New Zealand Public Health and Disability Amendment Bill (No 2)

It is a pleasure to speak on the major part of this bill, the New Zealand Public Health and Disability Amendment Bill (No 2). I note that in new Part 4A, “Family care policies”, inserted by clause 4, new section 70A, “Purpose of this Part”, says quite clearly: “The purpose of this Part is to keep the funding of support services provided by persons to their family members within sustainable limits in order to give effect to the restraint imposed by section 3(2) ...”.

I think it is very, very important to emphasise that this policy does indeed give disabled people the choice of whether to employ a family carer or a contracted provider. And as I pointed out in the second reading of this bill, the packages to carers of those who used to be held in institutions are really very realistic. They will come to over $100,000 in certain circumstances. Traditionally, as we have all debated during the last two readings, for 20 years no family members have been paid—no family members have been paid. But this bill enables that choice of payment to those who, indeed, have very high needs. This will open up payments to something like 1,600 families who have in the past not had that benefit.

Certainly, targeting high and very high needs people was supported by 68 percent of all submitters and 71 percent of family carers, in response to the consultation document that was put out by the Government in 2012, and I believe that there were something like over 600 replies to that. There were 273 submitters, and there were 12 discussions around the traps in New Zealand. Again, it is important to point out that changing the policy to pay all groups of family carers rather than only carers of those with high and very high needs would result in spiralling and unmanageable costs of as much as $175 million a year. We do, of course, have that difficulty—where are the grey zones? But when we hear the rhetoric of both Labour and the Greens—the Greens, which would print money, and Labour, which has refused to pay anything at all, even though it has known since 2001 that this was an issue—it is indeed of great concern.

This policy adds to the extra $100 million that the Government is spending on disability support services over the next 4 years. The total investment in disability now reaches something like $1.1 billion. This is a realistic, compassionate, fair solution to an issue that has gone on for a long period of time. And as one of the disability spokespersons said this morning, the sector will be very relieved that at last a solution has been offered by the National Government.

Just before I call the next member, just so that we are clear about the parameters in the debate, this is a debate on clause 1, and it is a wide-ranging debate on clause 1. The reason for that is the New Zealand Public Health and Disability Amendment Bill (No 2) has not been considered by a select committee. However, when we come to clauses 2, 3, and 4, these will be narrow debates, and I refer members who are going to speak to Speaker’s ruling 114/7. All of those who are going to be speaking, please have a look at Speaker’s ruling 114/7. So it is a wide-ranging debate.

Thank you very much for the opportunity to take a call in the Committee stage of the New Zealand Public Health and Disability Amendment Bill (No 2), and I hope that the Minister of Health takes the opportunity to answer some of the questions that were foreshadowed during the truncated debates that we have already had on this bill.

Can I first of all agree with one point that the previous speaker, Dr Paul Hutchison, made and that is that for some family members who have been denied access to payment for caring, this bill does progress that issue and that is a good thing. It is massively outweighed by the frame in which the Minister has put this resolution. The Minister has quite clearly said in his press statements and in the introduction to this bill, as well as in the questions and answers from the Ministry of Health that accompanied it, that it is the total responsibility of family members to care for their disabled other family members. That undermines the whole point of this bill.

The point of this bill should be to say that under the public health and disability responsibilities that the Government has, a family member who is performing a support service that would otherwise be performed by a paid caregiver should be entitled to be paid as well. So the whole framing of this debate has been that a Minister was dragged, kicking and screaming, from the Court of Appeal and into Parliament to address the issue that was raised by the Atkinson family. The Minister knows that when Labour was leading the Government, the matter had not been resolved by the courts. It was resolved by the courts during his term of Government, and for the last 12 months he has been working out how he could get out of the responsibility of paying for family caregivers.

The other point that I want to raise in relation to the issues that Dr Paul Hutchison raised is that it would pay the member well to read the regulatory impact statement because that has accurate costings, rather than the drivel that he reported to the House. The accurate costings are that it would have cost only an additional $17 million per year to include all people who are family caregivers who are currently not being paid. That is a miniscule amount of money within the total health budget, and if the Minister wants to fix the situation then he should have fixed it.

So the remaining 3,000 or so—2,800—families, for whom the Ministry of Health in its regulatory impact statement has presented this information to Parliament, will be feeling very angry and very let down by the promises that the Minister has made to solve the situation. Not only did the Minister promise to solve it, he then attacked Annette King, and other members of the Labour Government, for not solving it, and he has not done it either. He has not done it. It has just slipped through his fingers. He had the opportunity. He had the court case. He had it resolved during his time as Minister. After taking it to the High Court, and then it going to the Court of Appeal, the Minister did not fix the situation. This bill does not do it.

