Menéndez March RicardoRICARDO MENÉNDEZ MARCH (Green): Thank you Madam Chair. I really appreciate the opportunity to take a call. I've got two specific lines of questions that could have definitely been addressed at the select committee stage.So the first one is: whether a child impact assessment has been done on this bill. The reason why I'm raising this is because if you look at the general policy statement it's very clear that part of what this bill intends to do is to provide some relief to New Zealanders who are facing difficulty due to the rising cost of living. So it's really clear that there is a cost of living intent in this bill. At the select committee stage we normally could evaluate the impact that such a bill with cost of living implications would have on things like child poverty reduction. I think this is quite pertinent to ask because we've been told by different Ministers on bills that will increase child poverty that those bills that increase child poverty are not to be taken in isolation but as part of a range of interventions that the Government is doing. This is one of those according to different Ministers.So what I'm interested to know is whether a child impact assessment has been done as part of the process of this bill to actually evaluate the cost of living impacts on children particularly on child poverty reduction because to me I guess this is one of the bills the Government intends to have cost of living impacts. So I'm keen to know what analysis and to what extent those impacts on cost of living relief have been done as part of preparing for this bill and if there's no information actually around for example how many children does the Minister expect to be lifted out of poverty as part of the relief that this bill is supposed to provide I'm curious to know then whether the Minister can back up his arguments around the significant cost of living impacts that this will have.The other thing that I was interested to unpack was around a distributional assessment and that's the other part that I think hasn't really been unpacked as part of the legislative process. Again this is something that we could have unpacked with officials and with the Minister and other submitters could have brought their own analysis on this. By distributional assessment I mean for example which population groups are the ones that the Minister expects to have most to gain as part of the repeal of the regional fuel tax.So on different bills that we normally evaluate in select committee we do get the opportunity to assess where we do think that impact will go. So for example is he expecting that people from specific neighbourhoods will be more disproportionately benefiting compared to others? Is this families for example receiving income support or different ethnic groups expected to benefit? Is this people who are working full time or part-time or who live near for example public transport areas? This is important right? Because if the whole intent of the repeal is to have a cost of living impact it's worthwhile examining who's going to feel that impact that he claims this bill will have the most on? I think again if the Minister's unable to substantiate his so-called cost of living impacts of this bill by backing it up with evidence and robust analysis I just question then whether the cost of living argument for this bill is just based on vibes as opposed to actually robust evidence around who will benefit the most.To recap I'm interested in whether a child impact assessment has been done whether a distributional assessment was done and whether the same analysis on how this will impact child poverty reduction targets—particularly in the context of other bills that will increase child poverty in this country.