Estimates Debate — Vote Social Development

I rise to speak against the estimates in relation to the Ministry of Social Development and Vote Social Development. In relation to that, I would like to make a couple of points. I thought today that I might need to come along tonight and apologise to the Minister, because, as most people in this House know, I have been a stern critic of the wastage that has occurred in social development spending. I have also been a stern critic of the Families Commission and of the $9 million every year it gets from this Government as a pay-off.

Today, in the House, when I heard about the $9 million that is still going to be spent on singalong courses in the tertiary education sector, I decided that maybe I should apologise, because at least there is a Families Commission for $9 million, and we know that for that $9 million the commission has employed and sacked one chief executive in 3 months and given a secret payout to that chief executive, which apparently the Minister cannot tell us until, gosh, after September. It has also had a survey done, and about 2,500 people, probably all of them related to people who work for the Families Commission, have written in and said what they want for families and what makes families tick. That is $9 million, which is peanuts for this Government.

I will not apologise to the Minister, though, because I have also reminded myself that he has spent $127.8 million to fund a new service to help sickness beneficiaries and invalids beneficiaries in some way. We have a situation where the number of sickness and invalids beneficiaries seems to be continuously growing, and the best he could say to us today in the House was that those numbers are not growing quite as much as they were last year. Frankly, that is not good enough. There are 120,000 working-age New Zealanders on the sickness and invalids benefits, and we in the National Party do not for a moment believe that there are 120,000 working-age New Zealanders who need to be on the sickness and invalids benefits. What is most infuriating is the fact that that money—which should be going to help the people who really are sick, who are dying of cancer, and who have terminal illnesses and have to travel overseas to get treatment—is being wasted. That is what is so infuriating.

Governments do not have money; Governments simply use and borrow taxpayers’ money. There is no such thing as Government money; there is, in fact, only New Zealand taxpayers’ money. Taxpayers’ money should be spent on what New Zealand taxpayers need—that is, on dealing with the sick, on really looking after the elderly, and on really making sure that hip, knee, and cataract operations are done. Those are things that this Government has failed to do anything about, despite the massive increases in health funding. Tonight I have been sitting here listening to the debate, and I have thought about how time is valuable and about the amount of nonsense I have heard from the Labour Government. Certainly, I presumed, having heard the very good speech from the member from United Future who spoke previously, that United Future members would not be voting for this nonsense, but I have been told by one of my colleagues that unfortunately they will. I have to wonder why the people of New Zealand have to continue to wait to do something about this Government. Fortunately, we now have an election date, so something can happen.

Just the other day we saw one of the examples of bureaucracy and nonsense coming out of the Government in this area. It is something called Social Report 2005.

💬 Steve Chadwick: It’s fantastic!

I hear from the member for Rotorua that it is fantastic. Unfortunately, not everyone agrees with her. This document, which I calculate is at least 1½ centimetres thick, was described yesterday by the New Zealand Herald as “Scorecard a waste of money”. The New Zealand Herald goes on to suggest in its editorial that one of the first things the National Party should do in Government is to get rid of this PC nonsense—and when the New Zealand Herald says that in its editorial, then, by goodness, things are about to change. One of the things it says about the report is that it is full of Government propaganda—gosh, fancy that—and is uninformative. But Steve Chadwick says it is fantastic. The report suggests that everything is happy and lovely here in the land of Nod, but it does not explain why 30,000 New Zealanders are voting with their feet every year and going to live in Australia. It does not deal with that, unfortunately, and the reason it does not is that so many thinking young New Zealanders who can work have already gone. That is what is happening.

💬 Lesley Soper: And why?

They have gone because they know they are much better off in Australia. They are 25 percent better off in terms of money in the pocket. The reason why is that they get paid more and are in an economy that can do that. We in this country have to try so much harder. I tell Mrs Soper that one of the reasons those young people are going is that they are sick of being told what to do by a nanny State—a pack of parenting experts who would not know one end of a child from the other; a pack of people who are always poking their sticky little beaks into everyone else’s business and telling people what they can and cannot do. And, by goodness, they had better think nice thoughts! They are sick and tired of social engineering. They are sick and tired of being told in this sort of document from this sort of Minister that they are happy, and they are certainly not particularly happy with billboards that tell them that they are better off with Labour. They are certainly not happy about being told, yet again, how well off they are. This particular social report is just one of those superb indications of the wastage that happens with this Government.