On page 11 of the regulatory impact statement it says quite clearly that having no targeting and paying all family carers who are providing home and community support services would cost, at mid-point, $65 million per annum, with the range going as high as $75 million. That would ensure that the 5,400 family members of disabled people, who are currently providing that home support, would in fact be paid for it. So there is a smidgen of good in here, and why on earth the Minister did not do his work properly and get the entire package sorted is beyond belief. But he has made it worse than that. Not only has he denied access to payment for so many thousands of family caregivers but he is also, in this legislation, extinguishing their right to take a case to the Human Rights Review Tribunal on the grounds of discrimination. That was the basis on which the other families won this concession. Had the Atkinson family—or any of the other families, actually—taken that action under the criteria that the Minister has laid down, I do not think they would be entitled to payments still. They are getting it only because they have been through the legal process and the Minister has finally agreed to settle.

The Minister has agreed to settle with those families, but under the criteria that he is laying out in this legislation for very high and complex needs disabilities, those families would not be entitled to the payment that they have won through the courts. So why would the Minister disentitle other family members from taking what is their legitimate case? That is the very question that is answered in this report, which is also on the Table, from the Attorney-General, the Hon Chris Finlayson. He takes quite a long time to say it, but it is from the Attorney-General. On page 3 of his report he says, at point 17: “It is important to note that a savings provision … preserves the position of the parties in the Family Carers case and one other case … That litigation may continue or be settled as if the Bill had not been enacted.” So regardless of this legislation, those families would have reached a settlement with the Minister or the Ministry of Health.

Then point 18 says: “New section 70E appears to limit the right to judicial review because it would prevent a person from challenging the lawfulness of a decision on the basis that it was inconsistent with s 19(1) of the Bill of Rights Act.” He goes on to say, in point 19 of his report to the House: “On balance, I have concluded that limitation cannot be justified under s 5 of the Bill of Rights Act.” So why would the Minister want to do that? Why would the Minister want to trumpet the fact that he has finally resolved an issue that has been a public policy debate for over two decades, according to him? Why would he want to resolve that issue by creating another clear—and confirmed by the Attorney-General—discrimination, while at the same time extinguishing the rights of those families who have confirmed this discrimination created by this legislation, and prevent them from taking the matter through any system of human rights to redress? That undermines the whole point of this legislation.

There are further negative aspects to it. There is the fact that the Minister has not determined that a family member should not be paid perhaps at the average rate that other caregivers are being paid at, but only at the minimum wage—so family caregivers’ work is worth less than for somebody who is not from that family. I do not agree with that. If a person is doing the work, then they should be paid at the same rate as anyone else who is doing it.

I do not think that the sector has been involved in the discussions on this final piece of legislation. I agree that if there was a roll-out of this provision for payment of family caregivers, then those with the highest needs would be a priority, and that is correct. But this is not a roll-out. This is the beginning and the end of the situation. This is legislation that is not being brought in incrementally. This is legislation that is being done through all stages of this Parliament under urgency with no consideration at all—not even one day—by a select committee. None of the families involved, none of the caregivers, not Carers New Zealand, and no organisations that are involved in the provision of this support for disabled people are being allowed one word of input into this legislation. It is being passed right through all stages under urgency without any public scrutiny.

I think that is an immoral position for the Minister of Health to take. To have such a significant piece of legislation affecting the rights of so many families of disabled people—to have those rights extinguished without them having an opportunity to have one say—is an outrage. I am beside myself with surprise that the Māori Party, with the Minister for Disability Issues as one of its members, with the Minister of Māori Affairs as one of its members, is supporting this legislation. We know very well that many, many Māori families are particularly impacted by this legislation because many Māori families refuse to have anyone else support their family members because of their cultural priority that they look after their own members. So for the Minister for Disability Issues and the Minister of Māori Affairs to be supporting this legislation beggars belief. It is the price of the baubles of office, I guess, but it is a great surprise to me. I think that the Minister could well rethink the strategy.

It has been a very interesting first and second reading of this New Zealand Public Health and Disability Amendment Bill (No 2), because I have noticed that the Minister of Health has spent a lot of his time scuttling in and out gathering evidence against the previous Government. He has been rummaging through the Ministry of Health’s drawers to try to find anything that he can throw at the Opposition. I would say to the Minister that he might have been better off spending his time providing us with information about this bill before he brought it into this House.

I want the Minister to tell us why the regulatory impact statement was not available until today, and why so much of it has been blacked out. Why have the public of New Zealand and the members of this House, who rely on a regulatory impact statement to have an idea what the bill is, faced page after page after page blanked out, taking away information. Everybody knows that a regulatory impact statement is there to assist the House to have a debate about an issue. The Minister must have approved a regulatory impact statement that took out vital information that we could have used in this House—that his own members could have used. I would like to know why we face that—I cannot remember a regulatory impact statement like that. The regulatory impact statement, for example, on Better Local Government was a real shocker against the Minister of Local Government at the time, Nick Smith, but he did not go through it and cross out the bad bits he did not like. I will give him credit for that. He allowed the information to be put there for us to argue against, for the select committee to look at, but this bill is not even going to a select committee. Why was there no effort made, as was offered last year by members of the Opposition, to work with them on this issue?

