Turei Metiria: Vulnerable Children Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTurei Metiria: Vulnerable Children Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 15 April 2014. Volume:698;Page:17270. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]METIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green):Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker.Tēnā koutou e te Whare. The Green Party certainly agrees with some of the provisions of this legislation the Vulnerable Children Bill but not all of them. Where we have disagreements they are serious and so we are not intending to support this legislation any further. We did vote for it at its first reading to make sure that we had a genuine discussion about the issues of how to best support families when they are in a state of vulnerability—and children in particular—but we are not satisfied that this legislation meets the goals.We do appreciate that the Government is attempting to improve the safety of children. That itself is a laudable goal and there are some aspects of this bill that go some way towards that but this bill and the resources that are required to implement it will not be effective if the Government continues to neglect the issues of child poverty and family violence which increase the risk to children. Those are the drivers of risk to children and they must be addressed too. So we consider that at the same time as the Government is doing this bill which is really about identifying particular individuals and focusing on individual needs it should be implementing specific child poverty reduction measures and other policy initiatives that directly target family violence as the core driver of increased risk to children.I would say that we are very pleased that the Minister for Social Development has chosen to remove the child harm prevention orders from the bill. They were particularlyonerous there was no evidence to back them up there was no research that indicated that they would be successful or any indication from the research we saw in the Social Services Committee that significant numbers of children would be protected by them so we are very pleased that they have gone.The collaboration in the bill is good—the collaboration between the chief executives of all the various ministries. That is all very good too but actually it should not require legislation to make it happen. Actually these should have been put in place and it should be the normal practice of any Government intervention. There should be cross-ministry engagement and cross-ministry plans backed up by evidence and research that those plans are working with clear targets being set for the reduction of violence for the reduction of child poverty and for the reduction in the number of children who are presenting to Child Youth and Family and to other agencies—and in the number of families who are presenting to other agencies—for assistance. With plans like that in place and clear responsibility for meeting those objectives we will have real change. Whether this particular level of collaboration in this bill does that or leads to that we have yet to see but at least it is a step in the right direction.We are very pleased about providing more financial support to young people who are leaving State care. I will talk briefly about that shortly. We are however still very concerned that there is no intention by the Government to help the community sector with the cost of the increased police checks. The community sector came to the select committee and was very clear that this was not necessarily a bad idea—in fact many welcomed it—but the financial burden was placed on those agencies that are at the front line of dealing with the most vulnerable families. The money that they use to go out to family homes to go to meet and talk with families and kids and to make the assessments about whether a child is at risk and then to take action for that child if that is the case is now going to have to be used for police checks. There is a significant cost to community organisations at the front line and repeatedly the officials and the Minister have said that they will not make any kind of compensation or reimbursement for those costs. It is a significant cost in some cases and that cost will come out of the services that are provided to the children and the families whom this bill is arguing to assist. It is unfair to place that obligation on these services that do such a fantastic job on behalf of us all and for them to have no reimbursement whatsoever.I am particularly concerned about the provisions that increase the powers of the State to remove children from their mothers at birth. There are already significant powers that the State has to remove a child at birth if it considers that there is a risk. Part of what this bill does is it changes the onus of proof. It is already very difficult for mothers particularly to demonstrate to Child Youth and Family that they have had enough intervention that they are able to keep their baby and care for them properly. But now the burden of proof has changed quite significantly and the hurdles for these women are now significantly greater and we can see no justification for that.The single most critical factor in how children survive exposure to domestic violence is the presence of at least one loving and supportive adult in their life. For many children the loving and supportive adult is their mother who will repeatedly do her best to provide her child her children with a normal life even when she herself is being abused. So she is the subject of domestic violence; her children are the subject of domestic violence. She is fighting for her and their lives as best she can but the child abuse system does not acknowledge the role of this protective parent. We too often hear of these women these protective parents doing the best they can and losing their children because they have been unable to keep their children safe from the abuser. This is even in cases of post-separation where she has left the abuser she has taken the children with her she has not been able to stop the abuser from continuing the violenceand the children are removed from her. The children are removed from her. She is punished. She might have tried the court system and it failed her. She might have tried getting other support from women’s refuge—none of which has been able to keep the abuser away. Nothing about the State system has been able to keep the abuser away from her and her kids and she is the one who is punished. Her children are punished.I have been visiting child services agencies for the last wee while talking to them about the nature of the families they work with the very high-risk vulnerable families. One service told me that 50 percent of the parents of the families at risk come from State care—50 percent. State care has failed to provide those parents when they were children with the resources they needed to have a good and fulfilling life. State care has not helped them grow into the parents and adults who are able to have the resources to care for their children as they would like. Yet this legislation will take more children from parents and put them into State care. State care is not safe. Everybody knows that. The State system is trying to address that and good on it for doing it as best it can but it is still failing those kids. Those kids grow up to be parents and those parents have their own kids removed to be taken back into State care where the cycle starts again because at no point in this cycle has any Government truly addressed the drivers that have led to those kids being there in the first place which are child poverty and family violence.These are the issues that have to be tackled and there is not one single thing in this bill that deals with that. The State will take children away. It will do police checks on individuals. It will take an individualistic approach. I asked the Minister about this and said: “Do you understand that we need structural change and we need an individual approach at the same time?”. Yes she said; she understood that. No she was not going to address the structural drivers that cause family violence. No she was not. That was not her priority. So the Greens are very disappointed. We are disappointed in the time and the resources that it has taken to write up this bill and to eventually enact and do all this work knowing that at the end of the day not a single thing is going to make the major difference that we need made in this country which is tackling child poverty and family violence. We will not support this bill. Thank you.