Logie Jan: Social Security (Pathway to Work) Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLogie Jan: Social Security (Pathway to Work) Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 11 November 2015. Volume:710;Page:7921. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAN LOGIE (Green): It is with pleasure I rise to speak on this bill the Social Security (Pathway to Work) Amendment Bill in the name of Carmel Sepuloni. Firstly of course I need to offer my congratulations to the member on getting this bill drawn. Every time I stand with envy—I am still waiting. But it is always a good day when we get to debate and discuss ideas that offer positive solutions to genuine problems. I thank you for bringing that to this House.Next I would like to just address some of the points raised by the previous speaker Todd Muller. He raised a criticism that some of us in this House have raised concerns about the misnamed Support for Children in Hardship Bill because that bill increases the requirement for sole parents to be seeking 20 hours of work a week which pushes them off benefits and into a position of precariousness in relation to the tax system and their employer and from the age when their child is only 3 years old.The Green Party believes that parenting is a job. We believe it should be valued. We support those parents. There is as Carmel Sepuloni raised plenty of evidence that sole parents want to also be in the paid workforce and they are looking for those opportunities where that suits their family. A huge number of them are actively doing that.Our opposition is to the Government taking the choices away from those families and effectively saying that if a parent recognises that their child has specific needs for them to be in the home that choice is taken away. We absolutely do not support that. This bill actually supports those families where it is right for them and their family to be increasing their hours in the paid workforce and that is worth supporting because at the moment families are being penalised.Currently. if you are on job seeker support you can earn only $80 a week on top of your benefit which is the equivalent of about maybe 5 or 6 hours a week on the minimum wage before you lose 70c from your benefit for every dollar you earn. The effective marginal tax rate of that is extraordinary. And as was also mentioned by another speaker we have heard quite a bit on this side of the House about how terrible these high effective marginal tax rates are but obviously only if you are rich not if you are poor.So what this bill does is say that a job seeker can earn $150 a week before that abatement rate kicks in and they start losing that money. That is in recognition also in part that these abatement rates and thresholds were set at a time when most of the jobs that were in existence were full-time jobs. So the system was to encourage to be on a benefit or to be in full-time work.Sadly and significantly due to policies of preceding Governments that is not the structure of our workforce any more. We have a huge number of part-time jobs and casualised jobs. We have 100000 people in our workforce currently looking for more hours. So we need to actually acknowledge that this transition and this complexity exists and to support people to have decent wages and a decent income while they are doing the work that they are managing to get and support them in that.If only a few hours are all that is available actually let those people get the value of that work. Do not cut it out from under them because you are trying to incentivise them to be in full-time work that does not exist. That is the point at the heart of this bill and that is why it is a really good bill to be supporting.I think that the Government has a wider problem in penalising work. I would like to draw the House’s attention to a really interesting article that was written by Simon Collins in the New Zealand Herald in August this year. It is titled “Counting the cost of going back to work”. He compared New Zealand’s abatement in tax rates and loss of subsidies for entering work with the OECD averages. New Zealanders are doing it hard in international terms. They are being unfairly penalised by the policies of this Government.