As the Minister said when he started off in a very steady way, this is a very complex issue spanning over 20 years. And then, as the debate went on, he had his members’ and his own speeches becoming more narrow and more narrow, throwing a bit of blame around. He has been the Minister for 5 years—5 years the Minister of Health. In 5 years he could have done something, so it is no good holding up pieces of paper saying that Labour did not do anything, because National was the Government 9 years before we became the Government. Did it do anything on this issue? No, it did not. It made no decisions on it, and this Minister has been forced to make decisions that he did not really want to make. He can hide his face behind paper, and he ought to hide his face behind paper, because what you get out of his press statement, I think, is very interesting indeed. What he actually says is that the public of New Zealand expect family members to look after their own family. Well, in the main, they do, but there is one part of our society where we say we need to give particular care, and it is those who are not able to look after themselves.

The bottom line for this Minister has been all about money. When you look at the options, the little bit of the paper that we can read, you see that he did have some choices. I happen to know that the choices that the Ministry of Health is providing to him at the moment on carer policy he does not like at all. He certainly did not like the options that it put up. Why did he not choose one of the options under option 3C, or option 2C, because the difference in money is $17 million a year. You would have gone from 1,600 people with disabilities being supported to 5,400. Would that have been such a huge impost on the Government’s coffers? It certainly is not when it can throw money around for private schools, and it can throw money around to advertise to sell off our State assets at $1 million—$1 million for an advertising campaign. It was about priorities. Why could he not have settled for an option that would have been more expensive, but not greatly so when you look at the entire health budget?

I would also like to ask the Minister what consultation he had with those who are the carers, because we happened to receive this morning information from those who do caring. They say that they had very little involvement at all. They did not engage the carers in the policy design or system. Why not, Minister? In fact, you had one person on the technical advisory group who was allowed to respond only to a series of questions from the ministry. That comes from the carers themselves. It is no good shaking your head, Minister, and denying it. They happen to know what happened to them. They happen to know what consultation they had. He is calling them a liar. I do not believe the carers of New Zealand are liars. That is what happened to them. There was very little opportunity for them to look at this policy at all, and, in fact, I believe it has been so rushed that that is why the regulatory impact statement has not been properly completed. The Minister does not need to rush it. Tell this Committee why, when it will be implemented in October this year, he needs to put it through urgency in this Chamber. Why not try to work across this Chamber and get agreement on it so it could put in place for the future—not something that he decides to do? But it is very much the way this Minister works. He knows everything—he knows everything. He is an authority on everything. He does not need the assistance of the carers of New Zealand. He does not need the assistance of the members of this Committee because he is all knowledgable.

I have to say it is also very disappointing, and maybe he would like to tell us why it is, that when carers are going to be paid they get to be paid the minimum wage. The ministry did not recommend the minimum wage; it recommended around $16. So why has the Minister said that it will be the minimum wage that will be paid? Why are these caregivers to be paid less than other caregivers? Are they less competent? Are they less important? Are the issues they face less troublesome for them? Would the Minister like to respond to why they will be paid the minimum wage? Maybe the Minister would also like to tell the Committee about the operational details of this policy, because the operational details of this policy—Minister, is it correct—will not be ready until September this year? Can the Minister answer that? Will the operational issues not be ready until September this year, because that is what your office said yesterday? They will not be ready until September so we will not even know how it is going to operate. Perhaps the Minister could tell us what he classifies as very high and high needs. Which sort of disability will be included in the high to very high needs? I would like him to explain exactly the sort of person who would have high to very high needs. Would they be people with physical or neurological disability? Would they be people with muscular dystrophy? Whom has he decided will be those with very high needs?

I believe that the people of New Zealand deserve answers to questions like this today. They need to understand that this is the only opportunity for debate on this bill, which is going to affect many people’s lives. Today is it. The next hour or two is the time allowed. That is it. That is all this House has. Instead of spending time rummaging around trying to attack the Opposition, answer some questions about the policy. Put some answers on the table, Minister, instead of just playing your usual game of being a know-all and wanting to play the political game on every issue. He could have worked with the Opposition. He could have worked with all parties. You have heard it from the Greens, you have heard it from New Zealand First, and we had a statement put out last year saying that we would work on this issue. There was not even a phone call. When did we hear about this? Yesterday. When did we get the bill? Yesterday. When did we get the regulatory impact statement? Today. When did we get the Attorney-General’s report on it? Today. That is the level of consultation and information that is being provided to this Parliament. To treat the Parliament with that sort of contempt is just not good enough.

But, let us face it, what else would you expect? What else would you expect from a Government that has become so arrogant that it knows exactly what everyone needs and believes it knows what people who are disabled need? Do not worry about it, Government members know. Well, they do not. They have been asked to address an issue. What does a person who has got two disabled adult children, a 75-year-old man looking after his own children, who are 45 and 43, say? He thought he was going to get a half-decent scheme. What does he say he got? A half-baked one. That is the problem—a half-baked scheme, because the Minister of Health was not prepared to take the time to consult properly with the carers and to work with other parties, but wants to shove it through this House under Budget legislation and urgency.

