Social Security (Child Benefit) Amendment Bill

Tonight I am pleased to contribute to this member’s bill, because it deals with the very important issue of children in this country. First, I acknowledge the sponsor of the bill, Sue Bradford, a very good member of the Green Party. Her work in Parliament during this time has certainly proven her commitment to social issues that are very important to this country. I commend her for her efforts to recognise the needs of children. I also want to say that this side of the House is certainly committed to ensuring that we deal effectively with child poverty, hardship, and deprivation in our communities.

The Government will not be supporting this legislation, primarily because we believe we will be developing significant targeted initiatives in Budget announcements in the near future. Also, moves have already been made by the Government to improve the living standards of struggling low-income families, and, for that matter, middle-income families as well. In its last 4 years of power, the Government has developed policies and initiatives that have significantly improved the situation of low-income families and their children.

I know that there are continuing concerns about poverty in our communities. Recently, I attended a meeting of community groups in my own electorate of Mangere, who were concerned about poverty in our communities. Sue Bradford was present, and also a few others who are very much into developing social policy issues to help those struggling families. This Government has significantly improved the situation of those families, particularly if one considers Jenny Shipley’s 25 percent cut to benefits in the 1990s, which contributed to the demise of many of those low-income families and their children. Market rents increased the cost of accommodation and housing around New Zealand enormously, and were a major contributing factor to the poverty experienced in the community.

Those two areas contributed to poverty, and this Government has dealt significantly with them with the removal of market rents and the reinstatement of income-related rents. That not only made housing more affordable, but also contributed to a more stable situation for low-income families and their children. Not only were those significant achievements made in the first years of this Government coming into power, but benefit levels for low-income families have gradually been improved. Other initiatives, including fairer industrial laws with the repeal of the Employment Contracts Act, have resulted in the improvement of wages and conditions for low-income workers.

Progress has been made towards dealing with deprivation and poverty in our communities, and this Government will look to develop those initiatives further. This Government has signalled that in the Budget to be announced next week there will be an emphasis on dealing with poverty in our communities. Clearly, the assistance that will be given to low and middle-income families with children who are on benefits, as well as those in low-paid jobs, will be the emphasis of what this Government will be doing within the next 2 years. I am sure that that will meet the legitimate concerns of communities with regard to struggling families with children on low incomes.

Were we to accept this bill, it would cost about $500 million, and it would not alleviate poverty in our communities. In fact, it would put only a small amount of money into the hands of those who really need it. Even with the research that has been done on children in low-income households—in fact, one in three children have been defined as living below the poverty line—the reality is that we will end up paying another two-thirds of benefits to children who do not need them.

This bill is a godsend to those many hundreds, and even thousands, of low-income families in our country in need of financial support. It prioritises their highest need—that is, a boost to their regular income. The universal child benefit will not be income tested, but applied universally, so that families will not have to beg to justify their need. This legislation is focused on the children of a family, and makes some gesture to prioritise children and place them at the centre of policy making. It does not undermine the dignity of families by identifying them as the deserving poor, and it makes a real, tangible contribution to the efforts of those families to climb out of the poverty trap that many hundreds of them are in.

This Labour Government is turning its back on those families. It is turning its back on the 30 percent of this country’s children who live below the poverty line. It renders any Government rhetoric in the lead-up to this year’s Budget an insult to the needs of those families. Given that the National Party disgracefully abolished the family benefit in 1991, along with benefit cuts and other acts that attacked the low-income people of our country, we can only assume that on this matter Labour and the National Party agree that child poverty is not the national disgrace it is, but merely an expedient problem that they are prepared to put up with and do nothing about.

This Government will not even allow this bill to go to a select committee, where the needs of families and children can be identified and explored, financial implications considered, and the consistency between this bill and the New Zealand superannuation scheme established. The universal child benefit is one small step that we as a country can take towards eliminating child poverty. It will not cure all those poverty issues, but it will take the first crucial step to centre our economic policies on the needs of children and their families.

This legislation has received wide support from the New Zealand community—women, parents, and low-income families. Many community organisations, such as the Child Poverty Action Group and the Downtown Community Ministry, have done an extraordinary amount of work to assist families and support the measures set out in this legislation. The New Zealand Council of Christian Social Services, and even the Public Health Association, recognise that the measures in this bill are a necessary part of the strategy to end child poverty in our country.

The tragedy is that it is not just the traditionally understood low-income families who desperately need this measure, but also those in the middle-income earning band. It is that group that does not qualify for other targeted funding, such as the community services card, and it suffers extraordinarily. It is finding it harder and harder to make ends meet, and we saw some of the stark realities of that situation just a few weeks ago. This bill could signal a serious and real improvement to the problem of increasing poverty in our country. The question is whether the Government is concerned to end child poverty in our country. Clearly, it is not.

There is no doubt in my mind that the sponsor of this bill, Sue Bradford, is very well meaning in her attempts to address childhood poverty. Over the tea break I canvassed a few opinions on the family benefit. The first person I came across said: “I used to love having the family benefit. It was usually paid into the women’s accounts so that the men did not get their hands on it, and women would beaver it away. I used to spend mine on getting my hair or nails done when I felt like it. It was great, and I loved it.” The long and short of it is that the family benefit was never intended for that. It was intended to be spent on families.

