Walker Holly: Child Support Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Walker Holly: Child Support Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 27 February 2013. Volume:687;Page:8275. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
HOLLY WALKER (Green) 
: 
 I am pleased to take a call in the Committee stage of the Child Support Amendment Bill. As I told the House last night in the second reading it is with sadness really that the Green Party continues to oppose this legislation. We absolutely support the goal of a fairer more transparent child support system but right from the get-go with this legislation we have found ourselves unable to support it because of a number of concerns that we have which have not been addressed by the Social Services Committee’s deliberations on the bill. 
I think it is really important to ground this debate in the subject matter which is of course the rights of children to be well supported and cared for when their family is going through difficult circumstances. By definition to qualify for child support children’s parents and/or caregivers have been unable to reach an agreement about how to financially support that child. That is not an ideal circumstance for any child by any stretch of the imagination. It is a time when children are likely to be stressed and vulnerable and a time when it is absolutely important that the legislation and the scheme governing the support for those children maximise their best interests and seek the best possible outcome for those children. 
To take probably our most fundamental concern with this bill it is the fact that it fails to maximise the best interests of children and it fails to take that opportunity to do so. We have heard from one of the previous speakers Dr Clark about the efforts that the select committee went to to consider enshrining a commitment to the best interests of children into the purposes of the Child Support Amendment Bill. That would have gone a long way I think to alleviating the concerns that we as the Green Party have about this bill. Unfortunately the attempt to do that was blocked by the Government members of the select committee and even the attempt to have some further advice from officials on that point was blocked. 
I think that when we consider that not even in the Child Support Amendment Bill are we prepared to enshrine the best interests of children we really have our priorities wrong as a Parliament when it comes to how we are taking care of our kids. It is also a missed opportunity to alleviate child poverty. We heard from a number of submitters that the child support scheme could be improved in such a way that would actually directly benefit some of the 25 percent of New Zealand children who are living in poverty—for example the ability for parents who are reliant on benefits to receive a passed-on child support payment rather than having that whole payment retained by the Crown as a means of offsetting their benefit. 
Additionally the ability for the Crown to advance child support payments to families in order to ensure a stable and guaranteed income for the children and family even if the liable parent is late or behind on their payments would have made a huge difference for thousands of children and helped to alleviate child poverty. That opportunity has been missed and that is a great shame. 
To turn to what takes up the bulk of Part 1 of this bill which is the new child support formula—really this is at the heart of the changes that the bill introduces—we remain incredibly concerned at the complexity and lack of transparency of the new child support formula that this bill introduces. It has been acknowledged by officials in their advice to the committee that the new formula is much much more complicated than the one it replaces and the one it replaces is already reasonably complicated and already a source of friction for many parents who need to calculate their liabilities or their entitlements under the existing child support formula. That will only get worse under this bill because the new formula is incredibly complicated. It introduces a huge number of new variables and the upshot of that I think is that it will become basically totally impenetrable for the average parent to work out their own liabilities or entitlements under the child support scheme. They will probably need to sit down with the advice of a professional accountant in order to be able to figure it out and certainly without the full and complicated information required to plug in all the variables they will not be able to do their own calculations check the calculations that the system has spat out for them and feel confident that the system is fair and transparent. 
That I think has the real potential to create new grievances between parents because if it is felt by either a receiving or a liable parent that they have not had a fair deal from the new formula they really have no ability to go in themselves and check against it because it is so complicated that it will simply be impenetrable for them. That I think produces a real weakness in the scheme that actually puts it at considerable risk. 
What we also heard from officials with regard to the new child support formula is that it is going to put the Inland Revenue Department’s systems both administrative and IT systems under considerable strain. We know that the Inland Revenue Department’s IT system is already creaking and groaning under the weight of what it has to administer and we have seen recently in other legislation before this House regarding the student loans scheme that the system basically cannot cope with the changes that are being introduced. And here again we have an example of that with the child support formula. It is so complicated that it is going to require significant investment in that IT system for it to actually be able to administer and process the formula. 
We know already that that whole system needs replacing so it is a very inefficient use of resources to invest in it—and we have heard from officials that about $91 million will be required to administer the new formula—when that whole system is going to need to be replaced soon anyway. I would not be surprised actually if it was the straw that broke the camel’s back and caused the system to collapse. 
So significant are these problems that the introduction of this bill has had to be delayed by a year so that the Inland Revenue Department’s systems can get up to scratch. I think that tells you a lot about the readiness of the department to administer the new child support scheme. Simply put it is not a good idea to go ahead. So we have very fundamental concerns with that with the cost to the taxpayer of an additional $91 million and a contingency of $28 million to even put into place the administrative requirements the training of new staff and the IT systems to administer the scheme and no additional benefit for the children who are supposedly at the heart of the scheme. We have very fundamental concerns about that. 
Finally I want to turn my attention to the Minister’s Supplementary Order Paper 181 which is before the Committee. The concern I want to raise with this is really a process concern. This legislation goes back a very long time. The consultation to begin to review and reassess the child support scheme goes back a number of years. There was a very lengthy public consultation process undertaken and a very lengthy report produced and over several years this legislation has progressed incrementally. 
We also had a very full process at the select committee when we considered this legislation. We took our time over it as we heard from Dr Clark largely because we had to spend so long trying to get our heads around the new formula. But we had a very lengthy process and we had plenty of time for advice from officials about amendments to the bill. Indeed the select committee recommended a number of amendments. And yet here we have at the last minute with no advance notice and the amendment available only earlier this afternoon changes on the floor of the Committee from the Minister when in fact I believe that he has had years and years and years to get this right and to put those amendments in place. I think it is very unacceptable that this kind of last-minute process has been followed with those amendments in the Minister’s Supplementary Order Paper. 
Those are some of the reasons that the Green Party has fundamental concerns with this legislation that we opposed it at the first and second readings that we will oppose it through the Committee stage and that we will oppose it at the third reading. Thank you.