Social Security (Social Assistance) Amendment Bill

The ACT party is opposing this bill, as is the Green Party. However, we oppose it for the exact opposite reasons, which is an interesting situation in itself. The ACT party believes that every child has a right to know the identity of his or her father, but as the Social Security (Social Assistance) Amendment Bill will not require women on the domestic purposes benefit to name the fathers of their children, except in exceptional circumstances, ACT will oppose it. The bill was supposed to provide a solution to the problem of the increasing numbers of women on the domestic purposes benefit who refuse to name the fathers of their children. The harsh reality is that the numbers have escalated over the last few years, to the point where one woman in six—one parent in six—on the domestic purposes benefit is now refusing to name the father of her child. I understand that some 19,000 parents—more particularly, 35,000 children—are involved.

The harsh reality is that people do respond to incentives. Some make the point that the penalty is only $6 a week. Think of the incentive provided by that. We have already heard from the National Party speaker about the many cases she is familiar with. She spoke about live-in boarders who are actually the fathers of the children. The kids call them “Dad”, but officially they are boarders and do not make any financial contribution. The women, of course, receive taxpayers’ money. That is the point. It is not Government money that those people are getting; it is taxpayers’ money. Struggling battlers, hard-working New Zealanders, are paying too much tax for people who, in too many cases, are abusing the situation. That is why there needs to be an incentive for fathers to make liable-parent contributions.

I agree with the Green Party spokesperson that far too many fathers are escaping their responsibilities. Unquestionably that is the case, and they should be brought to account. A lot more needs to be done to bring those irresponsible fathers to account. But this bill does not do that. In fact, it does the reverse. Six dollars a week is no incentive, because although the bill will increase by that amount the penalty for not naming the father, that increase will be totally offset by the additional assistance that domestic purposes beneficiaries will receive as a result of the increased assistance through the Working for Families package. That means that by the time the bill comes into force, a mother who refuses to name the father of a child will actually receive a benefit increase rather than a decrease. So there is no incentive whatsoever, and there does need to be an incentive. People respond to incentives.

All legislation should concentrate on getting the principle right, and the incentive right. The ACT party says that this bill gets not only the principle wrong but also the incentive wrong. Whenever legislation gets both of those things wrong, there is a downward spiral. We can expect the escalation in numbers of mothers not naming the fathers of their children only to increase, because that is what the incentive provides for, and that is what this Government policy provides for. So ACT will be strongly opposing the bill. It does nothing to bring the fathers to account or to make parents more responsible for their offspring.

I also make the point that with the new DNA technology, it is now much simpler to determine who has parental obligations. Nothing in this bill addresses that issue, so the bill actually fails to achieve the prime objective for which it was introduced. That is deeply regrettable, and we have no hesitation in opposing it.

I stand on behalf of United Future to support the second reading of the Social Security (Social Assistance) Amendment Bill.

The bill, as we have been told, has three main amendments. First, it seeks to encourage more sole parent beneficiaries to establish paternity, and apply for child support. Second, it extends the eligibility for the accommodation supplement to residents of retirement villages who have “licence to occupy” tenure. Third, it introduces some flexibility for seasonal workers, so that they are less disadvantaged during off-season times by stand-down provisions.

Two of those amendments—namely, the second and third as I listed them—are something that we can go along with pretty well without exception. But it is the first one we do not support, and I notice that other speakers have put some emphasis on it as well.

Although supporting this bill, United Future would like to signal that we believe much more work needs to be done on the issue of paternity. Clearly, we are glad that Work and Income case managers now need to provide more substantial information about the issues regarding established paternity when dealing with pregnant single women applying for a benefit, and that lead maternity carers will now be provided with information packs. I mean, that is an advance of a minor proportion compared with what we have in terms of the issues before us. However, further work needs to be done to investigate ways of providing clear, legal pathways for fathers to establish paternity of their children. I want to devote a little time to that issue, because I think we can skirt around it and miss the point, but I think it is an important issue. Further commitment needs to be made to resourcing both the scientific and the legal mechanisms that would be required to give fathers an equitable opportunity to be named on birth certificates.

