Ardern Jacinda: Parental Leave and Employment Protection Amendment Bill (No 2) Taxation (Parental Tax Credit) Bill — Third ReadingsText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeArdern Jacinda: Parental Leave and Employment Protection Amendment Bill (No 2) Taxation (Parental Tax Credit) Bill — Third Readings[Sitting date: 15 May 2014. Volume:698;Page:18003. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JACINDA ARDERN (Labour): It seems surprisingly that the previous speaker the Minister of Labour has run out of things to say in the third reading of his Budget legislation arising from the Budget Measures (Financial Support for Newborn Children) Bill. We have still got plenty on this side of the House to add to the discussion on these bills the Parental Leave and Employment Protection Amendment Bill (No 2) and the Taxation (Parental Tax Credit) Bill. The Labour Party does support the legislation that we are debating now. Of course it would be crazy if we did not. It in part goes some way to acknowledging what Best Start was trying to do but as we have debated at great length it certainly does not go all the way in some critical areas. Even though there is a stark contrast between the two packages in terms of scale and in terms of length probably our biggest disappointment is still the exclusions that exist for families. We traversed in quite a lot of detail the fact that those who are our most vulnerable areexcluded but actually there is a group of middle New Zealanders for want of a better word who are also excluded.In this Budget the Government used quite a bit of rhetoric around vulnerable children in the speech that Mr English gave yesterday. In particular the Government announced some extra funding to basically implement the Vulnerable Children Bill. That did actually need to happen. We have an agenda by Paula Bennett that was going fairly underfunded in the way that it was being rolled out. Two Children’s Teams are already in existence. Just to give some context Children’s Teams are collaborative cross-sectoral teams that are meant to work with our most vulnerable children in areas where there is that extra need. We have two pilot sites in Rotorua and in Whangarei and as of November last year the teams were working with a total of 32 children—32 children were being assisted by the Government’s Children’s Teams. We always agreed that they are a good idea. What we disagreed with was the fact that they were having to operate out of a department’s baselines. That was just untenable and so it is good to see that there is some extra funding going in there. It needed to happen if we are going to make some inroads.But also the Government did make a bit of a statement around the fact that it was supporting vulnerable children not just through this package we are discussing today but through $349 million going into child protection. That is up from 2008-09. Child protection services then were getting roughly $317 million but if you inflation-adjust it actually what Child Youth and Family needs to be awarded just to keep pace with inflation is more like $360 million. It is still falling shy and that is taking into account that over that period of time we have gone from 49000 notifications where further actions were required by Child Youth and Family up to 61800—a big jump in the number of cases that need Child Youth and Family’s attention and a big jump in the number that are substantiated. So yes the Government has put social workers in specific places—in hospitals and in our schools—but on the frontline they still really are an ambulance. It was always intended actually that Child Youth and Family would have a preventative role but that is long gone—that is long gone.I want to compare that then with what Labour has proposed with Best Start. What was clear in the debate where there was comparison between the package of what the Government has put forward here in this legislation in income measures and what Labour has put forward was that Best Start was never just about income. Yes that was a big part of it. We had as part of it 26 weeks’ paid parental leave. We had a Best Start payment that reached 95 percent of families. The only families excluded from our Best Start payment were those earning over $150000. That was where we were happier to put our exclusion zone. The Government put its on people earning less than roughly $20000—a stark contrast in the way we address those packages. We have roughly 95 percent of families being covered by our package so there was a big difference there. But the Government when it was talking about its payment package which is in this legislation did talk about wanting to balance the issue of giving options to families with also maintaining a parent’s attachment to the workplace. We can sit and try to play around with what that might look like using tables spreadsheets and options or we can actually use the evidence.Some of the best evidence we have is now coming through from the Growing Up in New Zealand study which uses a diverse cohort of approximately 7000 families in New Zealand and is covering their experiences in raising their children. The last time we did this was with the Dunedin longitudinal study. Yes they are expensive studies to do but they provide us with such rich data and they provide policy makers with a bit of a sense of the choices parents are making sometimes even when they are up against strong financial pressure. What we do know from the Growing Up in New Zealandstudy of children who were born in 2009—so we are some way down the track now with those families—is that 11 percent of the children in the study live in households with an income of less than $30000 per annum—11 percent are in extreme poverty then—John Hayes: Rubbish!JACINDA ARDERN: —in that regard or could be considered to be in quite significant deprivation. John Hayes just said “Rubbish!”. I cannot quite tell which element of what I just said was rubbish. Does he maybe think that you are not struggling if you are raising a family on $30000? Is that the point he is trying to make or does he not acknowledge that 11 percent are growing up in those circumstances?Hon Clayton Cosgrove: Oh he’s silent now.JACINDA ARDERN: He has nothing further to add. So that is what we know about those families. There are a significant number who really are in quite significant deprivation. Then if we continue to look over the study it also found that 40 percent of families had received paid parental leave over the last year and a smaller percentage had received family tax credit. That is interesting. That sits with what we talked about today—that a large number of people are not eligible for paid parental leave which is being extended in this legislation by 4 weeks. People do tend to miss out on things like the parental tax credit which we have also been debating. Eighteen percent of the families had at some point during that period been reliant on a Government benefit—18 percent. Those families get nothing from this legislation. Those 18 percent of families get absolutely nothing from this legislation today and that is a point we have tried to make very very strongly.But here is another interesting fact. All of the families were reliant on a great number of income sources during the first 9 months of their children’s lives. Only—and this is incredible—14 percent received income from only one source. So this traditional idea that one parent goes out and keeps working and the other stays home and cares for the child is not so. That is just a luxury for families now. Only 14 percent received income from only one source. Thirty-eight percent received income from two sources 31 percent from three sources 13 percent from four sources or more and 5 percent were having to try to cobble together an income from five sources. They are families working multiple jobs trying to bring in enough income to be able to survive with their new children. That is over the first 9 months of a child’s life. Keep that in mind. What kind of situation does that create for those families? The Government said that what it wanted to do with paid parental leave was maintain attachment to the workforce. I am afraid that it simplifies the situation down to say that actually a mother’s only choice is whether she holds on to a slightly lesser income for a longer period. Actually some of these parents are having to make the choice to go back to work in order to keep the income high enough to keep going. We see that from that data.There is one final point from this study. The type of leave taken during the first 9 months was made up of paid parental leave unpaid leave and annual leave. Families are cobbling together what they can to stay home longer and I think that that is really telling. But as I said at the beginning Best Start—and there have been a lot of comparisons between Labour’s package and National’s—was never just about income. It was also about doing things like putting a boost into early childhood education. We want to move from 20 free hours for families to 25 free hours. We want to fund early childhood education centres so that all of their staff can be 100 percent qualified and so that they are funded to do that. We want to put a boost into Plunket so that Plunket nurses can be not only a universal service but a targeted one where we are putting them into the homes of our most vulnerable families earlier and keeping them there longer. That is what we want to do to create that extra support which is not just financialsupport but support in raising a child for families who sometimes have very little outside support themselves.In health we listened to the excellent work that was led by Paul Hutchison and the Health Committee. We want there to be 10-week gestational checks. We want free scans for mums and we want free antenatal classes. All of that is how you give a child the best start in life and that is what Labour would do.