Woods Megan: Social Security (Youth Support and Work Focus) Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Woods Megan: Social Security (Youth Support and Work Focus) Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 19 July 2012. Volume:681;Page:3779. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram) 
: 
 I can assure the member opposite that deep down nowhere does Labour secretly agree with the measures in this bill the Social Security (Youth Support and Work Focus) Amendment Bill. I am happy to stand here and take my final call as part of a Labour team that has consistently opposed the reforms in this bill. Labour believes that we need a set of mechanisms that will address the barriers to getting people off welfare and into work. Those barriers are the availability of work. Another one of those barriers is the availability of childcare and quality and affordable childcare. And the third barrier is the issue of skills and whether people on benefits have the requisite skills to get back into the paid workforce.  
Let us first of all briefly look at the issue of the availability of work. Throughout the passage of this legislation members opposite have tried to appease their own conscience by hailing to the maker of the welfare State Mickey Savage and somehow making themselves sleep at night by saying Michael Joseph Savage would approve. Well what they are doing is a whole lot more Margaret Thatcher than Mickey Savage. That lady is not for turning when it comes to these welfare reforms. Michael Joseph Savage believed in a social security system where there were a set of rights and a set of obligations for those on welfare but there were also rights and obligations on the State to create jobs for people—that an active State and an active Government did not leave its citizens to languish in the way this Government is prepared to do.  
New Zealanders want to work. The household labour force survey tells us that. We saw that when Labour came into power in 1999 it faced an unemployment queue of 162000. When Labour left office in 2008 there were 17700 on the unemployment benefit. This had not been achieved by punitive measures; this had been achieved by economic development and the creation of jobs. We did not just muck around playing around with cycleways; we actually created jobs.  
But the issue that I really want to focus on today is the issue of young people and skills training. We are told that this legislation introduces all kinds of incentives to get young people back to work. There are all kinds of financial carrots and financial sticks so there are punitive measures if they do not turn up for training. I want a National member to take a call and to tell me why they voted against my amendment to this bill which actually offered an opportunity for real jobs matched with real skills training. Why is it that National would not match up the opportunity the genuine and real opportunity we have to train our young people to be active in the rebuild of Christchurch? Why would they not explicitly put the opportunities that are going that are languishing and are not being taken up in terms of the $42 million that is being allocated for the rebuild of Christchurch in skills training? Why did they vote against this? It is because this legislation is nothing but a dog whistle to their constituency. They are more interested in punitive measures rather than real opportunities for our young people—real opportunities matched with real jobs that will offer them a lifetime of employment. But no what we can talk about is “building capacity for work” and other rhetoric like “work focus” like the member we just heard from. How about just plain old-fashioned apprenticeship skills training and then going into a job? This is not something that members opposite believe in. This is not something that members opposite are willing to vote for and it is certainly not something that this legislation does anything to achieve.  
This set of measures this so-called welfare reform does nothing to address the underlying causes of why people are on benefits. Members opposite cannot sleep at night by telling themselves repeating over and over that Michael Joseph Savage would approve. He would not. They have failed to address the core reason of welfare dependency in this country.