There are a number of things in the bill that I want to draw attention to. United Future fully supports the exemption provisions proposed by clause 7(3) of the bill for women and children who would be at serious risk should they have to meet the section 70A requirements. I think that we are not heartless, and nobody around Parliament has been heartless about this matter. However, we must not buy into the myth that the exemption would apply to most of the 19,500 current beneficiaries who have not legally identified the other parent, or who refuse to apply for child support. The Social Services Committee was furnished with some very interesting findings, and I want to touch on one or two of those.

The Ministry of Social Development did an interview of 4,035 sole parent beneficiaries who were subject to that section 70A penalty because they declined to name in law the other parent of their child or children, or because they refused to apply for child support. I think it is rather significant that only 6 percent gave the fear of violence to themselves or their child as the reason for not naming the other parent. I think it is unbelievable that we allow the other 94 percent to go scot-free. I must admit that the rest of the reasons given in that survey were many and varied, but, in general, they were excuses that considered the interests of the adults above the long-term best interests of the children. A number of speakers have addressed the issue that the child gets a very rough deal through this approach. If we have poor conditions for the mother to work with, and no father, then we have this problem looking at us.

In this day and age of non-invasive DNA testing, it seems absolutely outrageous to United Future that there are fathers who, for instance, can afford to fly to Australia to get away from everything, yet we are unable to track them down when they are here in New Zealand. [Interruption] Yes, and I think we should get into that one and discuss this issue further before this bill goes through. I think we should put this into law somehow. They can afford a trip or to go to a test, yet they remain unidentified or unconfirmed because the power base for that decision rests with the mother, and she is not being honest.

By the way, the select committee heard one powerful submission from a man who had completed a study of the impact on young teenage boys of becoming a father. The submitter commended the intention of the bill to hold fathers more responsible, but he felt that it provided a very one-sided picture of unidentified fathers. Basically, he believes that, in many cases, the blowtorch should be held at the feet of those young boys. He stated: “There are a notable numbers of fathers, particularly adolescent males, who have fathered children in short-term relationships. For a significant portion of such males, the mother of their child has omitted paternal details when they registered the birth. Qualitative research suggests adolescent males are a particularly vulnerable group in this regard. Someone else has pointed out they are generally poorly educated, have limited financial resources, and lack a strong sense of self. As such, many find themselves helpless in their wish to assert their paternity—and that is one of the big issues. He goes on to state this combination of factors causes many adolescent fathers to resign themselves to being precluded from their child’s life. They become shadow fathers unable to assert any paternal rights as they have been omitted from their child’s birth certificate.”

I believe and United Future believes—and I am sure that other parties do, too—that the Government should consider formulating facilities to assist males to declare their paternity where such a declaration has not been provided by the child’s mother. I think it is quite absurd that currently, under New Zealand laws, judges are removing children from their mothers’ legal care for a few hours, so that a DNA test can take place to determine paternity, then returning the children to their mothers, in order to get around some inadequate legislative provisions that work to the disadvantage of fathers and their legal right to be named on birth certificates. I think this bill should make that issue clearer to get around that problem, but it does not.

This bill is a step in the right direction. But it is really only one small and faltering step on a matter that is a serious foundational family issue—that is, the right of every child to have at least access to information about who his or her mother and father are. The child ends up fatherless. Both the studies mentioned in my speech are worthy of serious consideration, and United Future would like to signal that we are not prepared to limit our efforts on this matter to supporting this bill; we will not be shying away in the Committee stage after this debate from the hard work that remains to be done on this vital parenting issue.

Finally, I say that United Future will support the second reading of this amendment bill, but with the provisos I have laid out.

I rise to take an exceptionally brief call in strong support of the second reading of this bill, because of the three significant changes it makes to the social security system.

Firstly, there are changes to the accommodation supplement. Secondly, we can ensure that benefit applicants who work for part of the year are not financially disadvantaged. That is very important in terms of the seasonal workers that a number of our electorates cover. Thirdly, there are changes in the area of child support that will make a big difference to children in sole parent families.

I support the second reading of this bill.

Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker, for the opportunity to speak on this somewhat dubious Social Security (Social Assistance) Amendment Bill.

The National Party will support this bill, but with deep reservations. There is no doubt that the rest home provisions are appropriate; however, the only real purpose of this bill is to attempt to indicate that fathers should be named. This is the first time that this politically correct, socialist Labour Government has actually made an attempt to address this situation, and to acknowledge that it is important to name the father. But I think that this bill is undoubtedly dubious and deceptive, because here we have the extraordinary situation where the Minister is suggesting that $6 be taken away from the mother as a punitive action for not naming the father of the child, when the reality and irony is that from tomorrow, 1 April—April Fool’s Day—the Labour Government will be rewarding those mothers by substantially increasing the benefit, almost to the order of three times the benefit for the first child, and something like double the benefit for the second child.

