Logie JanJAN LOGIE (Green): Thank you Minister for addressing some of the questions I had regarding this 100-page Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 329 which arrived with us yesterday. You have not spoken on any of the rationale for the other changes that it makes. That you have at least put on record now a couple of sentences relating to three of the points is I think something.There are quite a few points I want to cover in a short amount of time. I would like to ask the Minister to explain to us the change around the complaints mechanism. My understanding of the bill as it has been reported back to the House is that it would establish a review mechanism" for that complaints system "that—" and then it had an entire list of 10 points. That has been changed now by SOP 329. So instead of "a review mechanism that—" it has changed to a review mechanism "that is intended to be—" and 10 points has been reduced to two points: "(A) accessible and timely: (B) have the necessary capability …" and an explanation of that. Then instead of the other points which were all in one list now we have "for which 1 or more of the following are specified:" and then there is a list that seems to me to be quite a significant change in terms of the direction in relation to that complaints mechanism. I do hope that the Minister will take the time and give the public the courtesy of explaining the rationale for that amongst the other Supplementary Order Papers at this late stage.I want to touch on another point that the Minister made in earlier speeches. When we said that submitters had told us clearly that there was not necessarily a need to change the legislation that there was a need to change practice the Minister stood up and said: "Well actually the safety of our children is a clear need for changing the legislation." Well I would like to give the Minister some of the submitters' responses to that and see what her response might be.We were told that the intent of the initial legislation was that it was a liberal positive piece of legislation but then in the 1990s and after that there were changes to the State Sector Act and the Public Finance Act. This is from Professor Mike O'Brien telling us that it had undermined the role and the ability of Child Youth and Family to be able to respond to the needs of children and their families—that the Public Finance Act and the State Sector Act changed what was the core business of child protection which was created originally in this legislation out of huge amounts of consultation with our communities and that basically it changed the concept from what was good for the family and what children needed to how much money we can get to provide that service out of the systems.We were told that in the 1990s a $600 limit was put on support for whānau and that then we had all the other systemic change happening in our society around benefit levels being set below the poverty level around limited tenure in housing and that that has created a huge amount of instability. So what we heard was that actually the model of practice was really positive but there were structural limitations put on the ability of social workers to be able to support families and children and none of those points have been addressed in this piece of legislation. So although we are hearing all this pretty talk about being able to support children and their families and make great changes there is a real danger that nothing will change in practical terms in terms of ensuring that those families get the support that they need.I would like to speak a little bit about two more points. One is around youth justice and the other is around information sharing. We have heard of the information-sharing provisions and that the Minister has been in discussion with the Privacy Commissioner about this. The insinuation was that the Privacy Commissioner was on board with this. Well I sat—no the Minister is shaking her head but that is right. The Privacy Commissioner is not on board with these changes. We heard from the Privacy Commissioner the Office of the Children's Commissioner the Law Society a range of women's refuges and community organisations who are absolutely without a doubt not concerned about adult affairs but concerned about the welfare of our tamariki and children in this country. They told us that there were several problems with this information-sharing provision in the Act. It was not developed out of consultation with the people who are doing the work. Actually those people who are doing the work know what families need and what works for them.I was at a social services conference in Christchurch where a professor of social work was telling us that all the social work literature tells us that the one thing that makes the biggest difference in terms of helping people change their lives is relationships—it is trust. Actually when you put in information-sharing provisions like this which would enable the State to compel almost anyone in New Zealand to give information about a child a young person or their family we risk breaching that trust at the community level. That is what this legislation does.Section 66 of the Children Young Persons and Their Families Act enables social workers to be able to compel people against their ethical guidelines. We heard clearly from the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists that they were really putting a line in the sand and saying that this is dangerous. They are saying that actually you cannot trust the information and that the general practice for people the protection in law to be able to change the information and check it—that is not a normal part of practice and we risk sharing bad information. We were also warned that this legislation is putting in an information-sharing provision ahead of the development of the operating model that it is going to connect to.So we are in real danger of there being a mismatch between those two things. We were also told that it is complex and fragmented and harder to understand than the existing law and we were told just last week I think it was by the Privacy Commissioner that it is a mismatch with the family and whānau violence legislation information-sharing provisions that will in all likelihood apply to these same families and children. So we are going to be in the situation where social workers are going to have to be choosing I think between three different information provisions created by these pieces of legislation and decide which one is going to work and gives them the most power. How is that going to make practice good?We have heard from the Minister that we know that there are situations where everyone has had a different piece of the puzzle and we just need to make sure everyone gets the pieces of the puzzle. Well the problem is not necessarily the fact that there is not legislation around information sharing. Often people have shared information but nothing has happened with that information because they have not been resourced to be able to respond to that information or they are given information and they do not know how to understand it and they do not respond to that information or they are given information and they do not trust the people who gave it to them so they do not do anything with that information.Nothing in this legislation will change that and that is how this stuff works on the ground. That is what we were told continually and we are in this piece of legislation making things worse and that puts children's lives at risk. When we know particularly to address the needs of tamariki Māori that there is institutionalised racism built into all of our systems—there is no question about that—and that we will be sharing information that is loaded with that bias is that going to increase the change of tamariki and whānau being stigmatised? I say yes. That is the information we were giving and we should not be doing that. We should be putting our efforts into building trusting relationships in our community and properly resourcing our organisations to work alongside whānau to be able to support them in a relationship of trust because all of the evidence tells us that is what works—that is what will protect our babies."