What did this Government have to do to get Television New Zealand’s profits up? Fifteen million dollars was spent on advertising the Working for Families package. That is what it spent its money on. That was down from the $20-something million it was about to spend until one of my colleagues pointed it out. This Government is so busy waving everyone bye-bye at the airport that it is not prepared to take the tough decisions. One thing I find so interesting with this Labour-led Government—and I should acknowledge Jim Anderton’s Progressive Party, although I notice today that he did not use the correct name; that is the new name he has for it—is that it is so good at spin. We have heard that from John Tamihere. This social report, which is supposed to tell us all how happy everything is in the land of Nod, is one of the things—

💬 Steve Chadwick: Read it.

Strangely enough, I actually did read it. Clearly, that member did not. Obviously Mrs Chadwick either did not read it or is terribly impressed with glossy pictures and different coloured ink. They are some of the things that fascinate people in the Labour Party. They are very, very fascinated by glossy pictures, different coloured ink, and strange little fonts that most people cannot read without their glasses on. This document is not meant for reading; it is meant for looking at the pictures. That is what this is all about. That is one of the reasons why people are leaving this country. They are sick of being told all about how happy we are in the land of Nod. When I listen to the “women’s brigade” of the Labour Party, also known as “Labour’s Ladies’ Party”, I understand why so many people are on the sickness benefits and the invalids benefit. People like that have no understanding of the real world. They have no understanding of what it is like to get a real job and get real pay because this is the best money they have ever seen in their lives.

What a lot of drivel! I feel incredibly sad when I hear the bitterness and aggro that comes from the opposite side, from a woman member who kind of gives the word “woman” a bad name in this Parliament. And why?

💬 Judith Collins: I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. I take exception to that.

The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson): That is not a point of order. The member will be seated.

It makes one feel one should be ashamed to appear to advocate for women’s issues, for things that this Government has been proud to introduce—things like paid parental leave, which has given the mums of this country so many opportunities to care for their newborn babies in their first 13 weeks of life. We think that is a good thing. Clearly, the Opposition does not think it is a good thing. It thinks it is a dreadful waste of money.

Opposition members bang on and on about Labour’s policies and how ineffective they are, despite the fact that this country’s level of unemployment has been turned round under this Government to become the second lowest in the OECD, with over 260,000 more Kiwis in work than in 1999. People are not standing outside the post office looking for work. Neither are they working for the dole. They are undertaking industry training and getting apprenticeships, which is something that was lobbied for by the union movement. The “union movement” is another dirty term, a dreadful term, for people on the other side of the Chamber. They do not believe in anyone advocating for working people. But, yes, the union movement advocated to this Government, and it listened. We are a Government that listens. We understood that investment in skills and training would be a great thing for our country, so that is what we did. Now there are 9,000 apprenticeships, and in the near future we will probably see more increases. We are a Government that is committed to skills and training.

The first thing the National Government did when it came into power was to scrap pay equity for women, which the National Party is totally opposed to. The second thing it did was to scrap the Apprenticeship Act. Overnight the National Government stopped training and skills in this country. We saw that devastation through the 1990s. When Labour got in, we fixed it. We gave hope to young people and created jobs by supporting business and creating skills, and we are seeing the rewards in our unemployment statistics now. We are seeing job growth, and that is a really good thing.

Again, we are seeing the Working for Families package bad-mouthed. Why would one bad-mouth that? Why is it bad to support working families in this country? Why is it bad for hard-working families in this country who have more than one child, who have two or three children, to get targeted tax relief so that they can provide the best opportunities possible for their children? Why is that a bad thing? I would ask Judith Collins that question, but I know she does not know the answer. All National wants is to return to the failed policies of the 1990s, when there was no training and no support for industry and families, when State houses were being flogged off as quickly as one could look at them, and when there was no support for education in this country. We know—we saw what happened through the 1990s.

