Williams Poto: Social Security (Commencement of Benefits) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWilliams Poto: Social Security (Commencement of Benefits) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 17 November 2015. Volume:710;Page:8239. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]POTO WILLIAMS (Labour—Christchurch East): All that last speaker Alfred Ngaro proves by his contribution is that he can read. That is all he proves. He makes no valid points. I want to say that one of the points that we made on this side of the House was that the Government MPs did not take a call throughout that whole Committee stage—Alfred Ngaro: I might need to talk to Ruth about that.POTO WILLIAMS: You might not need to. However you should be defending your bill. After all the points that we raised I was sure that the member Alfred Ngaro as the chairman of the select committee that saw the original bill would have wanted to make a contribution. But no Government MPs sit there and they throw the occasional lob but they do nothing constructive when they have required us to sit in urgency to pass a bill that obviously does not require urgency. There has been no justification given to this House as to why urgency is required—none whatsoever.We started the day debating the reason we were here for this particular bill and it is really about a couple of phrases. The two phrases in contention are “on the day which” or “on the day after”. That is all this argument has been about for the whole of this debate. We know that when we go back to the original section 80BA of the Social Security Act—the principal Act—it says “on the day which”. So we have been having an argument for the last—how many hours has it been Ruth Dyson? Several hours—to say that 17 years ago it was right and it was implemented incorrectly for the last 17 or 18½ years.It is a simple argument—let us fix it. Let us go back to 1998 and say: “You know what? All those people who missed out on that day because of those two clauses ‘on the day which’ or ‘on the day after’ the people who were actually paid on the day after you know what we are going to restore that. We are not going to say: ‘Hey we found this out in 2014 and that is the day from which we are going to actually fix this.’ No we are going to go back and have a look at the whole shebang and correct it from the beginning.” What has happened because we have put that line in the sand and said that we are going to go from May 2014 is that there are a whole lot of people who have missed out on this and there has been a lot of discussion about the principles of natural justice. They have been excluded from this process because of it.The Minister said that to date they have received 8500 claims. The previous speaker seemed to intimate that that is because of the work that the Government and the ministry have done. Well actually that is not correct. It is because of the work that beneficiary advocates have done and the word of mouth that has gotten out there as beneficiaries have been able to claim and receive what they are entitled to that people have started to claim this process. But from tomorrow that stops for most of those people who should be included in this process. That is frankly unfair and not good enough. The Government takes responsibility just from the date that the mistake came to light and not actually from the date of the original error which was when the bill was passed under urgency in 1998.We could have actually provided a little bit more fairness in this process if we had looked at Supplementary Order Paper 142 submitted by Carmel Sepuloni and Supplementary Order Papers 143 and 144 submitted by Jan Logie to actually extend the period and give people an opportunity to review where they had been and what they had been doing and potentially make a claim. We know that there are sections of the working population who are going to be impacted more than others and those are the seasonal workers those are workers who participate in school and education activities where their contracts cease at the end of term and they are clearly not able to engage in this process.This piece of legislation came to the House with no regulatory impact statement with no clarity that the policy intent was actually met through any evidence there were no Cabinet papers to support it and we have had to rely on the word of the Minister that the intent of the policy of the bill is actually that. This side of the House has been working all evening to look through Hansard for evidence. We have had nothing from the other side of the House nothing at all. This has been a really truncated process when it did not need to be. We have had no external examination and we have had no official input whatsoever. It is a flimsy bill and it has been poorly drafted. We will be coming back to the House probably in time to fix it.We have no idea how much this is going to cost us. There has been no financial examination of this bill whatsoever. There has been no financial examination of the cost of this whatsoever. If there has been it has not been presented to the House nor has it been provided to members to debate. That surely is not good enough. When we are spending the precious time of the House to debate this bill surely we should know and the people of New Zealand—the taxpayers of New Zealand particularly—should know what the fiscal implications of this bill are going to be. We have not had the opportunity to examine that. The resources of the Government are vast. They should have been used to ensure that members of the public were well informed about the implications for them and the opportunities for them to actually make claims and not leave it up to our beneficiary advocates.The Minister herself said that Kay Brereton had exhausted her electricity source trying to contact beneficiaries and she applauded Kay Brereton for it. I was absolutely astonished. Surely that is the job of the Government to do that work when it has clearly made a mistake and it needs to advise those who could benefit from that error being corrected. Surely it was the job of the Government to do that.This is the second of three bills that we will be passing through this House under urgency. Frankly this one did not need to come to the House under urgency; it could have gone through the normal process. There are bills languishing on the Order Paper that are far more important and far more urgent. There has not been sufficient justification from this Government about why it needed to happen now. Clearly the bill has been rushed. Clearly there is a lack of evidence and a lack of a regulatory impact statement and the other information that should have come to the House for a full and thorough examination has not occurred. There is not much more to say. We have well traversed this bill in the House. Unfortunately we will not be supporting it.