Tēnā koe. Tēnā koutou e te Whare nui. It is not great to be here—I think we should be at a select committee, I really do. I am very, very disappointed that we are not, because this is a very serious oversight on an issue that, given all these years of angst that have gone on, we should be talking about to the people who are experiencing it. And they are watching—never imagine they are not. We are being watched as we speak.

I had an email just a little while ago from a carer, who said: “I am just appalled that the Government continues its discriminatory and exploitative process against families caring for severely disabled people.” This is what she does: “What part of 168 hours in the week allows for only a maximum of 40 to be funded when you are the parent carer? What do these people think we do? Go out on the tiles? Off duty after 5 p.m. till 8 in the morning? Disappearing every weekend? Should our funding be based on their ivory tower understanding of what happens? How do they get this 18-year-old number? I understand that those under 18 have been allocated funding for care, but why can their parents not be funded as any other carer is? Do two parents at home get paid and only one that’s left because of death or because a partner leaves—can that person get paid if they are a spouse? I am just flabbergasted that spouses and partners continue to be exploited.”

So perhaps the Minister of Health could answer her question: are spouses able to be paid? We would really like to know, because of the situation. “This is outright discrimination.” she says. “Are the Government wanting more legal action? No doubt further legal action could delay things and be their cheaper option.”—which has certainly been a strategy for the last 18 years—“This causes total stress and adds insult to injury with an already very difficult situation. People who care for severely disabled people need all the help that they can get and that they are assessed as needing. These battles are real struggles for the carers, who should be helped, not hindered. It’s not clear if children catering for parents are allowed payment.” That would be another question that she would like answered. “A very disappointing Budget for people with high or very high needs, whom it was supposed to be aimed at. The court action deemed that funding should be for the assessment of allocated funded hours that the Ministry of Health would be prepared to pay to anyone else. Why are they now saying ‘We will pay parents only what we feel like’ but, yes, anyone else can get paid their fully allocated hours? Why is the start date October? Promises for June were made.”

This is really true. After the end of the court case, promises were made that there would be a resolution by June 2013. She says: “No one is holding their breath.” They have been through so many promises and so many dates have been set. After the court case a year ago, it is not that the Government has chosen to take the opportunity to do something wonderful; it has no choice. It would be in breach of law if it did not act.

I also had an email this morning from a very experienced advocate who works for disability groups. He said: “I’m just summarising the policy from what I can read of the regulatory impact statement, and I have to say that it gets worse and worse. But don’t worry, once this is through there will be heaps of sector resistance.” So that is not good news. People have got better things to do than fight the Government when they are dealing with issues of their own family members or themselves needing care for disability. It is really, really disappointing to set up another round of conflict, even though the bill, the New Zealand Public Health and Disability Amendment Bill (No 2), certainly does its best to shut down any options for complaint. But the human spirit is not like that. The human spirit will not be told it does not have rights and will not be told by any Government that it will put up and shut up and have no right to complain. This is a breach of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, which is clear. The people out there who are involved in this issue are not, after virtually 20 years of litigation, going to just give up because the Government says they have to. Let us get real about this. There are going to be more challenges. We have a better path we could follow. We could follow the path of engagement.

So let us have a look at the process, which is why not holding select committee hearings is such a disaster. What has happened up until now has been pretty bad. There was eventually, after the last case was lost and the Government members realised that they would look like fools if there was an appeal—the Government had already spent several million dollars of taxpayers’ money fighting these cases—a decision to have a consultation process. The consultation document was, indeed, a novel of interesting proportions. It had a sort of Tolstoyan, sort of War and Peace—mainly war—aspect to it, because it made it very, very clear that there would be the possibility of taking money away from other parts of the sector if the people who were consulted chose the wrong path. So there was always this implied threat that “Actually, you’d better be careful and not want too much, you people who already have nothing, because if you do, it will be taken off other people in the sector”—a very good message if you want to divide and rule what is already quite a divided and difficult sector. People have very different needs and very different experiences of disability, and they do not need to be divided and ruled by being threatened.

The consultation document actually resulted in a lot of angst and anger from people who did go to the meetings and did want to engage very seriously with the issue. So then there were some options put up around whether Work and Income could manage it. Not surprisingly, the families and people with disabilities said: “Oh, no, we will not become part of the WINZ machine. We will not be treated as beneficiaries. We will not be treated the way beneficiaries are treated. We do not want to. We have enough experience of this. We want to be treated as people doing a job.” And who can blame them? The “WINZ machine”, or Work and Income, as it is actually called, is not a compassionate, liberating, transformative, support machine. Those words have very little to do with what happens on the ground every day in Work and Income. So that is why people wrote that option off. They definitely did not want that option.

The other options were around getting an allowance or being an employee. Both of those have fish-hooks in them and also have possibilities. The Government says it claims to have chosen the employee model, but in reality, when it says that people can be paid less for this if they are carers who are family members rather than being from outside the family, this is clearly not a normal employee situation. It is clearly discriminatory, and that is where there will be more trouble to come. In reality, we have to decide whether we are going to recognise people’s work—and the Human Rights Review Tribunal, the High Court, and the Court of Appeal have all said it is discriminatory not to—and then we have to pay them a fair wage. It is pretty fundamental that people should be paid a fair wage.

