Hipkins Chris: Support for Children in Hardship Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHipkins Chris: Support for Children in Hardship Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 01 December 2015. Volume:710;Page:8428. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka): I am very happy to take a brief call on the Support for Children in Hardship Bill when we are talking about the title and commencement clauses of this legislation. I have to say that I am a big fan of the non-political naming of bills in New Zealand. It has been a tradition in the New Zealand Parliament that the way we name bills is that we use factual descriptions for bills in Parliament not political sloganeering. I think one of the best examples of where you see political sloganeering in the way bills are created is obviously the United States Congress where you get bills like the No Child Left Behind Bill which became the No Child Left Behind Act which does not actually tell you very much about what the bill does.The point that I want to make is that the Support for Children in Hardship Bill basically creates an expectation around what the legislation is actually going to do that does not necessarily match up with what the legislation actually does. That is one of the reasons why I think the bill is misnamed. In fact we should just go back to the Kiwi tradition the New Zealand parliamentary tradition of naming bills after what they actually do. So in this case it is primarily a bill to amend the Social Security Act. Previously this would have been called the “Social Security Act 1964 Amendment Bill”. That would be what Parliament would have called it. The naming of it as something else actually politicises the title of the bill and therefore creates expectations around it. So it is a marketing ploy rather than a good legislative ploy.Therefore the House then brings itself to the question of: well does the substance of the bill match up to the marketing that we are getting within the title? If we look at it and we say “OK the bill talks about support for children in hardship.” one would think that applies to all children in hardship. The estimates suggest that this might apply to 18000 families with children and yet there could be up to 305000 children living in hardship in New Zealand depending on whose measure you are willing to accept. Therefore the bill fails at its first hurdle in the sense that I do not believe that it is appropriately named.But I actually have a technical issue that I want to get some clarity from the Minister on and that is to do with the commencement. If we look at clause 2(1) of the bill where we are talking about when Part 1 comes into effect it comes into effect on 1 April 2016 if an Order in Council is made under section 61HA(2) of the Social Security Act. Incidentally section 61HA(2) of the Social Security Act is actually being inserted by this very bill and that is the point that I am about to come to. If an Order in Council is made under that section then the Act comes into force on the same date but Part 1 comes into force immediately before that order.The reason that is interesting is that it suggests that the Government can make an Order in Council to come into force before this bill has actually come into force as a piece of law. That to me seems to be quite an interesting legislative instrument. I suspect that the reason that the Government is doing this is so it can determine what it wants the Order in Council to be on 1 April when the legislation comes into force and it is just trying to avoid any sort of legal irregularities around the fact that the Order in Council was made immediately prior to the Act—as it will then be—actually coming into force.It seems to me to be a slightly interesting legislative instrument. It is the first time that I have seen something like that which basically gives the Government the ability to make an Order in Council under an Act that has not yet come into force. I just wanted to check with the Minister in the chair Nathan Guy that in fact the intention in doing this is to ensure that basically the Order in Council can be prepared prior to the Act coming into force. But it is just to avoid the technicality I guess of the Act and the Order in Council coming into force at the same time and there potentially being some sort of circular legal argument that somehow invalidates the situation.The rest of the commencement clause basically is relatively straightforward. It comes into force either on the day after on which it receives the Royal assent—i.e. when it is signed by the Governor-General—or on 1 April 2016 which is not unusual when it comes to Social Security Act amendments because they tend to be for the full year. Having said that I think that some very legitimate arguments have been raised for why we always treat the expenditure side of the equation as coming into force some way down the track but often when it comes to the other end of the equation and the revenue generation side of things the Government seems to be a lot harsher. We dealt with some issues just recently in fact where there was legislation that was backdated and I think that is generally a bad principle.Overall I think the bill is worth supporting because the clauses we are supporting—support for children in hardship is something that the Parliament should take seriously. I am disappointed in the sense that I do not believe that the bill lives up to the promise in the title. I do not believe it supports enough of the children in hardship. I think it overlooks many of the impacts. Again let us come back to the title—“Children in Hardship Bill”. Actually why do children live in hardship? It is not because the children do not earn enough money. It is actually because the parents do not earn enough money to support them which is another reason why I think—and in fact the bill deals largely with parental income issues and I do not know that the title of the bill adequately reflects what this bill actually does.If we want to get really serious about dealing with children in hardship we do have to look very seriously at the fact that 305000 New Zealand children—if you accept the most commonly accepted definition of poverty—are living below the poverty line in New Zealand. That is a major major embarrassment to a country like New Zealand and we should certainly be doing a lot more about that. We need to look at early childhood education and the barriers to participation in early childhood education and the link between workforce participation and early childhood education. I do not think that those are sufficiently understood yet and I think we need to look much more closely at those. The bill is worth supporting. It has a lot of gaps in it. It is a start but it is certainly by no means a big step.