Delahunty Catherine: Social Security (Commencement of Benefits) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDelahunty Catherine: Social Security (Commencement of Benefits) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 17 November 2015. Volume:710;Page:8217. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green): Tēnā koutou Te Whare nui. I have been in this House for nearly 7 years and I thought I was pretty cynical. I look at legislation and I think it might be misguided but usually it has got some understandable merit. Then we get to this bill. This is extraordinarily mean-spirited it is extraordinarily bizarre and it is so arcane that the people who have actually suffered from being underpaid by the system—Darroch Ball: It’s not underpaid.CATHERINE DELAHUNTY: “Not underpaid.” my colleague says—quite right. Well they are not receiving their full entitlement. [Interruption] No? It sounds to me like they are not receiving their full entitlement when they do not get a day’s pay that they were entitled to. They are going to have enough trouble understanding it let alone applying for it. So I think that we need to look very hard at ourselves tonight and ask “What are we doing in this House? Urgency to fix urgency.”First of all I would like to talk about why we do not support urgency for this kind of thing because look at the mess. There was a drafting error supposedly and the courts have ruled clearly that the spirit of this is not just a spirit; it is actually in the law already—that when you are going back after a stand down you get the money the day that the stand down finishes. This is not rocket science—thank goodness because I am not a rocket scientist. It is pretty clear but what about the people at the receiving end? It is fantastic for people to spend time having arcane debates on the clauses but what about the 70 people who contacted Jan Logie today—let alone any other person in this Committee—about whether they are going to be able to get their just entitlement?The reason that I am fired up about this as someone who has been a beneficiary advocate on the East Coast is that if a beneficiary dared to miss an appointment or if a beneficiary supposedly dared to do something wrong with their paperwork let us watch the benefit fraud unit descend on them. I have sat in meetings with the benefit fraud unit; I have seen what they do. If anyone who is on a benefit makes a mistake it is a ton of bricks time. And then in the last couple of years there have been sanctions—cutting money from people. Today on Lambton Quay I talked to a beggar. She gets $13 a week from Work and Income. She is a mental health survivor who cannot get the invalids benefit. And this is the kind of system that creates this kind of mess and then when we make a mess the willingness is not there to clean it up so that people can get what is fair.How can we hold our heads up in this House and do this kind of stuff to people who are at the bottom of the heap many through no fault of their own? And then when the Government makes a mistake it will not fix it fairly. It is pretty basic: fix it fairly Mr Chair. Do not be mean—do what is right. Actually it is pretty basic.Iain Lees-Galloway: Be fair Mr Chairman.CATHERINE DELAHUNTY: Yeah be fair and do not be mean. It is not very sophisticated language. After all this is about natural justice. Is it not about natural justice? If we make mistakes we have to own them. At the moment this bill does not own what it is creating. So people are going to be knocked out of being able to apply for what is fair. They are going to be knocked out because they were on the benefit before May. If you are after May you are in but if you are before you are out.If anybody here knows anything about what it is like to live at the tough end of society the person is on the benefit and then they get some work. The person gets some work and then they lose their job. The person gets stood down and the person then applies for a number of jobs. The person may get some part-time contract work. The person loses that work and then the person tries to get back on the benefit—the person is constantly on and off. This is not new. This has not happened just since May 2014. This has been happening to people for—well I would like to say since 1984 actually but that is going back rather a long way. The benefit system is not treating people the way it expects beneficiaries to behave.