Nash Stuart: Support for Children in Hardship Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeNash Stuart: Support for Children in Hardship Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 01 December 2015. Volume:710;Page:8425. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]STUART NASH (Labour—Napier): Thank you—Hon Member: Is that it?STUART NASH: No no. The interesting thing about this bill and a number that are before the House—and there will be a bill before the Committee after this one on tax—is that it seems to me that a lot of tax legislation i.e. giving the ability to the Government to usually take money off Kiwis is retrospective.Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): Kia ora mai tātou. Tēnā tātou katoa. Members we are debating the Support for Children in Hardship Bill. When we adjourned for the dinner break Stuart Nash had 4 minutes and 45 seconds remaining. He was obviously cut short prior to dinner. He is welcome to resume his call.STUART NASH: I think I will resume that call. I was sort of cut off in mid-flow 15 seconds into my speech. What I was talking about is that the commencement date of the bill called the Support for Children in Hardship Bill is April 2016 and after this bill we are about to go to a tax bill as we have done quite recently in this House and there are a number of clauses in that tax legislation that are retrospective. It seems a little odd that when we have bills that take money off people or change tax laws which are quite fundamental to our economy often they are retrospective but when we are giving money back to people and often the most disadvantaged for some reason there is a big lag before this comes in.What this bill does is actually give $25 a week to some families come April 2016. That is not to be sneezed at—$25. It will make a big difference to some families but the interesting thing about this is that it is not indexed to how many children a family has. So if a family has one child they will get $25 a week. If a family has six children that family will also get $25 a week. That does not seem very equitable to me. I am unsure whether that is an unintended consequence. I am unsure whether it is a cruel joke or what the intent behind that is because if it is an unintended consequence I expect us to be back in this House with another remedial bill within 6 months remedying that—well I hope we are.We are talking about children in hardship. Let us put some context to this. There are 305000 children living in poverty at the moment. I think we can transpose the word “poverty” for “hardship” because it is pretty much the same. But the interesting thing about this is 60 percent of these are beneficiary families but 40 percent of these children come from families whose parents work. This is a new category called the working poor.We had a very interesting meal last Friday when we gathered a whole lot of old or former not old—[Interruption]—yes some of them were Labour MPs to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the election of the first Labour Government. It was interesting because on the placemats we had a Speech from the Throne from Michael Joseph Savage. What he said was that the Labour Government believes that every man—he did say “man” but I am sure he meant “man and woman”—earns enough money to support a family. That principle is universal and yet here we are literally 80 years later still fighting for the right for people to earn enough money to support a family.The fact that we have not progressed in 80 years to me is a real shame. In fact you could argue that by the end of that Labour Government men and women were earning enough money to support a family. I think that was one of the major legacies of that first Labour Government. But now here we are back in the House arguing for the fact that people need to be able to earn enough money to ensure that their children have every opportunity to reach their full potential. Every now and again what we hear from people is: “Oh these people they earn too much money. They get too much money back from the Government.” The interesting thing about that is that very very rarely is that criticism heard from someone who has to live on these tax credits.Parliament has deemed that people have to receive a certain amount of money to be able to live with dignity if they have children. It was passed and it is accepted but we would argue that at this point in time it is simply not enough money. An increase of $25 a week really does not go far at all especially if you have more than one child. In fact if you have a lot of children it does not go anywhere to be honest. But the interesting thing for me is—and we heard this from some people on the Government benches—sure this should be enough to support a family but what it has also got to be is enough to ensure that families can escape that poverty trap.People in New Zealand need enough money to ensure that their children have every opportunity to be as good as they possibly can be. The travesty of what is happening at the moment is that a lot of our children are not actually afforded that opportunity. The thing that I would argue is that we need to do more to change to get society back to the conditions and to the principles espoused by that Savage Labour Government in that first Speech from the Throne. It was a fantastic speech.