Collins Judith: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
Collins Judith: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:649;Page:17691] 
JUDITH COLLINS (National—Clevedon) 
: 
 This is a massive vote. It is almost $18 billion so I will not be able to refer to all of it in this speech which I have only 5 minutes for. I will deal with a few issues that I think are really really important. 
On the front page of the  
New Zealand Herald  
today is a story about a 4-month old baby who is in critical care at Starship hospital. The baby has very young teenage parents aged 18 and 19 and they are from Papakura in my electorate. We have yet another story that seems certain to involve the police the courts and who knows what else. It is another tragedy for those of us who live and work in South Auckland. 
Is there very much in this estimate about such matters? I have some notes that the select committee has made about South Auckland. The South Auckland MPs asked for a meeting with the chief executive of the Ministry of Social Development to find out why it is that at 2 o’clock in the morning nobody from Child Youth and Family is available to pick up the kids who wander around the streets of our South Auckland towns. Why is that? We have not had that meeting. We have now been promised that he will turn up tomorrow to our select committee and talk to us. We asked for that meeting weeks ago and nothing has happened in that time. Instead we are told by Child Youth and Family that it is an organisation that can only react to complaints. Well it certainly has a lot of them. 
I do not understand why we have a huge Government department—there are over 3000 staff at Child Youth and Family and they are all part of the Ministry of Social Development which has over 9000 staff—yet we know that at around 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning around Manurewa and Papakura and Randwick Park there are young people out of control and wandering around with nowhere to go and when the police pick them up and take them home so often no one is home. No responsible sober adult is home and nobody cares. I would like to hope that maybe someone is out there looking for them but someone is not in most cases. 
All we hear from the Ministry of Social Development and its Minister is how wonderful everything is. Well it is not. I have said time and time again that these bureaucrats will never make a difference until they get off their bottoms and get out there with the Mayor of Papakura and pick up these kids. 
What we also see here are all sorts of things that the ministry is talking about. I am pleased to see that the ministry is now going to fund a bit more of the Home Interaction Programme for Parents and Youngsters which we have in Papakura and that works really well. We find that the ministry had not changed any of that funding since 2003-04 but now we are being promised a bit more. 
I do not understand why we cannot do more of this. Why can we not simply take the families who really need the help give them the skills teach them a bit of self-esteem and let them show how wonderful they can be instead of waiting until it is too late and throwing up our hands in horror and saying “Oh gee. I wonder how that happened.”? Instead we have seen an absolute fixation on saying that all families need to be treated the same when actually they do not. Some families need a huge amount of extra effort and they should get it. At the end of the day what we have is children who miss out. The children I am thinking of in my electorate are the children who have nothing except what they can get from a benefit-dependent family and what charitable organisations can give to them. They need the extra help. Yet we see more and more for the ministry. There is a massive bureaucracy. We now have 60.5 fulltime-equivalent communications staff in the Ministry of Social Development. 
Nathan Guy 
: How many? 
JUDITH COLLINS 
: There are 60.5 fulltime-equivalent staff—that is three times the number when Labour first came into office. Considering the fact that there are supposed to be fewer beneficiaries one has to wonder who the staff are communicating with. There are 60.5 fulltime-equivalents in such senior roles. There are over 370 policy analysts now. The fact is that the ministry is just bloated with bureaucracy. In the meantime front-line staff have been cut under this Labour Government: 450 case managers—front-line staff—have been cut. The Government is telling us that this is because there is less unemployment but there has been a huge increase in the number of people on sickness and invalids benefits. Those people need to be helped to get back into wellness and helped to find work if it is possible yet the Ministry of Social Development is cutting the front-line staff and bloating the bureaucracy back at head office. Well there is a word for that and it starts with “h.”