Naylor Jono: Social Security (Extension of Young Persons Services and Remedial Matters) Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeNaylor Jono: Social Security (Extension of Young Persons Services and Remedial Matters) Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 23 July 2015. Volume:707;Page:5304. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JONO NAYLOR (National): It is a pleasure to rise and take a call on this bill. It has been a pretty entertaining afternoon. We have heard people with hearing problems unfortunately it seems who have been picking up wrong numbers. I am going to correct them a little bit on that. I will sort that out for them as I go through this speech.I particularly want to talk about this programme in the context of everything else that this Government is doing. This programme again shows the commitment of this Government. This bill reflects the plans and the ideals behind this Government in wanting to help our young people who need help the most to be able to achieve goals dreams and aspirations. I am aspirational. I want to see our young people succeed. I want to see them achieve everything they are capable of doing and that is exactly what is behind this bill. It is not paternalistic; it is empowering and I will talk about that further as we go through.When new programmes are introduced as this initial programme was back in 2000—whenever it was—Fletcher Tabuteau: 2012.JONO NAYLOR: 2012 thank you very much. That is exactly when it was introduced. It is important before you make any changes or tinker with it at all that you assess these things before you make a judgment. It is appropriate. We have had some early assessment done on this programme. It has been really interesting that it has been talked about already this afternoon that perhaps we should wait until this big longitudinal study is done so that we can find out what the long-term effects of this programme are before we do anything else with it. It just seemed bizarre to me considering that this is a programme that is hopefully going to help our young people for many years to come. We should ensure that we are assessing as we go. That is exactly what was done in 2014 with this Youth Service evaluation report that was done by the Ministry of Social Development.Let us look at some of the key findings within that. What we discovered was that in the first 12 months of enrolment in the Youth Service young parent payment participants were more likely to gain National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) credits. Well I think that is a pretty positive thing. I think it is important that we have things in place that are going to help our young people get more NCEA credits. Our young people who are participants in this programme are more likely to meet the requirements of NCEA level 2 in their first 12 months within this Youth Service. We have been able to look at that. We have been able to see that that is occurring and everyone would agree I am sure that the more young people we have within our communities who have NCEA level 2 the better their opportunities are for success the better their opportunities are for meaningful employment the better their opportunities are for being able to raise their children in a way that they will be proud of.It is important that we recognise that this programme has been working for our 16 to 18-year-olds. There has been a little bit of talk around this House about people being out of touch and not connecting with young people. Well I can say that I was privileged along with the Prime Minister to visit one of our community service providers a month or so ago and it was actually quite interesting to talk to a young woman there who has been a part of this programme. She was somebody who had a young child. I think she was about 17 years old and she was working her way towards getting her level 2 credits. I thought that was fantastic because in the past often somebody in her situation might have been sitting at home not because they wanted to but because they lacked the support around them they lacked the encouragement and they lacked the resources to be able to get out and get on and move forward with their lives. But what was most encouraging about speaking to this young woman was that level 2 NCEA was not where she was hoping to stop. No. This young woman having been in an environment where she was seeing early childhood educators working was absolutely committed to wanting to further her studies to become an early childhood educator.When we talk to these people when you get alongside them and you find out the positive impact that programmes such as this are having on them it is fantastic to hear. It is encouraging to hear and it gives us the motivation and the interest to say “Well if it’s working for this group of people why don’t we look at helping out some more people as well?” which is exactly what we are doing by extending this programme through to 19-year-olds as well. I think we need to remind ourselves whom it is that this programme is for. This is for those parents who are in the age bracket that we are talking about and we are also talking about 18 and 19-year-olds who are considered at significant risk of long-term welfare dependency.I heard Sue Moroney talking and the words that she used before were that we were sort of going to shift some blame on to these young people. We are not blaming them for the situation that they find themselves in but what we want to do is we want to empower them to be able to have the skills and the education and the support to be able to get out of the situation that they find themselves in. There has been talk about putting labels on them and how this is not fair. It is a crazy situation to be in. It is like people are saying that because you cannot do this for absolutely everybody you should not do this for some people.What we are doing is identifying those young people whom we think are going to have the longest-term risk of being on a benefit for a long period of time to make sure where possible that that is not the outcome they are looking for. There are not too many young people whom I have come across in my experience in youth work and in working with young people who have told me that their aspiration is to be on a benefit for most of their lives. It is not what people aspire to do. So we are going to put these programmes in place to help them. As with the current service young people who are referred to the service are going to be required to undertake budgeting courses and have budgeting conversations with their youth coach.Yes there are some obligations on them. I think that is not a bad thing sometimes when people do have a few obligations that they have to meet. But I think—and this is the sad part; hopefully Sue Moroney will listen to this before she leaves because she said that the $10 to $30 a week that they might receive was laughable—Sue Moroney: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. I know the member has not been here long but the reference to someone’s absence from the Chamber is not acceptable in his speech.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): No what he said was “before the member leaves”. He did not say that you were absent. You would be right if that were the case.JONO NAYLOR: If I have caused some offence by that I apologise. But this is the important thing that I want to draw attention to. Sue Moroney said that the $10 extra that somebody was going to get was laughable—her words. Well I can say that when I was raising a young family while I was on the student allowance when I spent some time in our family when we were trying to have a couple of young kids and we were on a sickness benefit if someone had said to me “Here is an extra 10 bucks a week.” I would not have found that laughable. I do not think that the beneficiaries in our community now would actually find it laughable to be getting an extra $10 a week. If you are struggling to get by on a week-to-week basis when you are struggling to pay for groceries when you are struggling on a benefit because we all know that it is not an easy thing to do when you are trying hard to budget—if somebody had said $10 was laughable I would have found that insulting. I think those people would find it insulting that the member who has referred to it in that way was so out of touch—so out of touch—with the plight of the people whom we are talking about.I know my time is almost up but I just want to come back to this last point. This is a cost-effective programme. We know that for every dollar spent on the existing Youth Service taxpayers’ liability is reduced by $2.53. Eugenie Sage when she was talking earlier sort of talked about this in a way that was perhaps negative. I cannot understand how somebody would think that investing now up front to be able to save the Government money in the long term is negative. And she talked about it like the Government was trying to save its own money. Well I am sorry but we do not have our own money. The only money we have is that money that has been given to us sometimes not particularly willingly by the taxpayers of this country and it is beholden on us to make sure that we invest that money that we spend that money in the way that is going to deliver the very best outcome for those people.As I said earlier I am aspirational for these young people in our communities. I want to see them do really really well. I think they can do more and I think that we can get behind them with these youth services. By expanding the youth services out to include those 18 and 19-year-olds who currently are missing out on the ability to be able to participate in this very very good programme we are helping more people. We are not blaming people; we are not looking down on people. We are empowering them and I really look forward to us helping more and more of them. Thank you.