Nash Stuart: Social Security Amendment Bill (No 3) — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeNash Stuart: Social Security Amendment Bill (No 3) — In Committee[Sitting date: 25 March 2015. Volume:704;Page:2635. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]STUART NASH (Labour—Napier):I do like it when National members stand up and they praise things like the Social Security Act 1938. Either they do not know their history or they are truly appreciative of what the first Labour Government did. What a great Government that was; there is no doubt about that. This bill for me has been quite confusing. I am just a simple man from the provinces. What I do here is I take a look at the bill and I read through it. Now we are at the Committee stage and the bill is being taken as a whole. I look at points that we can talk about—because we are supporting this but every bill has its discussion points—and then I get to as Ms Ardern alluded to Supplementary Order Paper 56 and the Supplementary Order Paper is longer than the bill itself. And then there is another Supplementary Order Paper—Kris Faafoi: Amending the Supplementary Order Paper.STUART NASH: —yes—for that Supplementary Order Paper and I scratch my head and go: “Where do I start on this?”.Again I go back to something that—Kris Faafoi: The very beginning.STUART NASH: —yes the very beginning—Ron Mark talked about. Supplementary Order Paper 64 talks about the Veterans’ Support Act 2014 which has been in place for less than 6 months if I am right. In fact the last bill we talked about the Taxation (KiwiSaver HomeStart and Remedial Matters) Bill amended the Veterans’ Support Act as well. Those poor veterans. Things change hugely for these guys. [Interruption] It is. And this Supplementary Order Paper talks about how there is a difference here. The wording is changed. The Government is omitting or getting rid of the term “deemed to have been resident in New Zealand” and replacing it with “treated under section 79(3)(a) of the Social Security Act 1964 as being resident and present in New Zealand”.As Mr Mark alluded to and as Jacinda Ardern and I tried to figure out we wanted to see what section 79(3)(a) actually looked like. We looked online which is what you do because that is supposed to be the most up-to-date version and this is the 21st century and we could not find it. Yet again I do not know how MPs are supposed to do their job when we go to the source of these documents and we cannot even find the piece of legislation that is being referenced. Again I am not too sure whether this is a typing error or in fact the legislation itself just has not been updated from last time it was amended. We deserve better than this; there is no doubt about that. It seems a little bit sloppy to me because this bill has been to the Social Services Committee and the select committee went through it. There were experts who looked at it. MPs cannot be experts in everything. Yet we end up with this level of Supplementary Order Paper. Again the cynic in me says that what this is is a Minister sneaking stuff under the radar that they did not want discussed in the select committee. But I am not cynical. I think this is just—Poto Williams: You’re bigger than that.STUART NASH: I am bigger than that. I suspect that this was just an error. The Minister for Social Development realised that there was a whole lot more stuff after the bill had been through the select committee process and all that sort of carry-on so she needed to put in a substantial Supplementary Order Paper.There are a couple of things I would like to talk about here. New clause 6A amends an item. The explanatory note of Supplementary Order Paper 56 says: “item 1 of Schedule 6 of the principal Act to prevent the income disregards provisions in that clause from applying unintentionally to supported living payments …”. These are for people who are looking after patients who require care full time. I do not know how you can apply unintentionally or how it can be applied unintentionally and what if it is applied unintentionally? As with these things people who look after ill people do not earn a lot of money. In fact they are usually on the minimum wage and they do it out of the goodness of their heart and man they are exploited. But the thing is what happens if they actually do end up with more money than they are supposed to? Do they have to pay it back? It is just a sort of insidious situation that is the last thing we want some of the most disadvantaged but well-meaning people in our society ending up doing.The other thing that I note as well—and this is most interesting—is that “New clause 6B amends clause 2(b) of Part 1 of Schedule 18 of the principal Act to restore the pre-15 July 2013 calculation of the rate of non-beneficiary accommodation supplement for sole parents.” The reason I say that this is interesting is that this existed less than 2 years ago. For some reason it was withdrawn and now it is back. I wonder whether it is because the Minister is a little bit more benevolent than the previous one and she has talked to officials and she has talked to members of the public and she has found out that actually something that this Government had done to beneficiaries was unfair and so it is restoring it. I am not too sure why. You can understand if you restore something from 2007 or 2008 but to restore something that was taken away less than 2 years ago again that seems like either rushed legislation in 2013 or rushed legislation now. It is just very hard to actually figure it out.