Ardern JacindaPart 2 Measures targets reports indicators and monitoring reportsRt Hon JACINDA ARDERN (Minister for Child Poverty Reduction): Madam Chair thank you. It's a pleasure to kick off the debate around Part 2 of this bill which is the more substantive part and I imagine the part where members will want to make a contribution so mine will be brief.Just to acknowledge the statements that were actually made both by the Hon Alfred Ngaro and also Marama Davison from the Green Party of Aotearoa around the drivers of deprivation I do think it's absolutely fair to say that we do need to take into account the totality of the environment that children are coming from when we consider issues of deprivation income deprivation and material hardship. That is why the bill does include the well-being strategy. That is the place where we do look at some of those much wider issues: where we look at the impact of deprivation on things like access to education the quality of housing access to healthcare and all of those additional issues. But in terms of the drivers of deprivation the measures themselves give us a little bit of an indicator too.Putting aside of course what we already know about inadequacy of income—what we should know as a Government—it tells us a little bit around the before and after. Housing costs give us an indication of whether or not for instance housing is driving some of the issues that we're seeing within households. So actually the measures themselves help. The persistence measure also tells us a message particularly when you see some of the indicators telling us that children at a certain age—and again we know that we need to improve the data set around persistence. But when you see that children under a certain age—for instance zero to say five—are experiencing that more persistent poverty that tells us a little bit around the impact of the expense of childcare costs in early childhood education and the inability of caregivers to be able to balance those roles of work and care. It tells us something about the income adequacy of sole parents. So the measures themselves do give us a bit of an indication around the drivers of deprivation at one level. I accept that there are many levels to that but the measures themselves are quite helpful tools to Government and I just wanted to acknowledge that.Of course Part 2 of the bill establishes the measures the targets and the reporting. I want to acknowledge that the targets themselves—the reason that we have been very careful around giving some flexibility in that regard is of course if there is a change of Government it will be their prerogative as to how they want to utilise those targets. So there's a requirement over certain core primary measures having targets set out and then others which remain an option for the Government of the day. That is because there's an ultimate hope here that we will see this legislation as a framework endure—that it won't just be the tool of one Government but the tool of many.Members will know that outside of the four primary measures which are made up of two income one hardship and one persistence measure we also have the material hardship measure which is made up of the more direct measures of actual living conditions for households and the persistent poverty measure which is where multiple years are spent in income poverty or hardship. There are also six supplementary measures in the bill. Those are included to allow further comparisons. It allows us to report on changes in the depth and severity of poverty. But again those are the areas where there's a bit more flexibility.Overall though our hope is that this suite when taken as a whole will enable Governments of every persuasion to be able to use evidence-based policy making and evidence-informed policy making using these measures as an indicator of where the greatest need is and what will make the biggest difference. But I leave it to members now to make contributions and I'm happy to contribute from the chair.