Woodhouse MichaelHon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National): Thank you Madam Deputy Speaker. At the start of my intervention and with your indulgence I want to reflect on the news today of the retirement of the Leader of the Opposition the Rt Hon Bill English who I have no doubt history will judge as one of the country's great parliamentarians. Now his legacy will very much be the steady financial acumen with which he steered this country through the global financial crisis and the Canterbury earthquakes but my abiding memory of Mr English will be his passionate unequivocal energetic support for social investment and the families who would benefit from it.This is very relevant to the Child Poverty Reduction Bill. If there is any regret that Mr English might have it would be I think that the social investment programme wasn't given three more years to really really bed in. I think that the intervention from the Minister for Social Development and her comments in November December last year indicate to me that she just does not understand social investment. She announced that it would be repackaged retrenched back into the Ministry of Social Development and that it would undergo significant changes. The Prime Minister herself when looking at some of the Better Public Services (BPS) targets that the previous Government had using rheumatic fever as an example I think also shows how lacking in understanding the Government is about the need for agencies to work across silos in order to solve entrenched problems—the symptom much less the cause of which is child poverty. I think the more one drills into the issue of child poverty the more it's clear that financial poverty is both a cause of dysfunction and a symptom of it. And if it were as simple as pouring more money into those families and then leaving them alone we wouldn't be here debating this bill.Rheumatic fever is I think a very important barometer. Prior to social investment it was not unusual for hospitals to simply treat the pathology discharge the child and send them back into the very conditions that led them to those poor health outcomes. I sat around the table watching as agencies were shoehorned out of their silo mentality and through those targets forced into directly addressing the causes of poverty and ill-health. Rheumatic fever was a really good example. It wasn't simply OK for the hospital to send that child back into the cold damp mouldy house from which he or she came. There was an obligation because of the targets and the expectations the previous Government had that they would be fixed so that that child would not come back.The significant improvement I think we were starting to make and the transformative actions that Government departments were going through in order to work collaboratively to reduce both the symptoms and causes of child poverty were very very promising. We will support this bill but we do so with the condition that there will be a very serious look at the way in which those BPS targets—those social investment targets that were becoming so effective—were going to be addressed by the Government. I look forward to the repackaging but I counsel the Minister that there was much good that was going on and it would be a terrible shame if on a blind ideology they were lost.I want to just make two points about the bill. Firstly the Prime Minister appears to have had something of a road to Damascus experience. I don't know how many times I sat in this House when in Opposition Jacinda Ardern grilled the Minister for Social Development the Hon Anne Tolley on her refusal to be boxed into a corner and to say There is one single definition of child poverty." and the previous Minister was right. Now the Prime Minister agrees with her. We see in the explanatory note of the Child Poverty Reduction Bill under "Measures" and I quote "material disadvantage is multi-dimensional and therefore more than 1 measure is needed to properly assess trends and understand which groups are over-represented." It further says "—as noted the level of poverty is a contestable notion and different views can reasonably be held:". Well if that's not a road to Damascus experience for the Prime Minister I don't know what is and I actually applaud her for backing down off the high horse she rode for years in Opposition to come to the sensible conclusion that there is no one measure.But the other particular feature of this bill which we will support because it does no harm—but doesn't do much—is the lack of ambition from the Government in actually solving child poverty. The previous Government took 85000 children out of poverty. Its Family Incomes Package passed in Budget 2017 which was mostly repealed by this present Government in order that they can give my children completely free first-year tertiary education is an example of both misguided targeting and a lack of ambition. The previous Government committed to taking 100000 children out of poverty in this term of Parliament and now we have a target that says that if they're lucky with a fair wind and they don't completely muck up the economy the way business is concerned they might do that target is going to be 100000 children out of poverty in 10 years. So tens of thousands of children are going to have to wait longer and longer for the Government to assist them into independence from the State and for their families self-determination and a life better lived because the Government wants to give my children free tertiary education.Well I'm sorry but this bill lacks ambition. This bill grossly lacks ambition. I think what we heard from the Minister for Social Development is that knowing the data—knowing the numbers—is an important prerequisite to solving child poverty but actions speak louder than words. Data will not change lives; policies and actions will.Hon Clare Curran: Nine years.Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: Yes there were nine years and in nine years a far greater number of children were lifted out of poverty than at any time in this country's history and the previous Government was the first—it supported those families through a significant recession and then it raised benefit levels for the first time in 42 years. So I'll stand very proudly on that record Ms Curran—very proudly on that record—and I challenge the Government to change its targets to at least match what the previous Government was prepared to do and had a plan to do because data is not a plan. Knowing the target is not getting to the target and all we have heard is rhetoric and numbers and good wishes but no plan—in fact a plan to unwind the very vehicle that the previous Government used to be able to lift those children out of poverty.So we will support this bill. We will support it but it is caveated by that very clear expectation that numbers are not enough. Actions are what are going to lift children out of poverty and we will be holding this Government very strongly to account for their success or failure. I would love to be able to stand up in this House at the end of this Parliament and say they exceeded their own modest expectations they did better than we thought they would—than they thought they would—but unfortunately I can't see any reason why I would be able to do that in the future. I hope I'm wrong. I hope we can achieve the previous projections of child poverty reduction because we owe it to our children to do just that."