Newman Muriel: Social Workers Registration Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
Newman Muriel: Social Workers Registration Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:607;Page:4880] 
Dr MURIEL NEWMAN (ACT NZ) 
: 
 It is a shame that this bill is again being passed under urgency. It is also a shame that it has taken so long for it to be passed since the original time frame was for it to be a bill that would be handled quickly. 
The Minister told us this is a bill that is meant to give greater protection to the people whom social workers support. It is meant to enhance the professionalism of the industry and the competencies within the industry. I remain puzzled at how a bill can provide for increased professionalism and competency and greater protections for those people who are involved with social workers given that registration under the bill is voluntary. How can the Minister stand there and say the bill will do this that and the other if registration is voluntary? People can decide not to register because it is voluntary. 
I say to Government members that this bill is a fundamental contradiction in terms. It is a Clayton’s bill that will not achieve the fine things that the Minister claims. It is a bill that will bring State regulation through a politically correct and politically motivated board because the Minister did not put my mind at rest in the Committee stage. This bill is imposing State regulation on an industry that practises self-regulation. 
The Committee heard no evidence of large numbers of people who were complaining about social workers except for the Department of Child Youth and Family Services. But that department is run by the Government for goodness’ sake! So why is this Government regulating a whole industry—some 10500 people—when those who were the subject of most of the complaints were the State’s own department of 1000 people? It just does not make sense. It is for those reasons that the ACT party will not be supporting this bill. 
The point is that the regulation of social workers will not achieve the aim of this bill—namely to try to improve the standards of social work in the Department of Child Youth and Family Services. Indeed Judge Mick Brown’s report brought all this about. He was very concerned about the competencies within the department. He saw poor practice he saw systemic failure. We as an Opposition highlighted there were 4000 potential child abuse cases that were unallocated but were being reported on month after month. One day I asked for the duration figures. I wanted to know how long the children whose cases were critical had been waiting; how long had very urgent cases been waiting and so on. The Minister found to his horror that some of those children had been waiting for months and months. The longest cases had been waiting for over 18 months to be seen. There were no provisions in the way the department worked to make sure that those children were safe. 
When the Minister got the report back from the department and it showed these dreadful dreadful figures he issued a statement to say the figures were wrong. It took him 6 months to get the figures right—through a whitewash system I presume! The point is that was blatantly poor practice operating in the department and it was these sorts of issues that Mick Brown wanted the Government to address. 
If we think about the Department of Child Youth and Family Services we recall that when it originated family breakdown in this country was relatively minimal. The number of children with high and complex needs was pretty small. The department actually could cope. But the problem is that things have become worse. New Zealand has the highest rate of family breakdown in the OECD—29 percent of our families are broken families. That means those children are far more at risk. That is what is putting the department under pressure. There are a number of cases of high and complex needs. Many members of Parliament will have received the emails from the family in the last couple of weeks in which it is crying out for support and help and saying the department will not help them and the police will not help them until someone is injured. So these people have nowhere to go because the department is the last port of call. 
I say to Government members sitting on the other side of the House that the model of having one agency is now obsolete. The agency needs to be able to work hand in hand with police health workers and education workers. So the idea of a one-stop shop a community-based agency wrapping all those services together is the sort of model that we should be hearing about in this House today in response to the concerns that Mick Brown raised in his report about competency concerns with the Department of Child Youth and Family Services. 
If in fact we were moving to that sort of model the ACT party would be very much supportive because we would see that it was timely and forward-looking and that it would possibly work extremely well especially if the police took up more of the forensic work that we understand social workers are busy doing. So the social workers are busy investigating doing forensic work doing the “removal of children” work and doing all the stuff that the police should be doing instead of being able to work with children to make sure they are safe and work with families to make sure they are safe so that the child can come back home. At the moment more and more kids are being taken away from their families and they are not being brought back home. The number of children in care is going up month by month year by year. That is not the best answer for this country that is not the best answer for these children and that is not the best that a Government can do. 
I can tell the member sitting opposite that a Clayton’s bill that sounds good feels good and has all the right buttons but does nothing is not the answer. That is why I am so disappointed in the response of this Government to what is the most serious concern this country faces. Every year thousands of children in New Zealand are put at risk because the agency fails to help them in the way that it would want to if it were better organised had better practice or better resources. I do not know what the answer is but I do know that this bill is not the answer. 
If some proper solutions were being presented today the whole social work profession would suddenly start to feel uplifted because its members would see that social work is moving in a modern direction. That would be far better than a bill that basically says to the social work profession: “We do not trust you. We are going to put in place to control you all a board that the Minister chooses by himself with no checks and balances.” What other profession in New Zealand has impositions placed on it in that way by such political intervention? Where are the safeguards for anybody when that is happening? Where are the safeguards for members of the profession to know that if they happen to be ACT supporters or National supporters that somehow they will not find the weight of the board coming down on them? That is a far-fetched scenario but it is one that cannot be pushed to one side when there are no checks and balances in this bill to make sure that the political system does not intrude into that profession. 
There are a few other issues that the Minister did not explain to us. Serious concerns were raised during the Committee stage. There is a real worry in the profession that this registration will create an elitism between different sides of the social work profession—those who have qualifications and can be registered or can afford it and those who do not. There are compliance cost issues on small businesses that run private provision of social work services that they may not be able to afford the $14000 to help their staff become registered whereas the State will. We have already heard from the Minister that he is going to pull down a big chunk of taxpayers’ dollars in the next Budget to ensure that some of his workers can get registered. 
One has to ask whether we need those sorts of compliance costs on an industry that is already absolutely overstretched to the point where many experienced professional social workers are leaving to seek better opportunities overseas and to seek better opportunities in other industries. Do we want to impose a whole lot of Government regulation and compliance costs on an industry that was probably doing a pretty reasonable job except for one particular agency which of course is always going to be the subject of public scrutiny—that is the agency that is run by the Government itself? 
I finish by saying my major concern is the political interference that the Minister did not put to rest. This is a Clayton’s bill and I am very disappointed that we will not be able to support it.