SpeechHon TIM MACINDOE (National—Hamilton West): Thank you Madam Chair. I am delighted that we are now going to move on to a period of time to consider answers relating to the Minister for Children and the Minister for Seniors and happy that that same Minister holds both portfolios. So welcome to the Hon Tracey Martin.My colleague the Hon Alfred Ngaro was here waiting very patiently and preparing for some time and now has had to ask me just to ask some questions if I may—first relating to the children's portfolio Minister and in particular relating to the impact of COVID-19 on children and in particular those who are vulnerable. So I've got a few questions that I'll ask and I'm happy for the Minister either to indicate to me through perhaps a nod if she'd like to answer each one individually or wait until the end. Let's hope that we can get a good free flow of ideas going on.In particular Minister I'm looking to hear what analysis has been done to date on the needs of children and young people in response to the COVID experience and what issues COVID has identified and where additional support might be needed. The first specific question is as I say what initial work has been done and what further research and work is being planned to assist the impact of COVID-19 on children and young people? And what are the insights into their future needs? As I say I've got some other questions. If you'd like to answer now I'm happy to sit down.Hon TRACEY MARTIN (Minister for Children): Thank you. Just to let the member know that under the current structure I have approximately 19 minutes for the rest of the complete amount of Estimates so my answers will be somewhat short and to the point I hope and make sense.With regard to analysis by Oranga Tamariki around how our carers and how our children that were in care were managing through the COVID lockdown period there was constant contact with our carers to make sure that they had what they needed whether that be—not entertainment—workbooks and so on and so forth for young people to continue to be engaged during the period of time that we were all in lockdown; whether there was a requirement to provide digital devices to some of our families and some of the children's whānau was also part of what were the conversations that were taking place with Oranga Tamariki; and making sure that our carers had access to their social workers or the helpline or whatever to manage incidents. During the time of COVID children were still taken into care and taken into safety often at the request of the police where they had to deal with family violence incidents.Since COVID as people have transitioned back out—and unfortunately I can't answer for every child in New Zealand—obviously the Ministry of Education has been doing a lot of work around transitioning some of our young people back into education and into other areas of support. But from an Oranga Tamariki perspective we have made sure that we have transitioned back our families tried to get the children that were able to have communication with their whānau and families during the period of lockdown as consistently as possible whether that be through a digital device predominantly because of the bubble situation. My understanding is that the information I've had back from the carers and the children via Oranga Tamariki is that they felt well supported and that they had the things that they needed.Hon TIM MACINDOE (National—Hamilton West): I thank the Minister for that answer and I acknowledge the fact that yes we are—well actually I want to get on to seniors as well because that of course is my portfolio but I am just wanting to cover off a couple of crucial things for the Hon Alfred Ngaro. I think to some extent actually with one of the other questions that he asked me to raise the Minister has just touched on it. But I just ask her specifically how has COVID-19 impacted on Oranga Tamariki's ability to conduct assessments and provide support for children? I know that she alluded to that a moment ago but maybe she could just give us a little bit more detail. And I'll hand back to the Hon Alfred Ngaro.Hon TRACEY MARTIN (Minister for Children): I thank the member. So again just very quickly Oranga Tamariki was somehow ahead of the pack with regard to Government departments and their ability to immediately switch to a digital environment. They had just updated all their digital equipment. They had better resourced their social workers with iPads and so on so that their actual recordkeeping could improve. So what that meant was we were able to switch quite quickly to working from home. If I recall correctly the number of assessments being able to be done increased dramatically and the time frame under which they were done became much shorter and that was because there was the ability to spend time and focus on those. My understanding is that some of the time frames where we had difficulty placing social workers on our 0800 number on our helpline—like late in the evening etc. etc. because that is quite a hard shift generally to fill with people who have families of their own—that went away during lockdown because we were able to provide them with a secure space inside their own home to be able to manage and to stay online for our families and for those who had concerns around children.I can provide greater detail about the numbers of assessment—I get that on a regular basis through my status meetings—but with regard to assessment the numbers increase they were done under a shorter time frame.