Davidson MaramaHon MARAMA DAVIDSON (Co-Leader—Green): Thank you very much Mr Speaker. The Green Party is also supporting the Social Workers Registration Legislation Amendment Bill. I'll start by acknowledging the previous speaker the Hon Carmel Sepuloni and her vast experience insight and sector relationships with social service workers particularly over the past couple of terms in a ministerial role which requires that insight and that knowledge to feed into what is best for social workers but also for our communities—what those needs are. We are supporting this legislation because we support the principle and the movement that acknowledges the importance of qualified and safe practice for social workers and for the people and the whānau and the communities who require social work support.We were also very very aware that extending the lead-in time to repeal back the experience pathway was—and this is the bit of the debate that I want to make quite clear. We're supporting this legislation. Yes there is still another—hang on what's the date?—two years so it comes into force on 28 February 2026. We too would have preferred the experience pathway to be rolled back another two years—with another extra two years—to 28 February 2028. This Government has chopped a couple of years off and we were very opposed to that amendment to the legislation. However we will support the two-year extension.I talked in the first reading about centring the absolute importance of safe and qualified practice especially for the people who require those services and that support. I used the experience of being a prevention of violence Minister over the past three years and how I came face to face all around the motu on the experience of when practice is not safe when practice is not informed and when social work practice and care practice is not up to speed with understanding the dynamics of being able to identify violence and being able to safely respond and also understanding the element of healing that all social work must incorporate into its practice. So I'm making it very clear that I absolutely back the sector in wanting to make sure that we have safe practice.What I also heard about around the country again in prevention of violence but also in the housing portfolio areas where many of the front-line workers—particularly in the homelessness space and the social housing provider space—have lived experience of homelessness of social housing of requiring specific housing support. Similarly too I always heard around the country about disabled workers and the incredible gap that we have especially in the prevention of violence space of services that are specific to sexual violence experienced by people who are disabled by disabled people the gap in the workforce for those particular areas of need and as the former speaker the Hon Carmel Sepuloni highlighted the massive and decades-long gaps in the Māori and Pasifika cultural expertise practice space. Those require us to be thinking that the needs on those particular skills and lived experience are going to increase over the coming years and not decrease. Therefore to try and balance to make sure we are centring safe practice but also ensure that the experience and skill and value of lived experience is utilised in a way that can only benefit communities this is why giving a little bit more lead-in to pulling back on the experience pathway and as much lead-in as possible is so important.Now the Minister has often stood to say where they've had enough of a heads-up there've been some conversations going since 2017 and so on and so forth. Yes there have. But what we have not done to meet that expectation is we haven't made the structural change to remove the barriers to the very people with the very lived experience skill and knowledge to be able to ease into that pathway in a way that we require. We haven't done that structural work.One of the biggest factors behind the difficulties and the barriers to receiving and being able to train and qualify and study for social work registration is poverty. We haven't removed that as a barrier. This Government is showing only signs of making that worse and so this is another example of why we needed to extend that pathway as part of understanding that the barriers haven't been removed. Whether we've given them a heads up since 2000 or 2017 the barriers haven't been removed and so I did want to acknowledge that that is also why we opposed the amendment for cutting down a couple of years off that heads-up.Just the weekend just gone at Big Gay Out we the Greens made sure to prioritise visiting the health services along that lane of tents at the fantastic festival that I congratulate the organisers for that range of services NGOs attending to a very diverse set of specific needs for rainbow takatāpui trans whānau. I met and spoke with young people with lived experience who have been impacted on by the discrimination and the very health issues that rainbow communities face. And the model that they are using also provides experience counselling and psychological services around these young people because this is of course the principle that it is the lived experience knowledge and skills that often have the most impact in feeling relevant to the very people whose trust often has been hugely destroyed by ordinary avenues and support. So again the rainbow community and young people were speaking to us very clearly about the need to ensure that we can maintain those experience pathways while wrapping around the qualification and safe practice support for them to continue to become the social workers that that community desperately requires.I wish the Minister had spent more time even talking to those very organisations. Ms Sepuloni herself outlined that the key stakeholder in this legislation who—yes there was apparently a submission which may have been in favour of cutting off two years of lead-in but that wasn't actually a consensus thought from that association of social workers. I wish too that the Minister would have sought—see this is the problem when we go into urgency and when a Government has got a bit of a rip and tear attitude. It's so much easier to tear things down and destroy decades of hard work than it is to create enduring solutions. And when you have that attitude of rushing through things to tick some boxes these are the voices that are missed out. This is how bad laws are made.I completely agree with Ms Sepuloni that we may find ourselves back here when we discover—oh oh!—we need more disabled community support we need more Māori and Pasifika and rangatahi support we need more rainbow workers support and we haven't got enough qualified social workers yet. We haven't ended homelessness. We haven't ended poverty and so the structural barriers remain to those groups seeking to be workers in a field that this House is desperately going to rely on.So the Greens are supporting the legislation overall. We wish that the Minister had the foresight and leadership to have been able to maintain a longer lead-in. That is disappointing. I truly hope we do not end up back here in the next years to try and remedy her lack of insight. Kia ora.