Logie JanJAN LOGIE (Green): I rise to take a call on the Committee stage of the Children Young Persons and Their Families (Advocacy Workforce and Age Settings) Amendment Bill. This is a bill that we have been quite clear we are unable to support in its entirety. There are specific provisions in the bill however that we are very happy to support if they were all that was contained in this bill. In my contribution this afternoon I would like to go through some of those specific provisions and talk in a bit more detail to them: the lost opportunity that we see in some the very real concern that we see in others and the sense of hope in others again.First of all I would like to speak to the commencement date which is in clause 2. This bill is intended to commence on 1 April 2017 which is set to coincide with the start of the new ministry which has been so poorly named: the Ministry for Vulnerable Children Oranga Tamariki which has raised very significant concerns in the community. I think the point has been well made that Oranga" in terms of well-being is cancelled out by the concept of vulnerability. To put those two things together in a title is misunderstanding the concept and actually it wipes it out in practice. We have concerns about that.It does need to be understood that what this legislation does is not a mild tinkering with our current child protection service. This is a potential dismantling of the State care and protection services and that is enabled by this legislation. But there is very little detail in this legislation. As was pointed out by some of the submitters to the Social Services Committee—I think the phrase from the Children's Commissioner was that it seems that the legislation had "outstripped the policy process". It may have been put a little bit more eloquently than that. But it is basically saying that we have got legislation that enables anything to happen because the policy work has not actually happened to work out what this will mean in practice.We are being asked to pass legislation that provides for protection of our children who have been hurt and damaged without knowing what that is going to mean in practice and this is going to come into force on 1 April. I do think that the commencement date and the time frame for this is really important to consider. Although I have been pushing for a long time for changes for more money to be going into the system for more urgent action and for the need for urgency—as have others on this side of the Chamber because we know that kids right now are unsafe in the system as it is operating and the Office of the Children's Commissioner does not have adequate funding to be able to provide oversight of the safety of the system—if the policy work has not been done to make sure that we get the right answer to make sure that we have got a system that will protect those children then it is not right. That really has to be our first priority. We have to put the thought into that to make sure we are not making mistakes. The Green Party is not confident that that work has been done.I move on to speak to some of the other points that we do support in this legislation. We do support the raising of the age of care and protection to 18. This again is one of those things that has been asked for for a very long time. I sat on the Social Services Committee when we considered the Vulnerable Children Bill. We heard from young people who had been transitioned out of care at a time when they were not able to sign a lease on a flat to be able to live independently and who ended up homeless on the street. At that time it was really clear to me that we needed to raise the age of care and protection to 18 yet this Government chose not to do that.Here we are several years later finally—after several opportunities have passed—we are giving this House the opportunity to act on that call from those young people and to be able to provide that smoother transition for those young people into the next stage of their life and that is really critical. However as has already been pointed out by Labour's Jacinda Ardern it is nonsensical from our perspective to be raising the age of care and protection and not be raising the age for youth justice as well. As we were told time and time again by the submitters to the select committee these are often the same young people. Many young people in our society who have youth justice concerns have been in care or are in care at the same time. To say that if nothing is going wrong you are a "young person" but if this half of you did something wrong you are an "adult" just does not make sense.New Zealand is lagging behind internationally in understanding this. We have an exception in place on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. That is an international agreement that puts the onus on us to recognise that our young people are children until the age of 18 regardless of whether they have committed crimes or not.This is not to say that our system does not hold those young people to account if they do something wrong. Youth justice responses are actually more effective than adult justice responses. This is not about giving young people a pass; this is actually about recognising that they are children. This is about having an effective system that is consistent and sets out consistent expectations and responses and it is also about what is effective.It was really compelling to hear the new Children's Commissioner—I think it was his first submission when he got to present on this—who was previously the Principal Youth Court Judge telling us how effective the youth justice system is and how much more beneficial it would be for all of us and especially those young people if we were to extend the age to 18.We will be very happy in the Green Party to be supporting Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 248 in the name of Jacinda Ardern to be able to define "young person" and replace "17 years" with "18 years" to get that consistency in our system. It really needs to be done. It should have been done before and it is frankly embarrassing for me that New Zealand is one of the last countries in the world that is still treating our children as adults in the justice system.I do not have that much more time in this call but I would like to also say that we will be supporting the other aspect of Jacinda Ardern's SOP. That adds a little bit more grunt to the aspect of the bill that embeds the views of young people and children into the system and that requires publishing annually after the first anniversary of the date of commencement how the views of children and young people have been given regard to in changes in the system. There is more that we would perhaps have added to this but this is I think just taking us a little bit further in giving the intent that has been specified by the Minister previously as the purpose of this bill."