So what happened after the consultation? Well, after the consultation round there was a silence—there was a deathly silence—which involved people like me being rung up constantly by other groups saying: “Have you heard anything? What’s going on?”. So, you know, I sent a few questions through to the Minister, and “In due course.” was the reply. But there was no information about where we were going. This is the 21st century, when sophisticated community consultation processes can be facilitated. But that did not happen. I go back to my own father, who always said that “consultation” is a cross between a con and an insult, and I do find that has a certain resonance in this case.

What happened was that the Government then set up a technical working party. There was considerable effort made by some of the families involved in the litigation, as they would have liked to be represented as experts. There is a fundamental issue here, which is that these people are experts, Minister. They have lived and breathed what you and I possibly have not. They know that there is a need to be fair and reasonable around State money because they have lived with minimal State money for a very long time. They are not expecting a banker’s wage, they are not expecting an MP’s wage, they are not expecting a consultant’s wage; they want the basics so they can survive with dignity and so can their family. This bill refuses to deliver that. They should have been included in the technical working party, and they were not. One person from the carers groups was included, and after three meetings there was a shut down. The technical working group was no longer involved. The Ministry of Health went back with the Minister and they started talking about it without involving anyone else.

And this bill is the result. This is the result. It is a paranoid, fiscally cheap option, which could have been so much better if they had kept the door open, if they had kept talking to people and kept engaging. I think it would be fair to say that most of us realise that we cannot just write an unlimited cheque on this issue. We have to recognise the constraints. But those constraints should be defined by the human needs of the people. The people themselves should define those constraints, not the Ministry of Health and the Minister, who have resisted every step of the way and have written into this bill that they basically do not believe that family members should be paid—but if the courts are going to make us do it, oh well, we will find a cheap solution. The bias, the prejudice, and the invisibility towards the knowledge and expertise of people with disabilities and their families is now going to be entrenched.

With that description of what has happened, we now find that the bill will not go to a select committee. So where is the expertise going to come from? Where is the knowledge going to come from for us to make an assessment? We are going to go into the third reading without hearing from the families and without hearing from the people with disabilities, who have many ways of speaking about their experience and would like to speak to us. Our job is to listen to those people about how we can fairly meet their needs. Our job is to hear them, not to set up a short consultation process, threaten them that the Government is going to take the money from another part of the sector, and then lock things down while the Government makes up a solution that is fiscally safe for the Government but that perpetuates discrimination to the point at which the Attorney-General says that it is actually a breach of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act.

So where are we going to go with this? Back to court? Are we asking people who are already stretched, who are already broken? They are not allowed to go back to court in this bill. They have been told really clearly in this bill that they cannot go back to court. There is no court that they are allowed to take their claims to. As for what the Government has done to the Human Rights Commission and to its status, it is very interesting. Presumably, the Government believes in human rights, and in the Human Rights Commission and the Human Rights Review Tribunal. But it has said that the most vulnerable citizens, the most marginalised citizens—who are people with disabilities and their families, with high needs—have no access. It is very bizarre that those with money and those at the highest level of society in terms of material wealth will have access to the courts in the land if they get into trouble, which, strangely, they sometimes do, with other people’s money, but the most vulnerable will not have access to the courts. That is written into the law. I am really ashamed—

💬 Iain Lees-Galloway: Mr Chair—

💬 Hon Maryan Street: Mr Chair—

Shall I toss a coin? I think I will go for seniority. I call the Hon Maryan Street.

That is right—age before beauty again. I rise to join this debate in the Committee stage of this bill, the New Zealand Public Health and Disability Amendment Bill (No 2), because there is a need to do so. I wish that I did not have to, but I do. I want to talk particularly about the regulatory impact statement, which a number of colleagues have traversed already. I want to talk about it from a slightly different point of view, and I want to talk also about the report of the Attorney-General.

In the course of drafting legislation, regulatory impact statements are made. The advice that has gone to Ministers is put out and the justification for the choice that the Minister has made is displayed—or that is normally the case. That is normally the case. So we have here in this regulatory impact statement the comparisons between the options that were available to the Minister of Health, on advice from officials. There were nine options. There was a matrix of three different options, with three possibilities within each of those.

The option that the Minister has chosen is the medium targeting one, which would pay family carers in high and very high need situations. He has chosen the third of the options in that stream, which we are advised would cost between $17 million and $30 million—$17 million and $30 million. Another option that he could have chosen was option C, which is that of no targeting and paying everybody—all family carers—who provides ministry-contracted home support services. The third option in that stream would have cost a maximum of $46 million. So we have a difference of $16 million between the two better options.

