Social Security (Social Assistance) Amendment Bill

This Social Security (Social Assistance) Amendment Bill is an absolute example of the deep factions that are breaking out in the Labour Government. Looking at the members opposite, I see there are 10 mods—and I think about the “She’s a Mod” type of thing. We have to ask whether Mr Duynhoven is a mod.

💬 Hon Harry Duynhoven: I was always a mod.

We would say, yes, he is a mod.

💬 Brent Catchpole: Or is he a rocker?

“Or is he a rocker?”, asks Mr Catchpole. There are the 10 people who would support Mr Tamihere in his leadership bid. Then there are the 15 who say they are staunch, but he does not really know just how staunch they are. Then there are the others, whom, I guess, would be the tossers Mr Tamihere talks about.

This bill is one of those examples that show the classic rifts within the Labour Government. On the one hand the bill purports to do something about the absolute trauma for the 33,000 children who do not have a named father on their birth certificates, yet whose mothers are claiming the domestic purposes benefit—33,000 children to 19,000 mothers. This bill states it will do something about it, but when we look at the detail of it we see that—just as with that other half of the Labour caucus whom Mr Tamihere terms “tossers”—what the Government wants is for nothing actually to change, because the party of those members opposite depends on people being at the bottom of the social economic heap, and those members know that. It is just one of those little things.

I can imagine United Future members thinking this is a great bill because it actually acknowledges, for the first time under this Government, that maybe fathers are important. Yet—just as Mr Tamihere says—because of some clauses in the bill, a few little words, suddenly it does not mean much. The $6 per week that is to be the little bit being taken from beneficiaries’ total income—whether they have three, four, five, six, or 10 children by three, four, five, six, or 10 different fathers—is being replaced by a big lump of extra money provided under another bill. That is how this Government operates: it gives taxpayers’ money with one hand, takes it away with the other, and at the same time tries to keep all its various factions in hand.

I can see the honourable member Georgina Beyer looking as though all her Christmases will stop now; suddenly she knows that she will not be back in Parliament after the next election. Poor young Darren Hughes has been sitting there all day looking like he has just found out that Santa Claus does not really exist, and the poor little darling looks as though he has been crying all day. This is because we now have written confirmation of something we always knew, which is that the factions in the Labour Government are what has rendered it utterly useless to bring about any change in welfare. Here comes Dr Cullen, and we all know about his skill with those little words, and how he is able to talk coalition partners like United Future and the Greens into supporting all sorts of things that they do not really want to support. They do not realise it until it is too late; by that time they have already signed up for them.

One of the areas that has been talked about today is the exemption for mothers who claim to fear violence from the father. Most people would accept that a mother who is being beaten up might be under a fear of violence. But when we look into this bill—it is just like all the other rubbish that Mr Maharey keeps giving us—we find that all a mother has to say is that she fears violence; there do not have to be any threats of violence, and there do not have to be any complaints made to the police. There does not have to be one complaint to the police—nothing.

💬 Russell Fairbrother: What do you want, black eyes?

No black eyes, I say to Mr Fairbrother, need to be shown, and no broken bones—nothing! All she has to say is that she fears violence from the unnamed father. I am sure a lot of extra people will suddenly be saying they fear violence. When the refuge people came along to tell us all about this matter, I asked them how many of these people who claim they fear violence ever take the matter to the police, and the answer was none.

In speaking in the debate on this part of the bill, I would like to suggest that during the select committee process the part that received the most attention from submitters to the Social Services Committee was indeed clause 7, which allows the rate of benefit for sole parents to be further reduced should they fail or refuse to name the fathers of their children. Almost all submitters on that topic felt, as the Green Party does, that it is totally unacceptable to further penalise single parents—mostly mothers—who are in that situation. At the moment such beneficiaries already lose $22 a week, per child, from their benefits. Once this new bill becomes law, that sum will go up by a further $6 a week. Although that may not sound like a lot of money to people on MPs’ salaries, such as the members who are speaking here today, to families that are surviving on the domestic purposes benefit every dollar counts. According to the Ministry of Social Development’s own research, and according to every other study I have seen in recent years, single-parent families are indeed the worst off, proportionately, of all family groupings in our country. So what is the Labour Government doing in deliberately increasing family poverty, even by that small amount?