Judith Collins was working really hard at doing I do not know what. She seems to think that people on this side of the Chamber do not know what hard work is. I look along at my colleagues and I know that they all know what hard work is. We are at the grass roots. We are talking to people all the time, just like our leader is. We know what is important to people in this country. It is training, education, and opportunity for people, for their children, and for their children’s children to enable them to sustain a good lifestyle and to have a future in this country. We see it with superannuation. What was another thing the Nats did when they came in? They said: “We aren’t going to touch your super.”, then they cut superannuation and tried to fool the people, telling our superannuitants that they had not cut superannuation. But they knew—and they were told very clearly—that they had reneged on their word.

We are a Government that is very proud of our policies. We are proud to support our families, we are proud to support skills and training, and we are proud to support education.

Thank you for allowing me a call in the debate on Vote Social Development. I would watch out for that cold ill wind of change that came across the floor before. Where have we heard it before? Mrs Collins was so Shipley-esque in her delivery. What happened in that era? It was a grave ill wind. It was nipping—it was more than nipping, it was savaging. Tatters is what was left of social development in this country under that National-led Government. One cannot trust a National-led Government to support and invest in New Zealanders who need most help. It has proved that in the past.

This Government has delivered. We have the lowest unemployment rate in decades—not just in terms of the general statistics of unemployment, but also in terms of the Māori statistics. It is all about social cohesion—about getting all the bits of the puzzle coming together, and forming and working well in various areas. This debate might be about social development, but our investment as a Labour-led Government has been in New Zealanders.

What I heard before from the member Judith Collins was not about us investing in all New Zealanders as fairly and inclusively as possible. The figures in this Budget that we are talking about tell us that benefit numbers are declining. People are finding jobs through the initiatives that this Government has employed over the last 6 years, and has given strong and positive indication that it will employ in the coming 3 years. That is most definitely a defining issue in terms of the difference between us and the cruel, cool wind that could blow in from that icy blue National Party over there.

I advise New Zealanders to be wary, and to think very, very carefully before they make that vital decision on September 17 about who delivers and who they can trust to deliver. So far, the Rt Hon Helen Clark, the Prime Minister of this country, who has led us well; Minister Maharey, in reference to the debate on social development that we are addressing at this point; and the inclusive policies of the Government in general have added to the social cohesion and the nature of a far more happy nation. We are happy to be proud of who we are—we are not talking ourselves down at every opportunity, which does not add value to New Zealand. We on this side of the House actually think of the future, as evidenced by the announcement today by our Prime Minister and Mr Mallard. What a wonderful announcement it was for the grandparents and parents of this country to contemplate, and, most certainly, for the greatest beneficiaries of it at the moment, the students of this country. They have some hope—

💬 Hon Member: Graduates.

Indeed, graduates. There are many more reasons to stay in New Zealand or return to New Zealand apart from those announced today. That is already obvious to the country, if one cares to look. Indeed, I really do believe that the Opposition should take great note of what has been achieved.

I heard Judith Collins slag off the work that, I have to say, the Ministry of Social Development—its chief executive and all its staff—has had to do to restore the tattered infrastructure of human resource that was eaten away in the 1990s. When I heard that ill wind coming from Judith Collins, I thought it was so Shipley-esque. It was under Mrs Shipley’s leadership that so much of the vital infrastructure that helped all New Zealanders and those most in need anywhere and everywhere—in the provinces and in cities—was lost. I can tell members that what this Government has been able to deliver in the last 6 years has been nothing short of a miracle. It has come back and recovered from the tatters left by the National-led Government of the 1990s.

I am very, very wary of the decisions that will be made in the future. So I ask New Zealanders, as they listen to this debate tonight, to analyse for themselves what is of greatest benefit. We in the Labour Party invest in New Zealanders. We in the Labour Party are proud of what New Zealand has to offer and of what it exports internationally, and we show it by our positive policies.

I am very pleased to stand up to support the estimates for Vote Social Development. I am a member of the Social Services Committee, and I can say categorically that this area has been one of the true success stories of the Labour-led Government over the past 6 years. It just kills the National members. It absolutely kills them that no matter how hard they try to spin the numbers, and no matter how hard they try to re-jig and re-evaluate everything, they cannot get away from the fact that under this Labour-led Government there are almost 100,000 fewer working-age people on benefits than there were when we took over from the previous National-led Government in 1999.

