O'Connor SimonSIMON O'CONNOR (National—Tāmaki): Look I'm absolutely delighted to be able to stand and take a call on the Social Workers Registration Legislation Bill in its second reading. Look as colleagues have indicated we are overall supportive of this bill. As has also been noted by colleagues it was a bill introduced mostly in its current form by the Hon Anne Tolley in the previous Government and we are pleased on this side to see that the bill is progressing. I'll touch on some caveats near the end but we're pleased to see that the bill is progressing. Once again it's not a surprise that it's effectively at this point a National bill which is being picked up by the Government. I noticed today that there has been a lot of talk about a great vision being put forward. I must have been in a different House of Parliament or another temporal moment but I didn't hear any vision and when we come to the House the first piece of legislation is yet again a piece of legislation of the past. We'll just have to wait for all those hundreds and hundreds of committees to come back before we see some new legislation.Look the overall intention of this bill is to increase the confidence of—and confidence in the work of—social workers and as a couple of colleagues have noted it's here thanks to the work that social workers do. They fill a particularly important role in our community alongside a whole lot of other people who support our community in different ways be they from the medical profession through to iwi leaders churches and so forth. So I give my thanks to those who are in the social work profession and of course the many who have inputted into the process to date.One of the difficulties though with social work is that it's rather difficult to define and that's been one of the conundrums I think that's faced the progress of this bill to date. I suspect most of us in this House—and people out on the street if you went on to the street now to talk to them—intuitively have a general understanding of what social work is. The difficulty comes when you try to define it when you try to put together a scope of practice to specifically and definitively define what it is and it is one of the issues of this House when we try to take these rather general aspects of a profession or we take a general policy idea and have to define it quite precisely in law. And that's one of the reasons that it's taken quite a while for this bill to progress.A member who spoke earlier was lamenting the lack of priority—that it's taken something like 15 years I think for this bill to progress.Hon Members: Sixteen years.SIMON O'CONNOR: Sixteen. Look it wouldn't matter if it was 20. Sometimes things take time to progress through and to get through right but notice there are two things that were noted there. One was that it's now so important—it's still taken this new Government a year if not more to get to it. The second is—and we'll come to it later with the Supplementary Order Paper (SOP)—that they're actually trying to ram things through. As we say it's a difficult thing to define. Social workers work across an incredibly wide range of areas with an even wider range of people with actually a very complex array of needs. And I think as I quickly skim the SOP I can see the array of problems. Problems" is probably the wrong word; it's the difficultly in again trying to define things. Overall the bill is processing it well. First and foremost it seeks to protect the name or the title "social worker" and that makes perfect sense. A person in this country should not be able to manifest themselves as a social worker if they have not done some training and some form of registration. When we initially introduced this bill we had not moved towards a licensing of people to social work; instead seeking rather to certify to make sure that those who are or wish to become social workers obviously have been police-vetted. There are some elements around the clean slate Act there which are rather important—that a person can indicate sufficient training sufficient competency to be able to take upon themselves the title of social worker and then importantly to register themselves.Again I think that nuance there—the difference between certifying titling versus licensing—is fairly important and again indicative of the complication that's here. The best analogy is ultimately from the medical or the legal field. A number of people undertake legal work but not all those are lawyers. It's the same in the health profession. There are some that are doctors there are some that are nurses but actually the health profession is much much broader than that.So again we say we are overall supportive. The problem that we are about to run into is ultimately that an SOP has been dumped on this House. That's a problem for a number of reasons. One I suppose just from a process point of view is that the SOP was not given in good faith to the House first and foremost. That was only done in recent days. We first learnt of this through a press release on the Ministry of Social Development website. I don't think that's very prudent.The second is that we had a truncated select committee process. This is becoming an unfortunate habit of this Government and that's of concern—particularly when we've had speeches earlier about how we have to listen to people and we've got to be empathetic and understand what people say. But when the tyre hits the road the Government's not particularly interested in engaging with people. We've been seeking as an Opposition to find out from the Minister who she did consult to bring about this SOP and there's been incredible reluctance—incredible reluctance—to say who. In fact all we wanted was just a bit of evidence of what was said. We've had some indications from the Green Party tonight that it was the unions—I suppose not a complete surprise; not a complete surprise. But the problem is you see—[Interruption]—I'm hearing a funny noise. I'm not sure if it's tinnitus. The thing is that the unions are one voice; they're not the only voice. That's the problem with the left and progressives—they often think that just because the unions have a say that's the say of everybody. And I think those of us who have had the privilege to sit on select committees understand that there are an array of voices that want to be heard. When I think of the social workers that I've worked with over the years—some are in the union some are not—some would support this bill and some would not. It's a variety of views that I think deserve to be heard. So I'm concerned again that this particular Minister Carmel Sepuloni is dumping an SOP on the House at the last moment—an SOP that will not be put in front of the public.And again part of the argument's been "Well we've waited 16 years so now we have to rush it through." Well if I've learnt one thing in my years in the House it's that when we rush things through we make mistakes. If all the seriousness and the compassion being manifested by those on the Government side—of course they all talk about the empathy required to be given to people yet of course if they get this wrong it's going to be those very people they want to help that they're going to harm the most. So I'm disappointed.The consequence of course is that we as an Opposition will need to take a good amount of time to debate this in the committee of the whole House to understand more fully what the SOP is about. Fortunately it's not like the last SOP of 501 pages that was dumped. This is about 37 pages but I think we give it a good hearing so that we can properly understand what this is doing to the public of New Zealand.Fundamentally as we say a good bill started under National engaging continually and over and over with social workers—both those if you will professionally unionised and those without—to understand how we progress forward. But I return to what I indicated at the start: social work is a fantastic and important profession alongside many others but it is a complex work. It is not easily and readily defined. I think one of the concerns that has been manifest throughout the progress of this bill over many years is making sure that we enable those who wish to be social workers to continue their good work for the communities of New Zealand and not to be limited. I can see that as an unfortunate consequence.So I look forward to this progressing—well I suspect it will progress tonight; we'll see how we go—to the committee of the whole House and eventually towards this registration that has been mooted for some time. Thank you very much."