Turner Judy: General Debate 
Turner Judy: General Debate 
[Volume:641;Page:11584] 
JUDY TURNER (Deputy Leader—United Future) 
: 
 Several months ago a social policy group calling itself Breakthrough Britain made a series of recommendations to the British Conservative Party about how to end the costs of social breakdown. Chaired by the Rt Hon Iain Duncan Smith MP the group advocates for a new approach to welfare in the 21st century. Its report called on the Government to start reinforcing and strengthening not the welfare State but the welfare society which it defined as “that which delivers welfare beyond the State”. The paper states that the heart of welfare society is the army of people who for the love of neighbour and community shoulder the massive burden of care. Underpinning the recommendations of the report is the understanding that pivotal to the principles of tackling disadvantage at the earliest stages of a child’s life is the need to support and develop the potential of the third sector—those community and voluntary organisations that work where the rubber meets the road with families in need of support of some kind. In the New Zealand context we have literally thousands of community organisations that have sprung up in response to local needs and that give shape and meaning to what it means to be a community. 
 The Grandparents Raising Grandchildren Trust is one such organisation. It was started by a grandmother who took two highly traumatised grandchildren at the request of Child Youth and Family into her care. This grandmother being at her wit’s end due to the complex needs these children were presenting her with and the absence of support put an advertisement in a local paper asking whether anybody else was struggling to cope with similar circumstances. Her phone has not stopped ringing since then. 
Now a few short years since that advertisement went into the paper she leads an organisation that has 3000 members and branches all over the country. What tends to happen when these groups form is that they quickly discover that there are needs within their group that cannot be addressed just by a friendly listening ear at the end of the phone. They quickly develop a range of additional services like second-hand clothing exchanges and legal advice—services that Government agencies cannot or will not make available to them. Lobbying central and local government is the natural progression for organisations that figure out over time that they are trying to make up for the shortfall in people’s lives created by systemic and policy failures. 
Members of the Grandparents Raising Grandchildren Trust quickly discovered that if they were raising non - family members they would be getting a more generous benefit with additional allowances to boot. They discovered that even when Child Youth and Family asks people to step up to the plate there is no legal aid funding for those who have nice homes and investment money for their retirement. Instead those people watch their money disappear on court costs as they must repeatedly fight their own children who do get legal aid in order to keep their grandchildren safe; or they watch their money disappear on new mortgages in order to upgrade their two-bedroom low-maintenance retirement homes to something more suitable for bringing up these new second families. 
I have spoken to members of the Grandparents Raising Grandchildren Trust who have whittled away their entire retirement savings and are now borrowing from lending institutions to make ends meet. I have sat in branch meetings of the trust and seen a woman in her late 60s sobbing with exhaustion. There is no respite for caregivers who are looking after family members but if people are fostering somebody else’s kids we will organise and fund regular breaks so they can keep going. This woman had figured out that her only option would be to drop off her grandchildren at the local Child Youth and Family office and drive away. 
It is past time that the Labour Government honoured its 2005 election manifesto and made available the same clothing allowances school trip money birthday present money and counselling and support that it provides to other children in need of foster care. Community groups like the Grandparents Raising Grandchildren Trust support those who support some of our most truly vulnerable citizens. They are not intending to resign from their responsibilities but would like to develop a better partnership with Government agencies that have the same mandate. 
It is time we stopped both ignoring and patronising the community and voluntary sector. That sector saves us billions of dollars and partnering with it is the smartest thing that any Government can do. However we need to do it in such a way that we do not compromise who the members of the sector are and the flexible support they are able to offer people in the community. 
United Future is prepared to offer an open door to these organisations to help broker a more productive line of communication for them with the Government and a more robust working partnership so that the safety net that we want to see in the community is sound.