The Green Party does not find it at all surprising that this bill is being supported, as we have heard today, by the National, New Zealand First, and United Future parties, and is opposed only by ACT, the Greens, and the Māori Party—albeit for quite opposing reasons. I find it quite disturbing that a Labour Government that prides itself on its commitment to social equity seems to feel constrained to put forward clauses like this in what would otherwise be perfectly fine, if rather limited, reforming legislation. If clause 7 were taken out, the bill would be fine and we would have no problem in supporting it. Even better would be to have a bill that did away altogether with the penalties on sole parents.

The solutions to the issue of a woman not being able or willing to name the father of her child or children are numerous, just as are the reasons for not naming the father. The Ministry of Social Development has done some research on that, and reported to the select committee that, as a result of interviews it carried out with over 4,000 single-parent beneficiaries, it found that such reasons include the other parent denying paternity or disappearing when advised of the pregnancy, the beneficiary not actually knowing who the other parent was, and the sole parent trying to avoid the other parent having contact with, or rights over, the child. Those three reasons were the main reasons for people not naming the fathers. From my point of view, I believe that at a human level they are all completely understandable, and a number of the social service - type groups that submitted to us made that same point over and over again. A further reason for a very small percentage of respondents in the ministry’s study not naming fathers was that the custodial parent and the liable parent had made private financial arrangements. I had thought that that figure would be a lot higher than it is, but the answer to that problem, again, is not an increase in the penalties but a reform of the child support legislation.

The Green Party really questions what on earth the Government thinks it is doing by lifting the penalties under section 70A of the Social Security Act. The Government is certainly not addressing the causes of people not naming the fathers of their children, as can be seen by a quick glance at the ministry’s research that I have just outlined. Indeed, one of the reports we were given actually states: “Harsher policy measures would not be effective for the majority of this group.” I believe that we should take quite a different approach to this kind of problem, not the approach of making poor families even poorer. Solutions lie in a whole range of areas, including things like providing far better and more realistic education for children and young people about what becoming a parent actually means. I think we should have that kind of education right from the time children start school, and not leave it till they are about to leave school, when in some cases that is far too late. We do need reforms to the Child Support Act, and we do need to provide more support—not less—to all sorts of single-parent families.

Labour is doing some good things for single parents. It has removed the compulsory work testing of people on the domestic purposes benefit, and put more resources into case work in order to help domestic purposes beneficiaries look ahead at their future, in terms of their education, training, and employment needs. That was good legislation, which the Green Party supported, and it is hard to comprehend in that context why on earth the Government also has to take this retrogressive step. It is high time that the Government stopped taking a kind of moral stand, because that is all it is. Six dollars is just a token deduction. It is a totally unnecessary and uncalled for, and it is a great pity that this Government has to stoop as low as this bill.

I take a call in the final part of this debate, on the title and commencement clauses of the Social Security (Social Assistance) Amendment Bill, on behalf of the ACT party. I would like to make a few points about the bill. It is a scandal that it took 5 long years for this bill to come in front of the House. When this issue was first raised with the Minister, not long after he became the Minister, there were growing numbers of women who were refusing to name the fathers of their children. There are growing numbers of kids who do not know who their dads are. I think it is just a dreadful shame that 35,000 children in New Zealand do not have a father named on their birth certificate.

As we have said in this debate, a lot of the causes of the problem come back to a very unfair child support law, which means that people decide to collude with one another in order to avoid paying up. That is a huge problem for everybody, not least for the taxpayers of New Zealand, who, as we have just heard, are now paying $23 million a day in welfare payments. That is $1 million an hour. Rather than try to address one of the big problems—the Child Support Act, which is very unfair—the Minister has come up with this bill, which will hide the numbers. It will provide exemptions for women who refuse to name fathers because those women claim, rightly or wrongly, that they know the fathers are violent or else that they are deadbeat dads who will not be prepared to pay, anyway. Therefore, instead of addressing the fundamental causes of the problem, so that we end up with a better society, we have this Clayton’s bill that will come into force in May and July, I see as I read the commencement dates.

I also want to make a comment to the Minister, who has claimed in his contributions to this debate that the welfare department now tells parents of their obligations and, because of that, more of them are naming fathers, so that the problem is starting to reduce as they accept their responsibilities. I would like the Minister to take a call to tell us whether, when welfare staff tell single parents about their responsibilities, they also tell them about the Government research that finds that long-term welfare dependency and sole parenthood damage kids. Does the Minister ask his department to discourage single parents from going on welfare till their youngest child is 18, and to encourage them to get out there, get a life, get a job, and have a better future for themselves and their children—not on welfare? Does the Minister accept responsibility for realising that children do better if their parents are in the workforce—if children have a working role model in their family? Or does he sit back and say it does not matter whether we have more single parents going on a benefit—that it is OK and the Government does not mind about it, because they will be Labour Party supporters,?

