Vulnerable Children Bill

I am very pleased to stand in support of the second reading of the Vulnerable Children Bill, a bill that would be one of the most important ones that we have considered in this House of Parliament in this term of Parliament. I want to congratulate the Minister for Social Development, the Hon Paula Bennett, on the extensive work that she has done up and down this country to hear the concerns and the cries of people in our communities regarding the needs of children. As a nation, we cannot think of anything more heartbreaking than to see a child who suffers abuse and who has their future marred, and so this legislation is incredibly important. Before I entered Parliament I worked in communities up and down this country, but particularly in west Auckland, where the Minister comes from. I know that in that community there are very many caring people but also people there who ought to know better and who must act better. This bill, which is very extensive, is going to bring a change to the face of New Zealand communities and I commend it to the House.

This is a split call.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak on the second reading of this bill, the Vulnerable Children Bill. This is a bill that had its origins within the Green Paper for Vulnerable Children all those years ago, which is a piece of work that I am very familiar with. At the same time as the green paper, which became the White Paper on Vulnerable Children, there were other pieces of work in play—the inquiry into the determinants of well-being for Māori Children, the Family Court review, and, of course, the review by Professor Boston on child poverty with the expert advisory group. So this bill has its genesis in a significant body of work delivered by significant experts in the field. I have to say that although the bill does go some way to addressing the issues that were raised by all those experts over all those years of work, sadly, it does not go far enough.

I also want to comment on a discussion that one of the Government members had prior to the dinner break today, when he commented on one of the other members of the House’s comments on those people who are impacted by the safety aspects of the bill. The Government member was misinformed, and misinformed the House, when he said that what the Green member had said was that those who perpetrated acts of violence were people of ethnic origin, when that was in fact not the case. What the Green Party member was trying to say to the Government member was that those most impacted by violence and abuse unfortunately tend to be Māori and Pasifika children and Māori and Pasifika women. I found it extraordinary that someone who sat on the Social Services Committee and who heard the submissions from the sexual violence sector could get it so very wrong. It does speak to the heart of what happens within a Government bill if people who are on the select committee do not actually understand the very basics of the bill and whom the bill is trying to protect.

The bill talks about vulnerability, and we offer this label to about 30,000 children whom we call at risk, when we freely admit in this House that there are over 285,000 children living in poverty. I would suggest that 285,000 children living in poverty are potentially at risk; however, they are not, by that definition, covered under this bill. So it does not go significantly far enough to protect those children.

One of my learned colleagues said earlier in the second reading of this bill that what we should be looking at is setting some standards for our children for their care and protection, and that we should be setting some outcomes for those children. When children are not meeting those outcomes we could look at targeted services for those children. I think that is a much fairer approach. It is actually an approach that speaks to our desire for all of our children to have an element of care and protection in their lives. When we look at those potential outcomes that would protect our children, the first one, of course, has to be tackling the issue of child poverty. Child poverty is freely accepted by both sides of this House—conservatively—to be impacting 285,000 children. Yet we defy the experts by refusing to measure child poverty. We are therefore not dealing with the specific issues that hold these children in this state.

One of the other outcomes we should be looking at is housing: the affordability of housing, appropriate warm and dry housing, housing that families can occupy, and housing that permits them to put down roots within a community. One of the symptoms of vulnerability is the transience of our families, whereby children move to different schools and communities, and the support services and agencies are no longer able to track them to continue to provide care for them. So when we are talking about care and protection, we should be looking at housing.

Finally, I want to talk about one of the other aspects of this bill, when it talks about safety checks in the workforce. It has already been covered by a couple of members in this House, but I also want to reiterate some of the comments of my colleague Sue Moroney, who said that harm to children does not necessarily come within the paid workforce. There are many examples where children are harmed in sports arenas or by other activities that occur in the community and where we do not pay that much attention to children’s care and protection. Thank you.

It is with real sadness that the Green Party is opposing the Vulnerable Children Bill. The Green Party and our MPs are absolutely passionate about making New Zealand a great place for our children to grow up in. We want to address the causes of vulnerability and address the well-being of our children. That is why we put child poverty on the political agenda last term. Because we know that poverty is created and can be eliminated by Government policy, we continue to call for action at every chance we get.

