Logie JanJAN LOGIE (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Chair. I wanted in my contribution tonight to focus in specifically on the aspect of the report dealing with fraud investigations and prosecutions because I think it speaks clearly to the legacy of the previous Government and how much work this Government still has to do. We've heard from the previous speaker from the National Party Louise Upston an attitude about how people really need to be in paid work to have any hope of living a decent life in this country.I just want to speak to that and acknowledge that there are some people who are not able to be in paid work for reasons of illness or disability or the disability or illness of their children that they are caring for and that when you continue only to focus on paid work you are leaving them to lives of pain and illness and a loss of dignity. This Government is committed to changing that.Specifically it was encouraging to see in this report that there has been a two-thirds decrease in the number of people who have been prosecuted for benefit fraud in the last year. That's important because we know that beneficiaries have been unduly targeted that most of those investigations have not resulted in any evidence of fraud and that it has made every single beneficiary's life feel precarious and under scrutiny. We see that in the comparison between the treatment of tax evasion and welfare. Welfare fraud accounts for $30.6 million a year. That's significant but when you compare it to the significantly underestimated $1.2 billion a year in estimated tax evasion we get the significance of the difference in the response when 1000 beneficiaries are prosecuted every year and there are only 60 to 80 cases of tax evasion. There has been undue focus to serve a narrative to bash the poor. That has served the previous Government and when they say they have a commitment to wellbeing it just makes my blood boil because the experience of people in my community has been so at odds with that.We saw the Privacy Commissioner's report last week about the treatment and the process of fraud investigations that were brought in by that previous Government in 2012 and he found that there was systematic misuse of investigatory powers—that it was intrusive excessive and inconsistent with legal requirements. Somebody turned up to a meeting and had an intimate photo of themselves presented to them in front of officials that had been sent by text to somebody in their life—that was presented to them. Who of us in this room would think that that was in any way acceptable? But that was an outcome of the policies of the previous Government that we are still living with the legacy of and that we need to undo with urgency.I want to recognise that the Welfare Expert Advisory Group (WEAG) has called on this Government and our society to change those policies and that they endorsed the Ministry of Social Development's current three-tiered approach towards alleged fraud that has been brought in now. But they also called on there to be an independent review of proceedings prior to the benefits review committee for prosecution of investigations—that there be external oversight because clearly those protections have not worked—and prosecution practice to be explored and aligned with IRD so that there actually can be some consistency across our country and we clearly need to address the definition of relationship" because there is a danger at the moment. I read in the WEAG report that people supposedly have six months of living with somebody but that is not happening in practice.So work needs to be done by this Government and we are really proud in this party to have put this in our confidence and supply agreement and we will keep pushing because people in our community deserve dignity and the right to be treated fairly by this State."