I say to the Minister that he has a moral obligation to make sure that anybody who goes on welfare in the long term and who is able-bodied realises that all the research the Social Policy Agency did, which went back over years and years, is absolutely conclusive that welfare in the long term is damaging to children. Any Minister of the Crown has a responsibility to make sure that families on welfare know that. I can tell the Minister that taxpayers out there know that. They know it is wrong for people who could work, and who should be working, to be stuck on welfare. What I would like to be seeing today is our debating a bill to bring in welfare reform that would support people to move off welfare and go into work, a bill that would provide support for families, children, and so on. But that bill must be one whereby we actually help children to have working parents—not parents on welfare, because no matter how well or how hard beneficiaries try, it is not the same as being in work.

I do not really agree with Dr Newman on much in relation to welfare policy, but there is no doubt that, unlike the spokesperson for the National Party, she does spend a great deal of time trying to work out her ideas, which is something I always admire. When she gets up she usually has something to say. She asked a question that does not have much to do with Part 3 of this bill, but I will reply to it anyway. She is concerned about the amount of money being spent on the domestic purposes benefit.

The member will remember that when we came into power the National Government had had a system that meant, in essence, that Work and Income staff spoke to a person on the domestic purposes benefit when his or her child was 6, and again when the youngest child was 14. As far as I can tell, National took that as great intervention. Looked at more closely, there was a little flurry of activity perhaps—not always, but perhaps—when children were around the ages of 6 and 14, but after that, nothing ever happened. Nothing at all was done for people on the domestic purposes benefit. That was the system that the National Government used to run and that the ACT party thought was quite useful.

We did not think that it was good enough. We had the view that people who are on the domestic purposes benefit move through it in about 3½ years on average. In the past they often came back to it, because the wages they could get in the 1990s were too low to be able to support their children. The average person on the domestic purposes benefit is about 32 years of age and is a woman moving from being in a relationship to looking for some form of independence. In our view, a much better thing to do was to start, even before people came on to the benefit, by asking them to begin writing for themselves a plan that would tell us how they would return to work, or to prepare for the day that they could return to work.

Ms Bradford, who is in the House today, had a big hand in helping us with the process of planning. So now I can inform Mrs Newman, who seems not to have noticed, of the reason that the number of people on the domestic purposes benefit is coming down in a sustained way. It should come down, and that is a view that Ms Bradford and I share. It is something that is not right in this country—when we compare ourselves with other like jurisdictions we have too many people who are on a sole parent benefit. We have too many people who are in that category and we want to see the figure come down.

We know that it is because they cannot get quality childcare, and the kinds of wages that would allow them to support their children, that they are often in situations where they simply do not get the training that allows them to lift their capacity to move into a job that will pay them a decent wage. So we have begun to pay attention to a whole range of policies that provide practical support to allow people on the domestic purposes benefit to plan for a rapid return to work and to stay there, which is of course what we want. We do not want them to come back because they simply cannot afford to live on the wages that they are getting.

So I can inform the House that Mrs Newman’s very good question, and it is a question that she has persisted with over time, was addressed last year. Ninety-three percent of people on the domestic purposes benefit now have a personal plan that leads towards them returning to employment. This is a vastly superior system to one that simply meant a little flurry of activity when the youngest child was 6 and then 14. We sincerely hope that this plan will see the rapid movement of people through the benefit and on to independence by giving them the support that they need.

I return to Mrs Collins’ deep concern about section 70A of the principal Act, and the speech she gave before. She has given speeches on that section all the way through the debate. I encourage her, if she does take another call, to tell us her policy. We have spent a wee while on this debate and have heard her talk about what the Government is doing. She says she does not agree with it, even though the numbers are dropping—down to 16,130 from a peak of over 20,000. I think that is absolutely right. Men should be fronting up to their obligations. We are seeing a steady decline now.

But it would be good if Mrs Collins could identify an idea. It does not have to be a big idea, or something that is too rigorous—an idea would do. I notice that Mrs Wong, once again, is having to step into the breach as she often does to support her colleagues. She is a thoughtful, intelligent, and able member of Parliament. I look forward to her rising in a moment to give us an idea. Mr Gudgeon has done so, from New Zealand First’s point of view, and Mrs Newman, from ACT, has done so. Let us hear one from the National Party.