We are very sad that all of the Government’s policy work, from the green paper, to the White Paper for Vulnerable Children, to this bill, fails to acknowledge the fact that some families, right now, are being forced to neglect their children’s needs because they do not have the income to provide for them. This Government’s policies have resulted in parents of children with, say, skin infections buying medication and not food because they are too scared that the Government-funded agencies that are supposedly there supporting them would report them to Child, Youth and Family if they did not make that choice. To allow that situation to continue while bringing to the House this bill, which supposedly puts vulnerable children first, is not right. We want a Government response that will make a difference and do what is needed.

I think, though, that I, at least, could still have voted for this bill if it was a matter of just not doing enough, but for me, at least, the clincher against supporting it is my concern that it will actually do harm to some of our children. I have mentioned before in this House New Zealand’s high rates of domestic violence. The police are called out to an incident of domestic violence in this country at least once every 7 minutes, and they estimate that that is only about 20 percent of the cases experienced in this country. This is a massive problem, and one that we do not have a handle on. We may have done a big social marketing campaign, but still the police response, the court systems, the capacity of our support agencies, and Child, Youth and Family policies are a very long way from being sorted. Yet this bill does nothing to address those problems—the most significant cause of risk to our children.

Domestic violence always harms children, and in 40 percent to 60 percent of homes where a parent is being abused, the children will be maltreated. The reverse is also true: in 40 percent to 60 percent of child maltreatment cases, domestic violence will be present. Remember how many families this applies to in New Zealand, remember the fact that our systems are failing to adequately respond to this violence, and then remember that this bill does nothing to address that. It does not even acknowledge domestic violence. The white paper basically censored domestic violence out of the picture. It is a ridiculous response, when you consider that.

According to leading US child psychologist Dr Robert Geffner, a practitioner and expert on child well-being in cases of domestic violence, the first thing we need to do when there is an accusation or concern about child abuse or domestic violence is to properly—according to best practice—assess risk. This does not happen in New Zealand. Then, if there is evidence of risk, the abuser, who is most often the father, needs to be separated from the children until he has successfully changed his behaviours, attitudes, and beliefs. This does not happen in New Zealand, and these courses are hard to access. The children should be put into the protective care of the mother or the protective parent, who should be given support and counselling. This does not happen in New Zealand. Children should be getting the support and counselling they need, automatically. This does not happen in New Zealand.

This bill does not address these problems. It does not address the vulnerability and needs of our children, and this House can do better.

Honestly, I do not know where the member Jan Logie was during the Social Services Committee process and during the hearings, and whether or not that member has actually taken time to look at what the Vulnerable Children Bill does. Although the Green Party members tend to stand on the moral high ground, preach on, wax lyrical, and wring their hands year upon year, the reality is that while they are doing that, New Zealand children are being beaten and abused. And I will not hold back on our friends over there in the Labour Party either, because they stand there wringing their hands also, talking about the fact that having jobs makes all the difference for children who are living in a vulnerable situation and “poverty”. Well, why is it that they will vote against every initiative and every bill that this Government puts forward to grow the economy?

The reality, and the answer to that question, is that that is a party that wants to see the Government programme fail. Its members do not want to see the economy grow, and by default that means they are quite happy to throw those children under the bus. If they were genuinely concerned about vulnerable children, they would be concerned about the incomes we are trying to grow. They would be concerned about the economy and how we are trying to support those families. So it is entirely disingenuous for them to stand here and say “Oh, look, we support this bill but, in actual fact, we will comment on everything we have against it. But we’ll vote for it, because that’s probably something that the public would expect of us.” At least, I guess, they are voting for it.

The reality is that one of the things this bill will do is provide a far greater intervention model, with a cross-sector approach where accountabilities and leadership have been missing for so long. Much has been traversed in terms of this bill, but I say to the members across the House that if they are genuine about supporting vulnerable children in New Zealand, they will be genuine about supporting the incomes we are trying to help grow.

The question was put that the amendments recommended by the Social Services Committee by majority be agreed to.