The explanatory note in the bill states that its purpose is to restore a benefit that is necessary for the protection and development of New Zealand children. The shame of it is that this bill will not address that issue. A universal family benefit will certainly not achieve that. There is no way that childhood poverty can be addressed in that regard. This benefit is intended not only for low-income families, but also for every other family in the country, mine included. I have five children, and according to this bill, I would receive $15 for my oldest child and $10 each for the other four—that is, a total of $55 a week. I agree that for many low-income families that is a lot of money, but for families such as mine—there are a large number of them in the country, and I will come to that in a moment—it just is not necessary. I would rather that $55 went towards hip operations or looking after children who lived in poverty-stricken situations.

If this bill were to become law, 16,257 families with one child would receive the family benefit, 19,569 families with two children would receive it, 8,493 families with three children, and 2,304 families with four or more dependent children would receive it. That is a sum total of over 46,000 families receiving an income of $100,000 or more a year. I wonder how Miss Bradford feels about families such as these—and it would amount to quite a sum over a period of time—being given that amount of money, when there are much better places for it go.

The ACT party, of course, would much rather see a lowering of taxes across the board to compensate families in this way. It is much better that people have the money to spend on whatever is necessary for themselves than having the Government spending it on their behalf. It makes very little sense that these working families pay their taxes, then the money is filtered through various systems, and the social welfare department gives it back to them in a rather obscure way. The route itself is very costly, and it is hard to determine exactly what value of the money originally paid out in taxes would filter its way back to these families.

It is an unreasonable expectation that this bill will see the protection and development of New Zealand families, particularly poverty-stricken families. There is no assurance that those families will spend the money on their children. We know from when the family benefit was around previously that in many cases that was not the case. The wealthier families were more likely to dedicate that benefit to their children by putting it in bank accounts, or whatever, than the poorer families, who often spent it on things other than those that benefited their children.

For these reasons, the ACT party will oppose the bill. We would rather that the Government addressed the issue of lowering taxes in its Budget next week, rather than trying to find other ways of supporting families. There is little doubt that New Zealanders are by far the best qualified to spend the money on their own behalf, and that is certainly what we would like to see.

My call will be a very short one. I just want to record what the last member said. The suggestion that if poor people got a family benefit, they would not spend it in the interests of their children—

💬 Heather Roy: I said some poor families.

The member implied that, proportionately, rich people in receipt of the family benefit had the interests of their children at heart, while poor people did not. I suggest that when poor people go down to Countdown and try to buy good food to put in the stomachs of their children, they are even more aware of budget constraints. Those pressures are far more real for poor people than for wealthy people. I do not think that that comment reflects well on either that member or her party. It was a terrible thing to imply.

First of all, I would like to thank those parties—New Zealand First and United Future—that offered to support this bill to the select committee, so that it could at least be considered in the context of Government measures to support families and children. I am very conscious that these parties do not on the whole support Green Party initiatives, so I thank them for taking the time to really look at what I have been trying to achieve in putting this bill forward for public debate, rather than just acting on prejudice.

On the other hand, we in the Green Party have been under no illusions about the likelihood, ultimately, of Labour support for my member’s bill to reintroduce a low but universal benefit for all children. All along, I had a faint but real hope that the Government might at least see its way clear to supporting the bill past its first reading, given that all it does is reinstitute the family benefit that was lost with so little fanfare way back in 1991. The family benefit seemed to sink without trace in the era of massive benefit cuts and the Employment Contracts Act, yet the loss we experienced then of that pitiful yet significant $6 a week per child is still with us now, and in some ways having an even greater impact.

Just imagine if in 2004 we had a universal child benefit that families could capitalise on so that they could at least raise the minimum necessary to put the deposit on their first home. Just imagine if families who have to borrow money or go to the food bank most weeks just to put food on the table could at least buy another $25 or $35 worth of food to feed their children. Just imagine if we lived in a country that dared to treat our youngest and most vulnerable citizens with a fraction of the same respect that we afford our elderly through a universal benefit called superannuation.

I hope that all those people who criticised this bill because it is universal and not targeted just to families that they identify as poor will take a moment to ponder, even briefly, the fact that most parties in this House are more than happy to support universal superannuation—paid to everyone 65 and over no matter what their income or assets—while some of these same parties say at the same time that we cannot afford to offer all children and their primary caregivers the dignity and support of a very tiny $15 a week for the first child and $10 a week for the second. I wonder what that says about our comparative attitudes to people who are equally citizens of our country, one segment of which can vote but the other cannot.

I feel really sad tonight that a Labour Party filled with all sorts of well-intentioned people like Steve Maharey, Jill Pettis, Taito Philip Field, and David Parker, who have all spoken interestingly in this debate, cannot at a minimum allow us to take my bill to the Social Services Committee. If we had been given that opportunity, we could have looked at it in the light of Budget changes to family assistance and the benefit system overall—which, evidently, Dr Cullen is about to announce—received submissions, and opened up a whole public discourse in this area that would have been very useful and timely.

However, that is not to be. Neither Labour nor National have seen fit to support my bill, and this will be the last speech on the subject for a while at least. Nevertheless, I do not regret the priority that the Green Party has put on supporting me in putting this bill forward, and on making the ending of child poverty one of our key electoral policy targets.

I would like to finish by thanking all the community, trade union, and church organisations that have supported this bill, and by promising that we in the Green Party will continue to campaign for a society, and a tax and benefit system, that puts children and families at the front of policy making and not at the rear, and that works for equity and sufficiency for all our citizens, even those who cannot vote in elections.