Robertson Grant: Social Security (Commencement of Benefits) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRobertson Grant: Social Security (Commencement of Benefits) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 17 November 2015. Volume:710;Page:8218. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central): I want to begin this contribution by taking us all back to 1998. This may or may not be a pleasant memory for everybody in the Committee—1998 was an interesting year. But during that year—in fact on 14 May 1998—this House was debating the second reading of the Social Security Amendment Bill which as best I can tell is the piece of legislation that is at the root of the problem we have got today.There is a large number of things I could raise about the debate that night. One of them involves an honourable member by the name of Trevor Mallard who raised a number of points of order during that particular debate including an exchange with Joy McLauchlan that involved a number of withdrawals and apologies some of which I could refer to. If I used some of the language—The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): No. I am now going to ask the member to come to the bill’s Committee stage. Thank you.GRANT ROBERTSON: But should at a later date in the evening you wish to hear that Mr Chairperson do let me know.I want to refer to a speech that was given during the debate by a Labour Party member Steve Maharey. I want to highlight three things that he said that are relevant to the reason that we are here tonight. The first of those is that early on in his contribution he made the point that the Minister of Social Welfare had that morning given to the Opposition the legislation that was being debated. That was the amount of notice it got. Is this ringing any bells for anybody? The reason we are here tonight with a National Government deciding to retrospectively take away the rights of a group of New Zealanders has its roots in the same rushed hopeless pace of legislation which this Government once again puts us through.Mr Maharey was very prescient as he occasionally was. He said: “Yet again we have an example of this Government running along behind itself trying to get legislation together and trying to get a programme together. When we look through the Bill we see that yet again there are many issues to be cleared up and cleaned up leaving hundreds of thousands of beneficiaries wondering exactly what it means for them.” That was in 1998. Fast forward to 2015 and the same thing is being done all over again. That is the problem members on this side of the Chamber have. Mr Maharey then went on to say “The Bill is being dealt with under urgency. It will not go to a select committee.” and he went on to tell us the problems with that.Once again we are in this Chamber tonight debating a bill that has not been to a select committee. As parliamentarians we have had our right to actually see the evidence that has gone already to a select committee about this matter denied to us tonight by the National Government. But again the problems are—The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! No the member will resume his seat. I want to make absolutely clear that no member has been denied the right to see that evidence. There is a right to table it that was not allowed. Members can share evidence with other members. There is no restriction on that.GRANT ROBERTSON: Thank you Mr Chair and I will take up that offer in due course. So we have the problem here just to repeat how we have got to this point. A piece of legislation has not been thought through properly. A piece of legislation was pushed through under urgency in 1998 and here we are again. The Government is attempting to retrospectively correct that with another piece of legislation that has not been adequately looked at that has no regulatory impact statement and that is again being pushed through under urgency.Then there is this line from Mr Maharey: “This Government wants to see beneficiaries be the fall guys for its faults.” Well you could not get a better example of history repeating itself from 1998. What I want to know from the Government and I still have not heard a satisfactory answer since an earlier call when I asked this question. We have now been given an idea of the number of people who put in an application—$8500. What I want to know from the Government—Carmel Sepuloni: 8500 people.GRANT ROBERTSON: Sorry 8500 people—thank you. What I want to know from the Government is what amounts of money we are talking about here. Are we talking about $80 each for those people? Are we talking $1000 each? Can we actually get some information into this Committee about what it is that the Government is so concerned about here? Is it the cost? Just be up front with New Zealanders. Just be up front with New Zealanders and tell us tonight the sums of money that are at play here.I would actually be extremely surprised if we were talking about individuals with $5000 or $10000. We do not know. I do not know the answer to that question right now. The Government must have some idea. The Government must be able to do this otherwise what we will be sitting with here are members of the Government who are simply not prepared to get up and justify this legislation.I am really struggling here. You heard Chris Hipkins earlier talking about what this Parliament has effectively decided is the way in which retrospective legislation can work in this House. There will be from time to time occasions where retrospective legislation makes some sense. But how can a piece of legislation be retrospective for people after an error is discovered but not before the error was discovered? The error exists. The error has been there according to the Government since 1998.It is not a matter of finding a dividing line of when a Government official told a Minister and that happened to be in 2014 which means there is a limited scope to the number of people who can be involved. If it is an error it was an error made in 1998 and the Government should simply front up to that. But what we learn is that history repeats itself. History repeats itself because the Government tries to ram through legislation and makes mistakes and creates further errors and further inequities.What I want to hear from a Government member or from the Minister in the chair is some indication of the individual amounts of money that are being discussed here. This would normally have emerged during the select committee process. It is a dead-set guarantee that somehow someone in the select committee process would have said: “This is how much it is. This is the estimation. This is how many who have come forward to us today and asked for an amount of money.” Otherwise we are flying blind here and all we are left with is the impression of a Government that is determined to take away from a group of New Zealanders the rights that they should have. There is nothing that has been put forward in this Parliament that would give justification for that.The intention of Cabinet the intention of an individual Minister—we have got the names of them here. Shall we go upstairs and find Peter McCardle and ask him what his intention was when he moved this? It is irrelevant—it is absolutely irrelevant. It is irrelevant what Cabinet decided. What matters is what ended up in the law in 1998. That is the only thing that should matter to this Parliament. If we spend all of our time trying to work out what the intent of Ministers like Peter McCardle and Roger Sowry who were the Ministers who moved it was we could have any old thing come up. We have not seen Cabinet papers to justify that. All that we have got is the law. It is our job in this Parliament to make the law and then when there are mistakes to deal with them in a way that is fair and is equitable for New Zealanders and not to deal with them in a way that is convenient for the Government. That is the impression that I have got from this debate—that what we are doing here in the House is what is convenient for this Government.Let us all own this as parliamentarians. A mistake has been made. A group of people individuals in our community have been denied something that they should have got. Let us give them the time—all of them—to make an application to get their funding back. They will not all do it—lots of people will decide it is not worth their while—but that should not be the criteria either. The criteria should simply be that when Parliament gets something wrong it corrects it and it allows those people who have been aggrieved and who feel that they have lost their rights or their entitlements to be able to take the course of action that should be available to them.There is nothing that has been put forward in this Committee tonight that should justify overriding Parliament’s doing the right thing. I want to hear a National member get on their feet and give us a reason for this breach of the rights and entitlements of New Zealanders because without that and unless they are prepared to support our Supplementary Order Paper we cannot support the bill.