Before I start my speech, I firstly seek leave of the House to table the National Party social welfare reform speech that was made by Dr Don Brash, so that the Minister can get a full briefing. It can become his compulsory reading.

Document, by leave, laid on the Table of the House.

I am glad that the Minister will now have some good, substantial reading to help him reflect on why Dr Newman cannot bring herself to support this legislation. The Minister is in such a good mood for taking calls that I invite him to do it again, because he has not answered two questions posed by Dr Muriel Newman, which I shall try to put to him again.

One question is why it took so long for the Minister to bring this token—according to our Green Party colleague—legislation to the House. I volunteer to answer that. A very big part of his decision was due to our leader, Dr Don Brash, making his speech on social welfare reform in January this year. Suddenly Labour realised that it was, once again, in trouble. It had not made the necessary changes to ensure that children were entitled to contributions from both parents to their well-being.

The second question that Dr Muriel Newman posed to the Minister was whether Ministry of Social Development staff, at the time that they informed mothers of their obligation to name the father, also impressed upon those applicants that it is important for the long-term well-being of their children that they receive a contribution from the other party—the liable parent. My good colleague Judith Collins consistently sought that answer from the Minister. I am not too sure why the Minister did not quite get around to answering her question. Her question was simply put: did this bill, particularly clause 7, do anything to make sure that both parents are held responsible for bringing up their children?

I think Sue Bradford of the Green Party put her finger on the right spot when she said that the $6 penalty is a very token gesture. Why should Labour, which is supposedly compassionate and does not penalise the individual, bring it in? It is nothing but election year grandstanding. Labour is trying to send a token message. The Minister for the past 5½ years has done nothing to solve this problem. Every time he has answered questions he has reinforced the fact that this bill does nothing to achieve what he wants to achieve when it comes to tackling the issue of solo parents. He has tried to say that all those other plans—making people sit down to write mission statements, objectives, and performance targets—contribute to a reduction in the number of people on the domestic purposes benefit. If that is the case, why is the House dragged into debating this bill, and why is the select committee called upon to examine this issue—when the substance of that problem, in the Minister’s words, is being tackled by the department, not by the passage of this legislation?

National still chooses to support the bill, for one principal reason: because we believe that both parents should be held responsible for bringing up their children.

My comments will be brief at this stage. Harking back to the comments I have heard today in this Chamber, I would just like to re-emphasise to those listening and to members present today that family wealth increases only through a well-rounded education. Regarding wealth or poverty, those situations come about only because of choices and decisions that people have made.

I hark back to the 1999 election, when I was invited to speak at the opening of an extension to an arm of Mangaroa Prison in Hawke’s Bay. The Chairperson probably remembers that. As a guest there, I emphasised to the inmates that the key to any future development of them was for them to get a sound education. After that, comments were made by Pacific Island representatives and Māori elder representatives, because the majority of the people we were speaking to were Māori or Pacific Island—but mostly Māori. At the conclusion of that speech, the inmates in that prison—not because I was a visitor; protocol dictates that they decide whether to support a speech that one has made—came and supported what I had said. They supported the notion and the suggestion that after their time was up in prison they needed to get a good, sound education in order for them to get out of the situations they were in before they went inside.

That is likewise for solo parents. As a former lecturer at a polytech, I always emphasised to students in the lectures I gave—and I continue to do so today—that education was the key. Today I meet a number of those former students who are in good, sound positions in work and who are contributing to society; previously they were on some form of benefit or in a solo mother situation. I say to members of Parliament that to solve the problems we have in our society today we have to get people out of that situation. We need to encourage people to get a good, sound education and to develop the potential each one has, whatever it may be.

I notice—and I do not want to categorise people into ethnic groups—that the Māori Party is opposing this bill. When we look at the statistics we see that a large number of Māori are in that situation. Our people need to be assisted to get on their feet. Once they are on their feet, we will not tell them to get a job but will say that this is the programme they need to follow, and it is along the lines of their getting an education so that they can become skilled and qualified, and can be in a situation in which they can achieve wealth. That is where New Zealand First is coming from. But looking at what is happening today. We can talk about the figures—19,000 solo mothers with 35,000 children. What are we going to do about it?

💬 Russell Fairbrother: Vote for the bill.

I have already made members aware that New Zealand First supports the bill, with provisos. The key for people in that situation is not for us to be judgmental about the situation they are in, but for us to look at the skills and the education they need so that they can become good citizens contributing to society.

I move, That the question be now put.

Motion agreed to.