Logie Jan: Support for Children in Hardship Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLogie Jan: Support for Children in Hardship Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 10 November 2015. Volume:710;Page:7863. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAN LOGIE (Green): I rise to speak to Part 1 of the misnamed Support for Children in Hardship Bill. This part of the bill does several things. It lowers the child’s age at which parents are required to seek work—it is now from the time their child is 3—and it requires parents to look for 20 hours of work per week rather than the current 15.I do want to talk to several points around this and I will start with a rather beautiful quote from the National Council of Women during the select committee process. The council noted that it thought it was a form of insanity that perfectly capable parents are forced into low-paid work while a more expensive worker without necessarily better skills is paid to care for a child. That is what this bill does. It takes away parents’ choices in parenting. It pushes them into what is most likely to be precarious low-paid work that is—the evidence we had from the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions was that most of the jobs that are available and that many of these parents are likely to be eligible for are night-time and evening jobs. So we are removing parents from their ability to parent and forcing them into unstable jobs that actually lower their chances of increasing their education so they can get to a point of being more likely to be in higher-paid jobs with better conditions that may offer them and their children better life opportunities.I think that the words of the Salvation Army were also quite telling on this point. It also noted that this bill is forcing parents into work where there is an effective marginal tax rate of 80 percent. It noted in a way that I found so compelling that really we are risking children of 3 and 4 years of age for such small return. In the Salvation Army’s mind that was irresponsible. The Green Party agrees—that is irresponsible. That is not in our best interests as a society and it is not in the best interests of those children.I want to go back to another point about the way this has often been discussed—that the increase in hours from 15 to 20 is just another 5 hours a week and it is no particular big deal necessarily in people’s minds—except that the fact is that as has already been pointed out there is the additional travel time on top of that particularly for those families in Auckland. But the key part for me is that 20 hours a week is the threshold that moves you off the benefit. It moves you into dealing with the Inland Revenue Department and not Work and Income.Many many parents have had the experience of being encouraged into these jobs and then finding out that their employer actually is not so great when their child gets sick or when they get sick more than the 5 days a year that they may be eligible for and that they cannot actually manage their needs the needs of their employer and the needs of their child and they need to leave that job. In the existing system somebody wanting to transition back into the workforce maintains that attachment with Work and Income so that if it goes awry they can go back to their case manager and have that conversation. It is much easier to get that sorted out whereas now they are off the benefit and they are dealing only with the Inland Revenue Department and their employer. Then they have to go back and reapply. That sets up a whole degree of instability beyond what we have now and that is incredibly risky. What this also sets up is more potential for sanctions because there are more requirements from the time the child is 3—this requirement to be looking for 20 hours’ work a week.We hear from the Government that if the work is not available—and the point that has been made here previously by Labour speakers is that these jobs are not available. I have heard the Government reply to that with: “Well you know if the jobs aren’t available then that’s fine. They just need to be looking. This is about encouraging them and getting into the jobs.” But there are sanctions that kick in at that intermediary point that would not kick in without this bill for families when their youngest is 3 years old. That is a big risk when we know that over a 14-month period 88000 people have had their benefit sanctioned—that is 44000 children in this country who have had their family’s income cut by half because of sanctions put in place by this kind of legislation.The New Zealand Council of Christian Social Services pointed out that I think two-thirds of those sanctions were because somebody had missed an appointment. We know that sometimes that is happening because somebody’s bus is late. We know that is sometimes happening because somebody has been to a tangi or a funeral and has not been in the position where they are able and thinking to contact their caseworker or able to get through and that caseworkers have caseloads of like 150 people. So I am certainly not blaming the workers in this equation. It is about the system that we have set up.The heart of what I am saying is that we are risking the well-being of our children with these provisions. For what gain? Very very little—locking their parents into chances of lives of low-paid precarious work with little financial return. I also want to point out that it has also been noted that currently over 100000 workers in this country are trying to increase their hours of work. That was evidence from the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions. There are people in this country who have a job and are wanting more hours. Do we really really believe that parenting is so valueless that we should take the parents’ choice away on how to parent and be able to push them into that environment and take away the chances of other workers who are trying to increase their hours by saying: “Well you know these parents they should be doing that more than the other workers even when they could be parenting.”?I really have to remind this Committee again of the fact that there is international research which indicative research in New Zealand backs up that 70 percent of these sole parents are likely to be leaving violent relationships. I have worked in refuges and I have worked with the children who are coming out of violent relationships and one of the things that I have seen time and time again in that situation is the children having different ways of responding. One of the ways is to be really really angry with their mum and to be keeping on pushing back and pushing back because they have taken on the messages from their dad. The time that is required to break that to actually re-establish the trust and to be able to give that child a chance of having a future not determined by that violence is considerable. It is not going to be fixed within the 12 weeks of the work-test exemption that is in place for domestic violence.One of the other things that I have seen is where children do not want to leave the side of their mother. Every time she leaves the room even to go to the toilet they are worried. They are worried that somehow she is not going to come back. When we are saying that these women who are trying to re-establish their lives and provide for their children in that situation have to stop and leave their children and put them into childcare and go into a low-paid job we are not taking domestic violence seriously. We are not. We are not creating the conditions for us as a society to deal with what is an epidemic of domestic violence. We are doing an absolute discredit to ourselves and our children and so many other initiatives will actually fail—