That $16 million could have taken the scope of people being covered from 1,600 disabled persons whose families would be paid to support them to 5,400—everybody. And yet the Minister has chosen to take the lesser of those options, for the sake of $16 million. That $16 million dollars is fairly comparable to the amount of money the Government took out of adult and community education some years ago, which did enormous damage to a whole network of adult education learning opportunities across the country. The Government has cut a third of the environment portfolio appropriations—34 percent out of that portfolio. It is giving $80 million as a subsidy to farmers for irrigation, and yet it cannot find $16 million to do the best option for the most people—the best option for the most people.

So looking at this regulatory impact statement, I think to myself that if I were a Minister—and I was, briefly—and I look at this through a Minister’s eyes, I would want to go through these recommended options and say “OK. Where are the risks? What are the risks in here around these options, and why would I not go for the best option for the greatest number of people?”. I would look for advice from officials about the significant risks. I go through the paper and I come to the bit that says “significant legal risks”. “Significant legal issues and risks arising from the preferred response” is the heading here—significant legal issues and risks arising from the preferred response.

Ministers must always be mindful of the risks. They must always be able to defend why they have taken a particular policy option and what the upsides and downsides of that policy option are. And so I go straight to that section, like a homing pigeon, having been a Minister, and ask what the risks are here. And what do we find? Here is the heading. Here is the answer: it is all blacked out. So I go over the page because I want to know some more about the legal risks. And here is the page—everything is blacked out. Here we go.

How am I, as a responsible member of Parliament, meant to know, and on what basis has the Minister made a responsible decision, if this blacked-out paper is what we get in the way of consideration of significant legal issues and risks pertaining to the best option? This is not good enough. The Minister can sit there knowing that he has to just endure this period of time in the House. He has to just get through it. And if he sits there quietly and if none of the National members get up to defend the bill, he knows that the time will pass—because all of this is time limited—and he will get his way in the end. So he will sit here and think: “I hope everybody who has an interest in this is at work or not watching Parliament on TV, because otherwise I might have to get up and answer some questions.” But the truth of the matter is that this blacking out of the paper is not good enough, and it is no basis on which this Parliament ought to be assessing the proper risks and legal issues around this.

Let me touch further on the legal issues. The Attorney-General has written a report and points out the fact that clause 4 of this bill inserts a new section 70E into the principal Act that prevents a person from making a complaint to the Human Rights Commission or commencing proceedings at the Human Rights Review Tribunal. It prevents the Human Rights Commission also from taking any further action in relation to a complaint made after 16 May. What is the date on the wall today? Because we are in urgency—most of the rest of the world thinks it is 17 May—in this place it is 16 May. This is the first occasion when people have been advised that if they did not get a complaint in before today, they were not going to be able to go to the Human Rights Commission.

At the end of this report from the Attorney-General, he says that the new section 70E “appears to limit the right to judicial review because it would prevent a person from challenging the lawfulness of a decision on the basis that it was inconsistent with s 19(1) of the Bill of Rights Act.” “On balance,” he says, “I have concluded that limitation cannot be justified under s 5 of the Bill of Rights Act.” It cannot be justified.

Why do we not have the Minister getting up and saying “I understand what the Attorney-General has said, but I reckon on these grounds, Parliament should take that into consideration but proceed in this way.” We are getting no response from the Minister because he just wants to sit here and wait for the time to elapse, for this to get out of his hair, and for us to all sit down, but it does require some response. Not only is the blanking out of sections of the regulatory impact statement not good enough but the Government is not responding and not saying to this House why it should not take into account the point that the Attorney-General has made, which is that it is an infringement of human rights in New Zealand if we proceed with this legislation the way it is. Why do we not hear from the Minister, justifying why we should proceed with this legislation?

Labour would like to vote for this. We would like to support it, because we believe that people do deserve to be paid for caring for disabled family members. This is, otherwise, health care on the cheap, and that, I have to say, is a feature of this Government also. It wants conservation on the cheap by devolving it to volunteer groups. It wants housing on the cheap by devolving it to the third sector. It wanted and enjoyed health care on the cheap by limiting the amount that it pays family members and then making people pay for it, as my colleague says.

This bill is not good enough. It should have gone to a select committee. There is no need for it to be passed in urgency. It raises too many points that need to be thoroughly debated and submitted on by the public of New Zealand. This is not good enough. It is the way this Minister works—simply to wield power and push his will through—but it is not good enough.

It is a pleasure to follow the Hon Maryan Street. Age is a matter of fact, and there is not much I can do about that, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder—that is just the way it goes. Mr Chairperson, you have deemed that this debate on clause 1 of the New Zealand Public Health and Disability Amendment Bill (No 2) ought to be a wide-ranging debate, given the fact that this bill has not been to a select committee and that submitters have not had the opportunity to have their say. It is our duty, as members of Parliament, to do our best to represent the interests of those submitters.

