Ball Darroch: Social Security (Pathway to Work) Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeBall Darroch: Social Security (Pathway to Work) Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 11 November 2015. Volume:710;Page:7923. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DARROCH BALL (NZ First): It is a pleasure to rise on behalf of New Zealand First to speak on the Social Security (Pathway to Work) Amendment Bill. First of all congratulations to Carmel Sepuloni who has been lucky enough to get another bill read and congratulations on her work on this bill as well. As I stated New Zealand First will be supporting this bill through to its next stage. What I want to concentrate on is the two different arguments that have been placed before the House today. They are the incentives versus the disincentives.As Carmel Sepuloni has already mentioned this bill is at its basic level a policy catch-up. For the most part that is true. At the moment with the way that the welfare system has been set up the current pathways into work are concentrating on the disincentive side rather than on the incentive side. I have got an example of that. Funnily enough there was an article that came out in the New Zealand Herald today. The title is “Part-time daycare worker better off getting benefit”. This is Jan Berry who is around $40 a week worse off than if she was on the benefit. At $15.50 an hour she earns $387 a week or $331 after tax and she also gets $107 a week in the accommodation supplement and disability allowance. But when her income rose after she increased her working hours those extras were cut leaving her around $40 a week worse off than she would have been on the benefit.So in that way the whole system is revolving around the disincentive pathway and to ensure that it is concentrating on the incentive pathway there needs to be a lot more done. Carmel Sepuloni’s bill does go some way towards doing that but not completely.I did some quick calculations and hopefully Carmel will be able to correct me if I am wrong on these. Up to the $150 mark currently if someone works the number of hours up to being able to earn $150 they will receive only $129 of that due to the abatement rates. Carmel wants to change that to $150. That is working for around 10 hours a week extra so that is $21. If you go further to the higher abatement rates—up to $200 which is around 13 hours’ extra work a week—instead of the $185 that you would be earning under Carmel’s bill currently it is $164.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Can I just interrupt. The member must always use the full name—DARROCH BALL: Sorry—Carmel Sepuloni’s bill.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): —as opposed to just the first name.DARROCH BALL: I will say “the member” from now on—the member’s bill. It is currently $164. The third amount is $179 instead of $220. So over the week working up to around about 17 hours a week is an extra $41. Like Carmel Sepuloni said that is a policy catch-up. It is the bare minimum at where we need to be.But if we are looking at turning it into an incentive we need to start looking at a pathway that is multi-pronged and multifaceted and it needs to be a framework rather than one-off policies. I did a bit of research today and had a look online. There was a Pathways to Work Government policy statement from Ireland in 2014. Ireland had similar issues and it wanted to look at taking a better approach to how the State actually engages with and supports the unemployed back into work. So there were five strands that it had. They were “more regular and on-going engagement with people who are unemployed; greater targeting of activation places and opportunities; incentivising the take-up of opportunities; incentivising employers to provide more jobs … and reforming institutions to deliver better services to people who are unemployed.”Like I said we will be supporting this bill through to the next stage and hopefully it gets there. But this is the potential for the start of a more multifaceted framework for a pathway into work by concentrating on the incentives rather than what it is now which is more the disincentives. Thank you.