One of the things that has been raised with me at home by local Work and Income workers is that they are sick of the Opposition parties standing up and saying that somehow they are fiddling the numbers. Somehow those parties do not believe that all the people concerned have come off benefits. They believe that somewhere in the system the Work and Income front-line people must be shoving people off an unemployment benefit and on to a sickness benefit, and that somehow their dishonesty somewhere along the way is causing the numbers to change.

💬 Dr Wayne Mapp: It’s the Government.

Mr Mapp agrees. Mr Mapp is calling out, and he agrees. Well, I say to Mr Mapp that there are 100,000 fewer working-age people on benefits now than there were in 1999, including sickness beneficiaries. I ask Mr Mapp to try to spin that one—he cannot. I feel for those front-line workers, because they do an amazing job. They are doing active individual case management, which is working, because people are moving from the unemployment benefit into work. Since 1999 I believe only 7 percent of people have moved off the unemployment benefit and on to the sickness benefit. The rest have gone into work, and that figure speaks for itself.

What does the National Party have to offer? Its members sit over there bleating, but what do they have to offer? I was looking on the Internet the other day, and I thought that I must have hit an archived file. What I saw was Work for the Dole. Work for the Dole is the National Party’s answer to unemployment in New Zealand. National did that in the 1990s, and the scheme was an abject failure. Earlier today we had Dr the Hon Lockwood Smith stand up in the House, seething and spitting over the announcement today of Labour’s tertiary education policy for graduates who have student loans. He claimed that we must have ignored Treasury reports and the reports from officials, because why else would we have done that? He said the officials could not have said that policy was an OK thing to do. Of course, in the 1990s, when the previous National Government reviewed the Work for the Dole scheme—or Work and Income reviewed that scheme—Work and Income said it did not work. It said that people who were on the Work for the Dole scheme were less likely to move into real jobs than people who were not on the scheme. Did National listen to the officials? Obviously not. Treasury said that for every four Work for the Dole jobs created, one genuine private sector job was lost. That is what Treasury said. Has National listened to that? Obviously not.

The reality is that it is all very well to say we will make people who are on the dole go out there and do jobs in the community, but there are people in our communities now who do those jobs for a living. That is what they do. They are the small business contractors and the small business owners, who cannot compete with the State-sanctioned Work for the Dole scheme. They cannot do that, and I think that is an important point. The people who provide those very important services in our communities should be very worried that business could be taken off them and given to people on the dole. That is the reality if National implements the Work for the Dole scheme—and the experience in Australia has been exactly the same. I hear the National Party members talk about how in Australia a similar scheme has been a great success, but it has not. The evaluation in Australia also stated that participants in the work for the dole scheme were less likely to move into real jobs. In fact, it stated that they were markedly disadvantaged, and could not get real jobs.

What kind of employment scheme is Work for the Dole, when it actually disadvantages people? It would be bad enough if the Work for the Dole scheme, with all the money and the investment that goes into it, produced no measurable outcome. But to make things worse—I have to wonder why National has resurrected that policy. To do it once might have been OK. National did it once and people said they thought that when people did not have time to look for jobs they would not get jobs, and said they also thought the scheme would take work away from many of the small contractors in their communities. It might have been fine that National did try Work for the Dole because it thought it sounded good. Admittedly, it is a good sound bite—it sounds good to be tough on beneficiaries, in order to get them out there. But to have the scheme reviewed and shown to be a failure, and to bring it up again, is pure foolishness.

I am rising on behalf of the ACT party to take a call in this estimates debate. I would like to start off by saying it really is a tragic fact that Labour has failed to take advantage of the unique opportunity provided by the great economic conditions it inherited to address the very serious problems we have in welfare and with families.

The reality is that the economy has done well, not because of Labour, but in spite of Labour. This Government has failed to set New Zealand on a path to prosperity. That opportunity was within its grasp and it has failed dismally. Instead, because of ideological reasons, Labour has introduced some 30 new taxes, charges, and levies, which means that wages that had risen in households around New Zealand have, in fact, been wiped out, and working families are no further ahead now than they were before.