However, clause 1 is, of course, the title clause, and it is customary for the Opposition to suggest some amendments and possible alternatives to the title of a bill. The title of this bill actually does not tell us very much. Folks up in the gallery might have been told that we are debating the New Zealand Public Health and Disability Amendment Bill (No 2), and I bet they thought: “That tells me absolutely nothing. I’ve got no idea what that bill will be about.” So I have got a few suggestions for the Government. My first suggestion is the “Pulling the Wool Over the Eyes of People with Disabilities Bill”, because that is essentially what it does. The Government was full of promises. It was going to fix the problem. Carers who were looking after family members who had a disability were now going to be able to be paid. That is what the Government said. That is what it told people in the disability sector that it was going to do, and people out there believed it, unfortunately.

It is rather unfortunate that they chose to believe the Government, because it is not the most trustworthy Government we have ever seen, but people out there believed Tony Ryall when he said that the Government was going to comprehensively deal with the issues raised in that court case that was settled a year ago. In fact, of course, as we know, that is not the case at all. That is absolutely not the case at all. The Government had three options—well, actually, it had nine options, when, as Maryan Street said, you put the matrix together of the options of targeting and how the employment relationship will actually work. The Government chose the one that kind of just about does enough to appease people—just about does enough to maybe try to pull the wool over people’s eyes—but certainly does not go the whole way. It certainly does not answer the whole problem. So I would call this bill the “Pulling the Wool Over the Eyes of People with Disabilities Bill”.

Another name for it is the “Doing Half the Job and Taking Away People’s Rights Bill”, because, as I said, it does about half the job—actually, I think that saying it is doing half the job is kind of generous. It does not really quite get to doing half the job. It does maybe about a third of the job, because this will, in fact, affect about 1,600 people with disabilities, not the 5,400 people whom it should cover. If the job was being done properly, it would cover all those people. It is doing not even half the job, but let us call it the “Doing Half the Job and Then Taking Away People’s Rights Bill”.

I think that second part is possibly one of the most abysmal parts of this bill, because even the Attorney-General, Chris Finlayson, says that this bill is not up to scratch. He points out in his report that new section 70E, inserted by clause 4, “prevents the Human Rights Commission from taking any further action in relation to a complaint made after the 16 May 2013.” If members look up on the wall, it says that it is 16 May. That is one of those weird things about Parliament; it is actually 17 May. But that means that anybody who lays a complaint from yesterday onwards—well, they just do not have the right or the ability to lay a complaint. However, of course, any complaints made before 16 May can be proceeded. That creates an inequity. That is a discrimination, and it is a discrimination that the Attorney-General says is not acceptable. He says that new section 70E “appears to limit the right to judicial review because it would prevent a person from challenging the lawfulness of a decision on the basis that it was inconsistent with s 19(1) of the Bill of Rights Act.” And there you have it right there. It contravenes the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, and, therefore, this legislation is wrong. It is discriminatory. As Catherine Delahunty said, it is deeply ironic that a bill that the Minister of Health promoted to people as being something that would remove discrimination actually creates a new form of discrimination. So I would call this bill the “Doing Half the Job and Taking Away People’s Rights Bill”.

I think the Minister would probably want to title it the “Gosh, I Hope No One Looks At This Too Closely Bill”, because when you get down to it, you realise what it actually does, and that is probably why the Minister did not want it to go to a select committee. [Bell rung] I was talking about why you would want to call this bill the “Gosh, I Hope No One Looks At This Too Closely Bill”. The Minister did not want this to go to a select committee because he did not want people who are directly affected by this bill to get a chance to give it the proper scrutiny that it deserves. But we have already started hearing back from the sector. People are looking at this bill because they want to know what the impact will be on them, and people are telling us that initially—initially—they thought the Minister was getting the job done, just as the Minister wanted to happen. He wanted the politics to work out on this, but then when they looked at it, when they peeled the layers away from the onion, and when they looked at it a bit more closely, they realised what was wrong with this bill. They are outraged that this bill says that family members who care for people with disabilities will be paid less—

I am sorry to interrupt the honourable member. The time has come for the meal break.

Sitting suspended from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m.

💬 IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY: In the 4 minutes and 7 or so seconds that I have remaining I would like to turn members’ attention to the amendment in the name of Ruth Dyson that refers to clause 1. It would amend clause 1 with the following: “This Act is the New Zealand Public Health and Disability (Lower Pay and Removal of Human Rights) Amendment Act 2013.”, which is, to be fair, a much more accurate reflection of what this bill actually does.

Although we have talked about how, you know, it seemed like a really good idea, and it seemed like the Government was responding appropriately to the needs of families of people with disabilities, what we have actually found out, of course, is that the legislation does three things, two of which are referred to in this amendment. The first thing, which is not referred to in this amendment, is the fact that it severely limits exactly who is eligible for these payments, and that is certainly not what the families were expecting.

The second thing it does is it actually tells those carers that they are going to be stuck on the minimum wage. That is what they are going to be paid: $13.75 an hour. If someone was doing this as a job and taking care of someone who was not a family member, let us be honest, the rates are not that flash—it is not exactly the highest-paid job in the world—but they are significantly better than this. The response we have had from the people who will be affected by this bill is that it is just such a miserly approach. If the Government could have found just $1 or $2 more an hour, then that might have made it just a little bit easier to swallow for the families of people with disabilities who are looking after those people.

