requests for support for young people leaving State care to live independently. We heard from the Dingwall Trust on the day I got to hear some of the submissions to the Social Services Committee and from a very amazing young man who had left State care at the age of 17 with no identification and no ability to signtenancy agreements or any other agreements. Sadly he ended up on the streets with alcohol and drug problems just trying to cope with these things that had been thrown at him at the age of 17 but later he came in contact with the Dingwall Trust and with the support he got he was able to turn his life round. He is now in pre-med and is working with Māori Television. It was a truly inspirational story.The trust was calling for there to be a transition period and an extension of State care to the age of 25 I think it was suggesting that as a matter of course because we are throwing young people out earlier than any other English-speaking country. I just cannot understand why we are being so harsh in this country to our young people whom I do believe we all care so much for. The view of young people who have experienced this system and of their advocates is that this bill needed to provide extended duties of care—not just exceptions and the ability for the State to intervene in exceptional circumstances but providing extended duties of care to enable gradual plans to transition young people to independence.Some Monash University research found that the cost to the State of a poor transition was $738000 per person. So even if you have to go to those rational economic arguments and everything coming down to a dollar figure which is painful to me this is still a sensible investment and I do think it would pay off. I am very disappointed to see that the bill has not separated the transition from birthdays or taken the opportunity to link it to the end of exams and put it in the bill that care continues until somebody has finished those key milestones in their life. But to extend it right through that period of youth up to the age of 25 which does not preclude independence I would have thought would be ideal.Another point I would like to speak on which is a core point for us and maybe one of the main ones why we are having to oppose this bill is placing the onus on the parent of a subsequent child to demonstrate that he or she is safe to parent if a child was previously permanently removed due to abuse or neglect. We know that protective parents are losing custody of their children because of the behaviour of abusers. That is happening. We would hate to see a situation where a woman had managed to escape—and even imagine if her partner had been through treatment and managed to get himself sorted and they were back together—but where she would face the possibility of losing her next child because of the actions of an abuser. That to me does not seem to be about justice. Reversing the onus of proof is a very big step and one that we do not believe in.