Bradford Sue: Future Directions (Working for Families) Bill — First Reading 
Bradford Sue: Future Directions (Working for Families) Bill — First Reading 
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SUE BRADFORD (Green) 
: 
 The Future Directions package announced today in Dr Cullen’s Budget represented by this very sudden bill is a mixed blessing. There is no question that the Green Party welcomes the steps that the Labour Government is taking to seriously address issues of endemic child poverty. It is a relief that after 4½ years in power it is finally taking action and beginning a major redistribution of resources towards families and children that was so badly needed after the structural adjustments and widening gap between rich and poor over the last two decades. The Green Party will be supporting this bill. 
We do not want to be ungracious about it but at the same time I will take this brief opportunity to point out a few of our concerns with the legislation. We are quite disturbed by the underlying attitudes represented here which basically say that it is much better for any parent even a sole parent with young children to be out there in the paid workforce rather than staying at home and carrying out the even more important job of being a good mother or father in some cases. I have a strong sense today that Labour is actually strengthening that dangerous moral imperative that first emerged in the 1990s with the Shipley Bazley and Rankin reforms. The imperative says that really all parents including single parents should be contributing to the formal economy as a priority rather than nurturing their babies and children. This bill has as its focus “making work pay”—a slogan used again and again to bolster an acceptance by society that anyone on a benefit should get off it as quickly as possible even if it is to the detriment of parent and child and even if there are still hundreds and thousands of other people still out of work; and that somehow the children of beneficiary families deserve and need less money to live on than the children of parents in paid work. 
I believe the State should be neutral on whether single parents should have to work and should also accept that it is not a bad thing if one partner in a two-parent beneficiary family works as a full-time caregiver for their children rather than being work tested forced out to work or as with this legislation financially penalised for not going out to work. This is not to say that we do not support any measures to help beneficiaries with the transition between benefits and work. There are huge and accumulated problems with wage rates that are too low to support many families a variety of punishing abatement regimes and the indubitable burden of extra costs incurred when people first start work after being on a benefit. However we believe that the way to deal with the transition is not by continuing to entrench the disparities between beneficiaries and working families on the same or similar incomes thereby penalising the children but rather through direct support of the working adult and their needs. 
I will turn now briefly to look more specifically at a few aspects of the bill. First of all there is a lot of detail that will be done by regulation. The Green Party is concerned by the increasing tendency of this Government to put the detail of so much new policy into regulation rather than doing it through the means of Parliament and the select committee process which this bill will not have the privilege of going through. There is a lot of detail that will be done by the regulation review process and we will be watching that closely. 
This bill does begin the simplification of the benefit system which the Minister has been promising for the last 4 years but I would like to reiterate that the Green Party would rather have seen at this time a whole rewrite and review of the Social Security Act—we would like to see the Government start again. The Social Security Act has been with us since 1964 and it has been amended over and over again as this bill does yet again. After 4½ years of work by the Ministry of Social Development on benefit reform we would have thought that this would be a prize opportunity to undertake the whole process rather than continuing to do it bit by bit. 
We are pleased however that this package takes us in the direction of simplification. We are very pleased that the inflation indexing which this bill promises with the family assistance will happen. It is high time. But we note that although this bill brings family assistance up to date families in the end will be only as comparatively well off as is equivalent to the position in 1992. It does not really keep pace in the way that we would like to see it do. 
We are also concerned about what is happening around the special benefit which has been a problem area for a number of years for the Government and for beneficiaries. Detailed provisions on this are to be done by regulation and again we will be keeping a close eye on where this goes. The accommodation supplement is also improved in this bill which is a good thing for everyone who is in the position of needing an accommodation supplement right now but in the end we would like to see the accommodation supplement abolished. The only way that will happen is if we have enough housing in this country and if we do not have a situation where so many people are forced in the end to depend on the State to provide a subsidy that in effect goes both to the landlord of the accommodation and to the employer at the other end. 
Although the Budget is increasing the number of State housing units that will be available it is only by a very small amount. It will actually mean that State houses as a proportion of the total housing rental stock will continue to decline. In the long run the accommodation supplement is not the answer. 
In conclusion I would like to reiterate that despite our concerns and reservations about some aspects of this legislation this is a commendable Budget initiative that families have been waiting for since 1991 when National’s benefit cuts and the Employment Contracts Act deepened a whole generation’s plunge into poverty. No one will be worse off as a result of this package and I am grateful for that. Many many families will be a lot better off over the next 4 years and into the future. I have a concern that in the summary of the Government’s new spending on the Working for Families package it appears that the rate of spending goes up only very slowly. In 2004-05 it is $170 million and spending does not go up to over $600 million until 2005-06 so the wait for substantial gains will be quite long for some people. But good on the Labour Party! The Green Party will be voting for this bill and we are pleased to see that such a big step has been taken.