It is a shame that the Labour Government has not taken the opportunity to address the problem in welfare, because welfare is the biggest cost to New Zealand. That cost would not have to be made if the Government worked with the welfare system properly. I am pleased that tax cuts are now a major election issue, because ACT members have campaigned on that area since we came to Parliament.

ACT members have also campaigned for welfare reform. It is a great tragedy that Labour has abused the goodwill of New Zealand taxpayers by failing to require able-bodied New Zealanders who are being paid benefits—being paid to waste their lives in a dead-end way, I might add—to go out to work. The interesting thing is that Labour has also sat on its hands with regard to evidence that shows children raised in families on welfare fail to do as well in almost all areas of life. The Labour Government should have reformed welfare, not just to get parents back into the workforce, but to also give a better go for children.

It is a scandal, at a time when the country has a shortage of workers that is crippling our economy, that 74,000 adults are still reliant on the dole. They are being paid to do nothing. The Minister shakes his head. I am talking about people receiving the dole and their spouses or partners. The Minister’s figures show that there are 74,000 such people. There are some 50,000 sole parents on the domestic purposes benefit whose children are at school and who could be working, as well. It is a disgrace that when we add up all the people of working age who are on welfare, the total comes to almost 320,000 New Zealanders. Half of them could be working.

This Minister and his Government have failed to make the provisions to ensure that those people go and get jobs. There are jobs for Africa in our economy at the moment. The Minister and Government members can shake their heads, but their failure to make the welfare system work is an abuse of the taxpayers of New Zealand, and it is keeping our taxes so high. By the way, if we brought in proper welfare reform, lower taxes would be affordable in the long term.

What is worse is that Labour, with its soft-on-welfare policies, has made benefits easier to get on to and harder to get off. It has increased the welfare net through the Working for Families package and has turned working families into beneficiaries. It has gone soft on benefit fraud. It is allowing beneficiaries to rip off the system and is doing very little about it.

And, of course, it is fiddling the figures. We all know that the number of people who have moved from the dole to the sickness benefit or the invalids benefit has escalated. We know that a lot of people now call themselves students and do dodgy courses. We also know that the public service has expanded dramatically, and I suggest that there are a lot of make-work jobs there.

Having said that, it is better for people to be in any job than to be on a benefit, but the point is that Labour is so desperate to make the figures look good, it has failed to get people who could work off a benefit in order to fill the jobs out there that need filling.

I, like many people in the Chamber, will miss Dr Muriel Newman when she goes, because, unlike the National Party members, at least she consistently raises criticisms about the issues that matter most to ACT. I think the problem—as has occurred all the way through this debate—is that although Dr Newman has raised a lot of criticisms, we have yet to hear a programme that New Zealanders really believe would be practical and useful in relation to the area of social welfare. That, I guess, is why ACT is polling at 1 percent—the criticisms may be there, but the answers, unfortunately, are not.

I want to go back to Moana Mackey’s comments before, and to say that I am looking forward to the election campaign. I do not think that any of the candidates who are either in the Labour Party or in the parties that have supported the Government over the last 3 to 6 years will have any difficulty at all, in any debate anywhere in the country, when talking about the issue of welfare. Let me say why that is the case. If we look back to the 1990s, we see that unemployment peaked at 11.9 percent across the whole of the population—11.9 percent. That was in 1992. The official Māori rate of unemployment was in the mid-20s under that Government. The Pacific Island rate was around 20 percent under that Government. Whole towns of people simply could not find a job. Whole towns of people lived in overcrowded conditions—people were unable to find a decent house. The list of things that were wrong went on and on. In 1995 one in three children in New Zealand lived in a household whose income was below the poverty line. That is the picture in a nutshell, just using the headlines that the 1990s took us into.

