Sepuloni Carmel: Support for Children in Hardship Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSepuloni Carmel: Support for Children in Hardship Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 01 December 2015. Volume:710;Page:8426. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CARMEL SEPULONI (Labour—Kelston):I just want to discuss the commencement date of this bill and point out that actually the decision to fund this package was made on 21 May 2015—Budget day. That is when the announcement was made. I guess our concern is that the commencement of this bill will not actually be until 1 April 2016. What we are all aware of in the House is that with 305000 children living in poverty there was a very real immediate need to address that poverty. With 60 percent of the 305000 children living in poverty being from beneficiary homes the Government had a very real opportunity to move this through quickly and to make a very small difference but none the less a difference in the lives of those children.We are disappointed with the commencement date. We are particularly disappointed with the commencement date given that through urgency just a couple of weeks ago we had the Government pushing through the Social Security (Commencement of Benefits) Amendment Bill which saw a number of people deprived of the opportunity to make claims after they were underpaid because of some technical error over the last 17 years. It is disappointing that the Government uses urgency in those situations but here we have a very real need—we have 305000 children living in poverty with 181000 of them living in beneficiary homes—and yet the Government did not see it as necessary to try to push this through any faster.So now we wait until 1 April 2016 and it is an unnecessary delay because you would not have any opposition from any party in this House if you decided to move the commencement date of this bill forward. That is a concern that I wanted to express. In fact I want to know from the Minister whether the Minister would consider actually amending the commencement date to bring it forward earlier so that these families may have a little bit more money in their pockets particularly around the Christmas period and in January and February when the kids go back to school. Would the Minister consider shifting the commencement date of this bill?The title of this bill is the Support for Children in Hardship Bill. I am just going to put it out there right now and say that given that it does very little to address the needs of the 305000 children living in poverty perhaps a better title for this bill would have been the “Supporting a Few Children in Hardship Bill”. I say that because the Government decided that it wanted to spend $250 million per year on a package that would make it appear as if it was addressing the issue of child poverty but it picked a measurement of material hardship that really suited its half-baked approach. We see that the Government’s selected measure which would give it a figure of between 60000 and 100000 families—not the household income measure that has been frequently reported in the past the latest of which shows the number of children in poverty has increased to 305000—meant that it was choosing the lowest possible figure in terms of estimates around children in poverty which has also meant that it will be assisting at the very most only 18000 families with children. That is a smidgen of the 305000 that we know of.I want to say that it was really disappointing actually to hear National MPs like the chair of the Social Services Committee Alfred Ngaro use that 100000 figure when he was referring to children living in poverty because I am sure that member like so many other members in the House knows that that is a major understatement and he is doing a disservice to those children and those families who are living in poverty.How much extra do those 18000 families get? Well actually they get $23.10 per family a week. I want to just refer back to what my colleague Stuart Nash was saying—and this is why I think it should be the “Support For a Few Children in Hardship Bill” which was that actually that amount of money is per family. It is not per child in those families so it does disadvantage those families with more children. It does mean that that small amount of money is going to have to be stretched across these families and it makes it much more difficult for them to get any benefit out of it.I want to refer back to the title—the “Support For a Few Children in Hardship Bill”—and I also want to maybe relabel this bill and what else can I call it? Actually no I am going to call it the “Lack of Support For the Parents of These Children in Hardship Bill” because there are measures that this Government has put through that we do not support in this bill. We are forced to support this bill because these families are so hard up that the $25 even though it is only a little bit is going to be something that will go into their pockets.But what we are concerned about in terms of the “Lack of Support For the Parents of These Children in Hardship Bill” is that we see a Government that is pushing through legislation that has no evidence base. We have the age where work obligations kick in going from 5 years to 3 years despite the fact that there is no evidence to support that doing that will see these families better off. In fact when I put parliamentary questions through to the Ministry of Social Development to ask it what evidence it had collected to support the measures in this bill it has said over the last 2 years nothing—no evidence whatsoever. And when we started to look for evidence to see what happens when you impose these types of work obligations on families what we found is that families can actually be worse off. Families can actually be worse off because what you end up doing is pushing parents out into the lowest-paid jobs and they can be worse off working than they actually were on a benefit. That is in no way supporting the children in hardship whom this Government says it is supporting.We have major reservations about extending the work obligations from 15 hours to 20 hours. And our reason for that is currently we know that the parents of these children have access to 20 hours of free early childhood education but there is also travel time that needs to be taken into consideration. The Government would have us believe that parents could access a childcare subsidy on top of that that would help with the additional hours that would be travel time in terms of the picking up and dropping off of their children but we have seen evidence this year that shows that once they are off benefit parents are less likely to access the child subsidy that they may be entitled to access. In fact I have seen letters to parents where they have been told: “No you’re not eligible for childcare subsidy because you’re able to access 20 hours free.” It makes absolutely no sense but I have seen it in black and white. So we have got concerns for the parents of these children living in hardship because they are actually going to be stretched more and it may impact on their ability to be able to look after their children.As I said before in renaming it the “Lack of Support For the Parents and Caregivers of These Children Living in Hardship Bill” I just want to point out that the National Government voted against a Supplementary Order Paper that I put up that would have put study alongside work obligations so that these parents would be supported to go into part-time study or to take up part-time work. And the reason that makes sense to us—and I am sure it makes sense to the general public as well—is that actually we do not just want to be pushing out the parents or caregivers of these children living in hardship into minimum wage jobs. Where we can we want to be providing them with the opportunity to upskill train potentially increase their earning capacity and potentially increase their options in terms of getting into more secure work when they go out into the workforce. But unfortunately National—so short-sighted—has not supported that Supplementary Order Paper.In fact in the Social Services Committee we had National members of the select committee saying: “Well they can get a student allowance.” They can only get a student allowance if they are studying full time and that is 32 hours or more. So there is no opportunity here now for these parents to be able to access part-time study—let us say 20 hours to 31 hours. In some instances that is all that would be practical perhaps because of the needs of their children or perhaps because of the number of their children. But it would have made sense for the National Government to support that provision and as I said it just goes to show that in many ways this bill should be named the “Lack of Support For the Parents and Caregivers of These Children Living in Hardship Bill”.We are supporting this bill because of the $25 increase but we have major reservations that might cause us to rename this bill.