Ardern Jacinda: Families Commission Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeArdern Jacinda: Families Commission Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 11 March 2014. Volume:697;Page:16512. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JACINDA ARDERN (Labour):It is my pleasure to take a second call on the Families Commission Amendment Bill. I want to point out of course that the most substantive part of this bill is contained in Part 1 and I imagine therefore that that will be where the most robust part of this debate sits. I want to come to new section 7 in clause 5 which talks about the commission’s main functions. In my opening address I did refer to what I thought was diluted advocacy. That is not necessarily strictly as is set out in the bill. The bill purports that the Families Commission will maintain an advocacy function but our concern has been based on the reality of what we have seen. In the bill itself it states in section 7 that the commission’s main functions will be: “(a) to act as an advocate for the interests of families generally … and (b) to monitor and evaluate programmes and interventions in the social sector and provide social science research into key issues programmes and interventions across that sector …”.I have two quick concerns. When the last time the Families Commission came before the Social Services Committee the question was asked of the Families Commission: “What do you perceive to be the most significant issues facing New Zealand families today?”. Interestingly there was a very long pause from the commissioner who was present there that day a bit of fumbling around occurred and then the main objectives for that year for the Families Commission were plucked out. From memory they were things like adolescence issues alcohol issues—clearly a list of things that the Government has taken an interest in rather than necessarily what the Families Commission itself had determined to be issues that needed to be advocated for and on behalf of families based on families’ needs. If they had been issues based on New Zealand families’ needs I would have expected the response from the commissioner or at least the head at that time to be much more intuitive and to be based on the conversations they had had the research they had done and the knowledge they had in those roles. Not so. They went directly to a set of objectives that were clearly established by an outside entity.Secondly with regard to paragraph (b) of the commission’s main function the monitoring and evaluation role there is no doubt that there is a need for that kind of function within the Ministry of Social Development. You constantly hear from NGOs of the requirement that is put upon them—and rightly so—to provide robust evaluations of the programmes that they offer. The issue is that some of the contracts that the ministry holds with organisations are not significant contracts. In fact you could soak up an entire contract with the cost of doing proper research and evaluation. So these organisations are left between a rock and a hard place. They do not have the funding to do a proper evaluation and yet their funding is contingent on it which has always led me to think that it would make sense to have within the Ministry of Social Development a pooled resource that would enable it to then allow NGOs that could not meet that threshold to access that research and monitoring arm to ensure that their programmes and interventions were working and delivering what the ministry wanted them to deliver.To me the fact that the commission has this as one of its secondary functions is problematic for two reasons. Firstly I do not think that a commission is the right place for it because actually we need this beyond just Families Commission issues and programmes. We need it much more broadly for the social development sector. Secondly the funding that the Families Commission has will not be sufficient for it to do this job as adequately as required. It still has a quite small budget when you think about the kinds of things that could come under paragraph (b). So those are the issues that I have with section 7(a) and (b) in that regard. As I say that is not to discount in particular the importance of paragraph (b) but why would we want to compartmentalise it in that way? Why is it not within the Ministry of Social Development? I would be interested in the view of the Minister in the chair Associate Minister for Social Development Borrows on that.I want to come to clause 6 relating to the commission’s additional functions. I touched briefly on the don’ts of the commission. Of course the clause sets out that it is not meant to act as an advocacy model for individual families. That is the kind of work that MPs presumably do themselves. But it then sets out in that section the additional functions that I have already talked about. Under new section 8(ba) it is to prepare the annual families status report but it is also—