Ball Darroch: Support for Children in Hardship Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeBall Darroch: Support for Children in Hardship Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 01 December 2015. Volume:710;Page:8399. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DARROCH BALL (NZ First): It is my pleasure to rise on behalf of New Zealand First to speak in support of this bill the Support for Children in Hardship Bill. But the problem and I have spoken about this before is that this is not actually focused on the children at all. It is actually—and we have heard it from different members of the House today—focused on the main benefit holder.I would just like to pick up on something that Alfred Ngaro said. Just looking at the introduction to the commentary on the bill it says: “This bill is intended to implement several initiatives for helping children who are living in severe material hardship.” Alfred Ngaro was talking about the spectrum that this bill was supposed to be targeting. But if we are talking about children who are living in severe material hardship and this bill is purporting to target sole parent beneficiaries and beneficiaries in general because they are down at the most severe end of poverty there are far more than just the 100000 children in that cohort targeted. Like I said at the start the problem is that this bill is not actually targeting those children; it is targeting the main beneficiary holders. So it is quite contradictory in the title in itself and I have spoken about that previously.Actually there are a couple of points I want to make. The first one is that one of the effects of this bill and this legislation is that it actually creates inequality with larger families. Because it is not concentrated on specific individual children like Jacinda Ardern pointed out earlier on the families with more children will become more unequal than those with just a single child. So it is actually creating inequality.I would like to look at a submission that was made by Susan St John who is an associate professor in the department of economics at the University of Auckland. It is quite a good report but I would just like to highlight one thing that she said. She talked about the new approach to welfare and she said that “This sees an intensification of the relentless focus on paid work as the solution to poverty including child poverty. Investment in this approach since 2012 has been about not more money for families but more money for the infrastructure of management of beneficiaries into work.” That is true with this bill and that is the problem that New Zealand First has with this bill.In fact the consequence of that approach is that there is an increase in the sanctions that are applied. So the administrative costs when applying new legislation like this can get quite high. In fact there were over 80000 sanctions applied between 2013 and 2014. So like I said if you are looking at the intent of the bill it is not achieving that. In stages it is actually creating inequality for the larger families and it is not actually focused on child poverty at all.One of the focuses as I stated was the sole parent benefits and it states in the general policy statement that there are a couple of points why children live in poverty. One of them is that the household income is too low even with good budgeting and discipline and another one says that the special demands on its budget are too high. But if we are looking at the sole parent benefit itself—and we are looking at it from 1990 I think it was—the sole parent benefit was around 75 percent of the average wage. And as we know what happened in 1991? It got cut quite dramatically by about 25 to 30 percent and ever since then down to 2015 it has consistently dropped from around 75 percent in 1990 to around only 50 percent of the average wage today.That is the kind of issue that this Government is trying to remedy by throwing not $25 per child and not even $25 per family but $23 on average per family. That is not going to create a solution for the massive gap that has been created over the last 30 years. That is why New Zealand First is concerned about this bill because the bill has the opportunity to do some good and focus on the children but—it is a step in the right direction. New Zealand First will support anything that is increasing the financial benefits that look after children but—