Upston Louise; Sepuloni CarmelHon LOUISE UPSTON (National—Taupō): Thank you Mr Chair. I've got a series of questions and I want to start first of all with benefit statistics and numbers but actually recognising that for every one of these numbers there is a person a family who are struggling to get by and if they want to be in work and aren't it is particularly challenging for them.So if we look at the time in question compared back to 2017 we've seen job seeker numbers increasing steadily each year now peaking at just under 200000. One of the questions to the Minister is: why is she saying that if the unemployment rate is the same as it was four years ago at 4.7 percent are there 75000 more people on job seeker benefit? That is my first question.The second question is probably the one that concerns me more though the fact that there are again compared to September 2017 50000 more people on job seeker who have been there for more than 12 months. So I want to know why that is. I want to know what has been done by the Ministry of Social Development to mitigate the harm from long-term welfare dependency. As I say that's 50000—it's a big number—but actually for every one of those numbers there is an individual or a family that is doing it tough.I've got a series of questions on hardship so I'll start there.Hon CARMEL SEPULONI (Minister for Social Development and Employment): I'll start with the benefit numbers and also the unemployment rate. I think it is important to note that the unemployment rate that we currently have is 4.7 percent but when we were first hit with COVID Treasury was forecasting that we would experience an 8 percent unemployment rate and some economists outside of Treasury were predicting up to 10 percent. I think that it is an amazing achievement for us as a country that we have managed to keep our unemployment rate as low as it is despite being hit with a pandemic.With regards to actual benefit numbers at its worst in terms of forecasts for what the benefit numbers would be we were initially told we could experience benefit numbers of 490000 New Zealanders. That as you can imagine scared all of us and I think was something that was quite frightening for the whole country. We haven't got there. At the peak so far we I think in January reached about 390000. And now the most recent stats that I've seen had us at about 360000. Now does that mean that we are in any way relaxed about the fact that we still have New Zealanders on benefit? No not at all. But I do want to reflect back and say that one of the things that I came across when I was made the Minister for Social Development and Employment was that actually what we had seen over the course of a period of years was the decline in front-line work-focused case management. So much of the front-line focus had shifted towards hardship—this is prior to us getting into Government—and the levels of staffing had not increased which meant that there was a decline in focus on work focus for the clients that were coming to the Ministry for Social Development (MSD). So one of the measures that we did put in place in 2019 was an increase in front-line work-focused case managers. We saw that begin to pay off immediately. We announced that. That came into place almost straight away. In July 2019 we started to see an increase in exits off benefit into employment and that has continued. It is not just MSD but I will acknowledge the staff that have been working at the front line. In the last quarter we've actually seen the most number of exits off benefit into employment than what we have seen since 1996 when electronic records started to be kept—so again a pretty amazing achievement given that we are still in the midst of a global pandemic.The member asked how I reconcile a 4.7 percent unemployment rate with 360000 people on benefit. And as she rightly pointed out that is more than what were on benefit in 2017—much of it due to as I've already said the pandemic. We do need to keep in mind that the unemployment rate is measured by the household labour force survey and benefit numbers are benefit numbers—they are an indication of who are on benefit. So sometimes they do seem out of sync. The thing that I take great heart in is that we saw a reduction in the unemployment rate through the household labour force survey down to 4.7 percent as well as seeing over the same period a reduction in the number of people that were on benefit. We always say and continue to think that there is definitely more to do in this space but I do recognise that you know we are actually doing a relatively good job in supporting people into employment alongside supporting a large number of New Zealanders into upskilling and training opportunities into workforces where there is meaningful and sustainable employment and where actually they have the potential to earn relatively good money compared to perhaps some of the work that they might have been doing prior to getting the upskilling and training that we have on offer now.