So what we have got here is a lower rate of pay than what people could expect to get if they were working in the disabilities sector and if they were caring for someone who was not a member of their family. That is the only difference. There is no difference in the nature of the work. There is no difference in the difficulty of the work. If anything, it is probably more demanding, because they are taking care of these people 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It is not something that you would go and spend 8 hours a day at work doing, and then go home and leave it all behind until the next shift. It is not like that, at all. In fact, these people, in many ways, are even more committed than the incredibly dedicated people who are out there working in the disabilities sector. What does the Government say? It says that their contribution is not the same—is not as good—as the contribution of those people who are carers for a living.

The second aspect, of course, is that it is a removal of human rights, because what it says to people is that if you have got a complaint or if you have got a concern and you were thinking about taking this issue to the Human Rights Commission, that right has gone. So you are OK if you did it yesterday, the day before yesterday, or any day before then, but from today onwards it is all over. It is all over, and that, frankly, is nothing more than simple discrimination—absolutely unjustifiable discrimination—and even Chris Finlayson, the Attorney-General, said that. He said that it is absolutely unjustified to have that discrimination in this law.

So I certainly support the amendment to clause 1 proposed by Ruth Dyson. We need to make sure that our legislation is appropriately titled and that people can get a full understanding of what is actually being done, right from the beginning. If this bill had the title suggested in this amendment, then people would be able to far more easily see through the spin—not that they are not. Minister Ryall, I am afraid that all the efforts are not going to work, because people are seeing through this, and people know—

I move, That the question be now put.

Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak in the Committee stage of the New Zealand Public Health and Disability Amendment Bill (No 2). I understand that because we are going right through all stages of this bill and there is going to be no select committee process—which is something that we on this side of the Chamber think is unfortunate—the debate around these clauses is going to be wide-ranging. I did want to start around the amendment from the Hon Ruth Dyson that my colleague Iain Lees-Galloway has spoken about, which would replace the title as it currently stands. It would have the legislation entitled “New Zealand Public Health and Disability (Lower Pay and Removal of Human Rights) Amendment Act 2013”. Iain Lees-Galloway did a brilliant job of talking through some of the semantics of the new wording that the Hon Ruth Dyson has put through.

One of the major concerns that I have about what is contained in this bill, and it is in the subsequent change in the title from the Hon Ruth Dyson, is that there is an ability to not only pay those family members who are caring for those of their loved ones who have disabilities the minimum wage but to pay, potentially, even lower rates than that, which is concerning. I understand that that is in clause 4 of the bill that has been put before us, and I think that is why the Hon Ruth Dyson has put forward an alternative title to this bill that more accurately reflects what is contained in terms of the conditions of this bill.

The second half of her amendment to the title of this bill is around the removal of the ability of those families who think they are getting a rough deal to have a right of appeal on human rights grounds. As Iain Lees-Galloway said in his speech, we are talking about family members of people who have disabilities, and some of them have given up their lives to make sure that their family members are properly cared for. The best that this Government can do is to offer them the minimum wage and to take away their right to complain or put forward an appeal if they feel that they are not getting the same deal that someone who is doing a similar amount of work—or the families feel they may be doing an even a greater amount of work—is getting paid to look after those people with disabilities.

I think this is an unfortunate trend that has come forward from this Government, because in other pieces of legislation there has also certainly been a trend for this Government towards same work, less pay—same work, less pay. That has definitely been the case for the youth rates that the Government has brought in. It has certainly been the case for our younger people. You have to question the amount of compassion of members on the other side of the Chamber when you have got family members who are looking after their loved ones with disabilities, and the Government will not compensate them at the same level as other people, staff who are working for other organisations, are paid. It will not pay them the same amount of money as those other people, even though there is a family connection, and you do have to question the level of compassion.

As I said, this is clause 1, the title clause. Iain Lees-Galloway has talked about some of the alternative titles for this bill. I think that another title for this bill could be “The Government Again Wriggling Out of Its Responsibilities Bill”, because this is another way that this Government has tried to look like it is taking action on something, but it is doing the complete opposite. It is washing its hands of its responsibility—its fair responsibility—towards those who are looking after their family members with disabilities in their own homes. We saw in a previous bill that the Government has tried to wash its hands of the responsibility of Housing New Zealand tenants. The Government plans to kick 3,000 Housing New Zealand tenants out of their houses. We see that again with this bill, because the Government is trying not only to wriggle out of its responsibility to pay those people who are looking after their family members with disabilities but also to take away their right to appeal that decision by the Government.

This House still says that today is 16 May, but as of yesterday those people who think they are not getting a fair go under this legislation are not going to have the ability to go and appeal against the conditions that this bill will put them under. There was no select committee process for this bill, so another alternative title we could have for this bill is the “New Zealand Public Health and Disability (Lower Pay and Removal of Human Rights and Zero Scrutiny From the Public) Amendment”—

I move, That the question be now put.