The 1990s were a time when the Government decided it should not invest in social issues, should cut benefits, and should demonise people who were on a benefit. If a person was on a benefit, he or she was a bludger, according to the previous National Government. It claimed beneficiaries were the problem, not the fact that there were no jobs out there, no decent housing, and so on—it was the individual who was the problem. By the end of the 1990s, not only was it possible to reel off figure after figure of what was essentially a social deficit but most people in the country who had any conscience at all had come to the belief that the Government’s policy was just unfair, mean-spirited, and bad, and had decided that they would not tolerate having a Government that turned on the most vulnerable people in the country in that way. One of the major reasons National lost the election so comprehensively in 1999 was that it followed policies that made people feel that the Government was unfair when it came to the vulnerable people of this country. [Interruption]

Since then, Mr Ardern may like to know, the whole picture has changed. The experts at the New Zealand Herald who write its editorials—and I do not know where they received their qualifications in social policy from—have told us that they do not want to hear measures of progress around social policy. Well, I am really sorry to say that Labour does. We regard it as being essential to know that there is less poverty in the country. We regard it as being very important to be able to tell New Zealanders how well we are doing socially. In the 1990s the previous National Government could not, and did not want to, do that, and the result was that those issues were ignored until they became hugely costly problems that had to be repaired, over the last 6 years, by this Government. We will have a social report. That report will tell us that New Zealand has improved on 16 of 22 measures, which has made sure that we are now in the top half of the OECD and are improving on social well-being in this country. The OECD calls New Zealand a “jobs miracle”.

If we take the benefit area, having got that general picture of the hustings going, we can say that 164,000 New Zealanders were on the unemployment benefit when Labour came into power, and that 50,000 New Zealanders are on an unemployment benefit now. For the first time there has been a sustained drop in the number of people who receive the domestic purposes benefit. I want people on the domestic purposes benefit to go back to work, and I say to members of the Committee that we have to do things that are practical if that is to happen. We have to provide childcare, for example; otherwise people cannot go back to work. The Government has been putting childcare in place. For the first time we are seeing the number of people on the sickness benefit level off. We are now looking at the possibility of the number of people on the sickness benefit going down—but not by talking about it, and not by saying that we should get tough on people who have serious illnesses and somehow make life hell for them. We can say that we now have good, practical policies. In fact, every single developed country in the world is looking at those policies, because they can see that we, unlike them, are seeing a real difference in the number of people on the sickness benefit. We are also seeing, for the first time ever, a decline in the number of people who are coming on to the invalid’s benefit. We have policies that work in a humane and just way to get people off the benefit and into the mainstream of society again, and earning a living, which is where the Labour-Progressive Government wants them to be. That is what we want.

When anybody in this House comes to a forum in his or her area, that member will find candidates will stand up and say that the area was going backwards before this Government came into office. They will say it had a regional economy that was failing, people were coming on to the benefit, and people and businesses were leaving the area. The situation is exactly the opposite of that now. If anybody in the House wants to invite me, I will welcome the opportunity to come and do an election forum in his or her electorate, and I will talk about welfare with the people in that area. The National Party can put up its genius ideas about what it wants to do. We will talk about 6 years of practical, humane, just gains for the most vulnerable people in the communities of the MPs in this House. I look forward to that. Barbara Stewart can invite me to come to her area. I will be right there. Mr Craig McNair can ask me. I will be right there. I will come to Shane Ardern’s region in the King Country, and we will have a good debate with the farmers there. We will talk about how everything is getting better.

The last thing I want to say is that the ideas we have had from the National Party so far are things like the compulsory immunisation of children. I listened to Mrs Judith Collins the other day at a forum. Someone said that he or she understood National wanted to compulsorily immunise children, and asked how it would do that. Mrs Collins said that National would just do it. The person asked how National would do that, and what would happen if the parents said that they were not going to have their children immunised. Mrs Collins’ response was that compulsory immunisation had happened in America. The questioner asked what had been done in America, so as to know how National would force parents to immunise their children. Mrs Collins’ response summarises the entire National Party campaign. She told the people at the forum not to worry, that National would not do compulsory immunisation now, and that it would figure that out when it got into power. I say to Mr Ardern that that is one of the other reasons why I am really looking forward to being in his electorate and debating his policies, because the National Party cannot actually tell us how a single one of its policies will be implemented. The National Party is like Mrs Muriel Newman: it is full of complaints, full of gripes, and full of attacks on people who are vulnerable, but it does not have a single workable idea to put before the people of this country.

These estimates deserve the support of this Committee. In the social development area we have made a huge difference. I am enormously proud of the people in Work and Income and the Ministry of Social Development. I look forward to working with them again after the election.