That is the way this socialist Labour Government, politically correct as it is, tends to work. If ever one could identify a political party that sends mixed signals, it has to be the Labour Party in Government between 1999 and 2005. It is extraordinary that it has lined up with a party that purports to call itself the Progressive Party, yet we see here, perhaps, some of the most mixed, confusing, and regressive legislation that we have seen for a long time. In fact, the situation where on the one hand a penalty is imposed on certain people, and on the other hand, within 24 hours of our discussing it, a reward three times over is given to those same individuals, is just nonsensical. But it is typical of the confused signals that this Labour Government sends to people, with the politically correct social engineering it cannot help itself from doing.

As both Judith Collins and Muriel Newman pointed out last year, it has been under this Labour Minister’s watch that the number of fathers who have gone unnamed has risen from 14,000 to a massive 20,000—an increase of 40 percent. Three women per day are choosing not to name the fathers of their children. Thirty thousand women are affected, and one in six of those is on the domestic purposes benefit.

The genesis of the situation goes back a long time. Back in 1993, for instance, there were in the order of 7,900 women who chose not to name the fathers of their children, which was about 5.6 percent. But under this Labour-Progressive coalition—call it what one will—that figure has risen to the extraordinary number of 20,000 women who do not name the fathers, which is about 16 percent of all the 107,000 women on the domestic purposes benefit. It really is a most extraordinary irony that the Minister, on the one hand, is taking away the $6 and, on the other hand, is tripling the amount he is putting back. He is rewarding the mothers who do not name the fathers.

Last year the House passed the Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Act, and one of the basic tenets of that legislation was the very important benefit to, and natural instinct for, a child to know the name of its father. Surely, the right of a child to know its father is fundamental, and one of the most excellent amendments to that bill happened to be brought up by the member for Port Waikato—

💬 Darren Hughes: Who?

Dr PAUL HUTCHISON:—the excellent member from Port Waikato; I am too modest to name him. But undoubtedly from all over the country there were people saying that that was a great amendment and that it demonstrated that huge instinct of children to want to know who their fathers are. Funnily enough, the opposite situation occurred in relation to some of those fathers, because at that time they were actually required to be anonymous.

Yet what we have in this bill, under this waffly, politically correct, socialist Labour Government, is an extraordinarily mixed set of incentives.

💬 Hon Harry Duynhoven: Minority Government.

That is quite right. It is absolutely a minority Government, and is becoming more and more so as time goes on.

It is extraordinary also that the Government has failed to supply any evidence in the background notes to this bill as to why there is a huge number of beneficiaries who do not name the fathers of their children. One must think it is only because this Government actually encourages them. That is what we are very much seeing today. The Government is tripling the benefit, yet providing a pathetically small disincentive that has really become totally meaningless.

Some people have asked whether there is collusion between parents, who make their own deals. I remember in the debate last year that the senior Government whip came out with an example in which one parent might say: “If you go me for child support, I’ll go you for custody.” Clearly, that is an intolerable sort of attitude. The sort of thing that was suggested by the Government whip is totally inappropriate. I agree with Hon Ken Shirley, who said how absolutely vital it is to be crystal-clear with incentives, otherwise we will get a situation, such as the 20,000 women are not prepared to name the fathers of their children, spiralling on. A perpetuation of this Government’s social engineering will see that number increase.

This is no way to break the cycles of disadvantage that we see in New Zealand. I have been down to Huntly West and heard the headmaster of the local school say that on any one day 25 percent of the children will be truanting. I am told by the Work and Income office that on any one day the children who turn 18 will be brought into the office by their parents to sign up for the dole. This is the sort of atmosphere that the Labour Government is perpetuating—intergenerational dependency. With this bill it is again incentivising something that will not help children to aspire to be, and be, independent and proud of the very basis on which they were born.

We reluctantly support this bill for some of the very minor benefits that it may have, and in the hope that it will incentivise women to name the father of their children. But we have been absolutely appalled by the fact that one day after we speak about this the Labour Government will disincentivise the naming of fathers.

Debate interrupted.