Logie JanJAN LOGIE (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of Green Party in support of this bill—wholeheartedly in support of this bill—that removes the punitive discriminatory subsequent child policy. The Green Party believes that everyone deserves enough to live with dignity to support their family's wellbeing and to participate in their community. Income support can alleviate poverty and encourage all people to participate in a free and fair society to their maximum potential. We've long advocated for benefit levels to be set at levels that enable people to meet their own basic needs without having to resort to charity or begging or more appointments going through the details of their life and their bank accounts. We've also long been clear in our view that benefits should not be reduced or sanctioned as behaviour control tools. We do not believe that precariousness helps build good citizens good community or good family members.I'd like to take a moment—with your indulgence Mr Speaker—to plot the recent political history of this bill as a different story has been told from this further right side of this House. So in 2017 our confidence and supply agreement with the Labour Party going into Government confirmed that we both—Labour and Greens—wished to overhaul the welfare system to ensure access to entitlements and to remove excessive sanctions and to review Working for Families as well so that everyone in this country would have a standard of living and income that enabled them to live in dignity and participate in their communities and that lifted children and their families out of poverty. It's something that I feel really proud of in terms of that commitment. As a result of this agreement the Government set up the Welfare Expert Advisory Group (WEAG) to provide an evidence-based road map for welfare reform. The Welfare Expert Advisory Group was led by Governor-General designate Dame Cindy Kiro and was made up of a really wide-ranging group of people from academics health community organisations professionals and business people to people with lived experience of the welfare system. In their report they noted that Agreement is near universal that the benefit and tax credit systems are unmanageably complex. The level of financial support is now so low that too many New Zealanders are living in desperate situations. Urgent and fundamental change is needed." The social security system needs to recognise that most New Zealanders are willing to engage participate contribute and do their fair share for their communities. That is the starting point of this discussion. It is that people want the best for themselves and their families without the requirement of having to wait for the National Party to tell them what to do. They further noted that "The current system is based on conditionality including sanctions and is tightly targeted with inadequate support to meet even basic needs. The experience of using the system is unsatisfactory and damaging for too many of the highest need and poorest people." They heard overwhelmingly in consultations right across the country that "the system diminishes trust causes anger and resentment and contributes to toxic levels of stress." That does not support our families. That does not support our children. That does not support us in our shared effort as a country to have the best outcomes for all of us.So now we're two years on from the WEAG report and two Budgets on and this is the second piece of legislation and the second sanction to be removed. It's fair to say the Green Party would have liked to have seen a bit more progress and for things to have happened faster because this is urgent. That sense of trust between people and Government and security in our communities we see it through the pandemic: we need each other and to be able to rely on each other we need to have confidence in our systems and in each other. Punitive paternalistic and I would say violent—in the extent that it does ignore the humanness of people—policies undermine that collective effort.When I've heard some of the speeches from the National Party today honestly it has really—I've found it a struggle to listen to. Some of the comments about looking at the evidence of this being in the long-term best interests—they are completely refusing to acknowledge that the evidence does not support this policy having any positive benefit whatsoever. So the rhetoric in the face of the evidence is just deeply deeply jarring to me particularly when they talk about supporting people into work and say that this policy—which is being overturned thankfully in the legislation today—is essential for supporting people into work. The evidence says no. But it's also the complete disconnection from the fact that many people want to work and they will do that themselves when it's the right time for them but there is no belief in people. It's just a sense of "These are people that cannot do anything for themselves until we tell them what they have to do". There's some deep problems with that and I really think they need to analyse particularly when it's in contrast to the reality that the National Party oversaw the diminishment of employment services within our Work and Income. So they spoke about supporting people into work while they actually oversaw the taking away of supports to help people who wanted to get into work to be able to get into work and good jobs. Those things do not go together and actually show to me the lie of what this was about. It was about forcing people into low-paid jobs and stigmatising people and that did not serve us as a country.The previous speaker Maureen Pugh went through and said "Well these are the obligations. That's not really particularly onerous is it? I think that's fine." I'd just like the House to imagine a scenario that I think is fairly typical. So Tina—she's got three kids: a six-year-old who's just started school and it's about 2 kilometres away; a three-year-old who is both clingy and hyperactive all at the same time; and a one-year-old who often gets sick probably because of the cold damp houses that they've been moving around in between. Tina is a sole parent not by choice but by circumstance and she is grieving for her lost relationship and sense of her own future and is battling depression. She lives in a low-income area is disconnected from family and friends and is struggling to pay her bills and to get her child to school and back and get her three-year-old to childcare as required by Work and Income in another place altogether while meeting her bubba's needs and staying afloat. I think that that should rightly be considered an achievement for pretty much any of us if we were in that situation.This scenario is not an unusual one and there are many variations to it and the response from my perspective to that situation is "How can we help Tina? What can we do to make your life easier to be able to support yourself and your kids?" But actually the policy we're getting rid of today instead of saying "How can we help?" it said "What more obligations can we put on you Tina? Well we're going to make you go to a work preparation course we're going to make you prove that you're looking for work and we're going to force you into a low-paid part-time job if we consider it suitable." That is not a policy that is affirming of family or children. That is a punitive discriminatory policy that I am pleased to see the back of."