Hayes JoJOANNE HAYES (National): Before I start my contribution I just want to congratulate Darroch for having his bill the Youth Employment Training and Education Bill pulled out of the ballot. As I was sitting here listening to the member Darroch Ball's contribution it almost harked right back to many many years ago when you could join the army at the age of 16 and you could from there start off on the basics and move your way through to a career if you wanted to. It does hark back to those times. I have a brother-in-law who is in his fifties now and he was recruited into the army when he was 16 years old. But things have moved on since then and I know that the army does require that recruits who are recruited into the army do actually have NCEA level 2 in education to do with English and mathematics. They do require that.My brother-in-law is now a commissioned officer. He started out as I said as a lance corporal and moved right through. He became a non-commissioned officer and then he became a commissioned officer. One of the things that he has said to me on numerous occasions is that he would like to make sure that young people who are coming into the armed forces do have basic education abilities and qualifications.When we start to look at this bill we are looking at a starting age of 15 years old while the legal age to leave school is 16 years old. If we start looking at young people at the age of 15 say going in under this bill and being recruited into the armed forces we are requiring the armed forces to pick up an almost custodial positioning within the organisation. That does require extra support for the young people who are going in. They will have many other issues besides the issue of actually getting into the armed forces and being woken up at 5 o'clock in the morning and being told that if they get into trouble they are going to be sweeping that court with a toothbrush in the wee hours of the morning. They are actually going to go through all of those things and not very many 15-year-olds who are failing in the system will actually accept that. To be honest they will tell the sergeant major where to go and that is not what I believe this bill is all about.I look at the many things this Government has done for youth within the Youth Guarantee programme. That is for 16- to 19-year-olds. We are all very familiar with what this Youth Guarantee scheme is all about: it is about supporting young people to get qualifications at NCEA level 2. That actually helps to put in a base for them—an educational base—that they can launch off from. This is a Government that provides all of the tools and the background so that young people can launch into their careers—into whatever career they want to do.There are also opportunities that this Government has put in place for young people such as the Gateway programme. My son went on the Gateway programme. He went into carpentry. He went in and tried his hand at carpentry and he came out with some amazing skills. He ended up not working in that area but it opened a door for him so that he could actually start aiming his education towards the area he is best at which is working with his hands. We also have service academies. These service academies are put in place for young people to go in and have a go at whatever service they want to try their hand at. They have an opportunity to opt out if they find they get to a certain point and find out that it is not really for them.We have a number of other opportunities that have been offered to young people that start them out as little wee cadets. They can move up and through—and it is usually through the air force base. They can start in the community and work their way through. It is called the Cadet Corps and it is voluntary for the young people. It helps parents to move their children towards those particular fields and it acts as another pathway into an area of one of the three armed forces.This bill actually deals only with the army; it does not deal with the air force or the navy—it does not do that. This is what the member is actually saying—he talked about the army. There is also trade training. These programmes offer some amazing opportunities for Māori and Pasifika within the building area. When I look at and turn my face towards Christchurch and we start looking at focusing on that area we have Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu which offers trade training for young Māori who can join up and become building apprentices. As we know Christchurch has had great need for builders and we had to train some young people into the building trade. Māori trade training has been able to offer them that. They also offer pastoral care for those Māori students as well.As another example I used to work for a seafood industry training organisation many years ago and we had various polytechnics and providers that supported young people into the seafood industry to train either as deckhands or as fisher people on the boats or on shore. One of the biggest areas that they had to put together was a pastoral care programme that looked after these young people so that they could successfully progress through. That is what this bill is actually asking for: it is asking for the armed services to put together not only custodial care but pastoral care around these young people.We also look at New Zealand Apprentice. A big area that we have reintroduced back in is New Zealand Apprentice because at one stage we trained a lot of people in academia and we got lots and lots of people with qualifications at university and tertiary level but we forgot about the trade training area. This is how the New Zealand apprenticeship schemes came about.Those are some of the things that the Government has come along and put in to support young people into positions. When I start to look at some of the unintended consequences—that is this thing about offering this programme to 15-year-olds when we know that the compulsory school-leaving age is 16—what this bill is actually doing is encouraging young people to leave school at 15: It's OK we'll look after you. We'll just throw you on this programme." It is not a very good message. And what about young people who want to enter the army and have to go through and sit all the exams to get into the army yet 15-year-olds can just trot on in there through this bill.I have already talked about the New Zealand Defence Force having to have extra people around to support the young people in whatever pastoral care they need but I guess really the areas of concern are some of the contractual implications with the Ministry of Social Development (MSD)—that MSD would have with the New Zealand Defence Force also additional to the Limited Service Volunteer programme that we have got. There are also the cost implications. I think the member said the cost is a fraction. Well I do not think a cost of around $23.4 million is a fraction; I think it is a lot of money. I am saying to the member that you will need to go back and redo and have a look at the actual programme and the bill that you are proposing here in the House today because there are so many holes and gaps without any consideration of what is already in place for young people.As I wind up my contribution today—as I said to the member—I congratulate Mr Ball on having this bill drawn. I think there is more work to go in. There is a lot of pastoral care information that needs to go in. You are trying to take us right back to the 16-year-old recruit from back in the day when my brother-in-law was recruited into the army. He had a long history with the army and of all the recruits who went in when he went in at 16 years old you can count on one hand the number of people who stayed in the army past age 30. So it is not an answer to everything it is not what the member proposes it to be and I think it sends out some very very damning messages to our young people.Darroch Ball: Your National Party policy?JOANNE HAYES: It does. It sends out some damning messages to our young people and I think more work needs to be done. That is why I cannot support the bill. Thank you."