Vulnerable Children Bill

It is my pleasure to resume the debate on the Vulnerable Children Bill. When the Committee rose last night we had moved on to, I understand, Part 3 of the bill. We have skipped from Part 1 to Part 3. I think it is important to at least acknowledge why that is. Part 2, which was the substantial part of the bill, consisted of the child harm prevention orders. Just to recap, I have a little bit of a visual aid here. You can see that this middle section of the bill was quite substantial. This was all the child harm prevention orders. That part of the bill was quite a significant step in our criminal justice system in the sense that it allowed for an order to be made for an individual to not work, for instance, or to not be in contact with children for up to 10 years without any conviction or sentencing having occurred. It was an order on balance of probabilities that could be ordered as set down by a court. It was a significant step to be able to do that without there first being any conviction for that individual.

The Minister for Social Development decided whilst this bill was still before the Social Services Committee to remove that element of the bill. There was not a lot of explanation given. The Minister explained that one of the reasons why she had removed that provision—which we, ultimately, agree with—was a small reference to the fact that the Government was looking at a sex offender registry. If there are any other issues that the Minister would like to give as an explanation for the removal of that from the bill, I would really appreciate the Minister using the Committee stage to do that, because there was very little explanation about the removal of those provisions, even though, as I have said, we were very sceptical. We said that we would support the bill going to the select committee in order to allow that bit to be debated, but we remained sceptical even after the select committee process. We are not disagreeing with the decision; we would just like a little more context from the Minister given that it was such a significant part of her bill.

As I highlighted last night, we do support this bill, Part 3 in particular. This is an omnibus bill and it has a range of measures that are all a part of the Children’s Action Plan. I want to traverse in particular three parts of Part 3 that are particularly notable. Some I will leave because there are many bits and pieces in this bill.

The first is a provision around subsequent children. Currently, within Child, Youth and Family, if there are care and protection issues within a family, and if multiple children are removed from a family, and if a subsequent child is born into that family, the onus is still, ultimately, on Child, Youth and Family to demonstrate that there are concerns for the safety of that child in order for that child to be removed. The bill, essentially, removes that onus, and instead the onus is on the biological parents to demonstrate that they have the ability, and have made the changes necessary, to care for that child. I think that reversing the burden of proof is probably the right way to go. We have seen a substantial number of cases where subsequent children have been subjected to the same care and protection issues that their siblings have, but they almost go through a trial period themselves before any action is taken. It is a very sad state of affairs to have to put in that provision, but it is a necessary one.

We do need to make sure that there are adequate protections in place, because, again, it is an incredibly significant thing for the State to remove a child. So we want to make sure that we have got the oversight over Child, Youth and Family that is required to ensure that robust decisions are made, particularly when we have had issues with social worker practice and whether there is enough supervision for our social workers. They are under significant stress and there is high turnover.

One of the things that we have argued for, for instance, is having a separate complaints body for Child, Youth and Family in the same way that the police currently have the Independent Police Conduct Authority. That would give people faith in the system. They would know that if a decision is made that they ultimately believe is wrong, there is a separate organisation they can go to in order to have it investigated adequately. When we are making changes as significant as this, I think that adding in some of those processes to ensure that people have that extra level of comfort is very important indeed, and we continue to advocate that that happen for Child, Youth and Family, as we have done in the past.

I want to come now to the special guardians provisions. I think it is important to look at these provisions in context. The Minister, some years ago now, recognised that there was a desire amongst foster carers for greater certainty in their relationships with the children they were looking after. I would think that that would have been a useful time to review our adoption laws, which are antiquated and not used because of the fact that they are not fit for purpose. But instead, a decision was made to explore the notion of Home for Life, and I think it had good motives—I absolutely do. It ultimately allowed greater certainty for those foster families. But unfortunately, at the time foster carers moved into Home for Life situations, it did remove a lot of the extra support for those families. I do not mean just monetary support; for most families, that is not the concern they have. It is the support when there are behavioural issues. It is the support particularly when parents end up going through the court system, as many do on an ongoing basis, to battle for the right to act as the primary caregiver for that child and to make decisions for the benefit of that child.

My concern is that when Home for Life was set up, this was actually the time when we probably needed the special guardians provision, so that we could meet people’s expectation that if they are part of a Home for Life, they are the primary caregiver and they get to make decisions, and they will not be constantly hauled through the courts by biological parents who have ultimately proven that they no longer show the level of the responsibility required to be able to make all the decisions in that child’s life any more.

My concern in terms of special guardianship orders—which are meant to give greater weight to a caregiver over a set of biological parents who have basically proven they are not fit to parent—is that one still has to go through quite a rigorous process to get to that place. The order, of course, must be made through the court, but if you look at the provisions, for instance, around the point at which the court makes the orders, it states that the court may give a special guardianship order only if the court is satisfied that, under section 110(2)(b), in clause 117, “the person has exercised all available mechanisms available under the Care of Children Act 2004 to resolve disputes with any parent or other guardian of the child or young person …”. It also states specifically in relation to the child that they must show, as section 1104(a) states, that “the child’s or young person’s welfare is being threatened or seriously disturbed as a result” of an ongoing dispute, perhaps between the caregiver and the biological parents. So the threshold is very, very high.

We need to keep in mind that some of these foster carers often have to battle biological parents who might, for instance, have a drug and alcohol issue, and they have done something serious enough to have their children removed. They are going through the courts over issues such as extra visitation rights, whether the caregivers need to move for work, or taking the children on holiday, and I have even heard parents raise issues with the caregivers just taking the children in their care to church. All of this can trigger having to go through the court to battle a parent who, again, as I have said, ultimately has had their children removed from them.

So, yes, there is definitely a need for these provisions in this bill. My question is whether we are going to lose too many solid, long-term foster carers on the way to getting to that point because of the threshold. I have certainly a number of cases—as the Minister will have—where foster caregivers have simply been exhausted by the system and felt unsupported in the process of simply trying to provide a stable home for the children in their care. What that would probably mean is that we would have to lower the thresholds for these provisions, or, simply, maybe it is time that we looked overall at the balance of rights between parents who have had their children removed and their caregivers, particularly the long-term caregivers.

That is a big call to make. But if we are trying to build a system that is ultimately focused on the needs of the child and the welfare of the child, then perhaps that warrants a review on that balance of rights, keeping in mind, of course, that we know that we constantly battle the long-term effects of children who are removed from their families and are constantly trying to strike a balance between those very, very difficult issues. But those are the statements on that particular provision that I wanted to make, and I will come back to further points later.

Bula vinaka, Mr Chairman. I want to talk about Part 3 of the Vulnerable Children Bill and share with the Committee a number of concerns I have, and work my way through to talking about Supplementary Order Paper 437, which is in my name. I accept that this part of the bill is a sincere attempt to alter the practice around vulnerable children, so, as such, it is to be taken seriously, and, as my colleague Jacinda Ardern said, Labour supports this bill and we support explicitly the kinds of provisions that this section is about. I want to go through those and end by saying that there is a critical element missing. Let me say that for me, as a professional social worker and a practitioner in this field for a long time, this is probably the most serious amendment that I would seek. It is one that the profession has required for a long time but one that successive parliaments and successive Ministers have not been able to address, and I am suggesting that the time has come to address that.

This is the part of the bill that suggests some very, very serious changes. Clause 102 talks about taking a holistic approach. These are words that we hear very often both in the social work field and in others as well, but when applied to social work and social work practice these words carry a particular meaning. Clause 102 takes the real sense of holistic. It is really saying that the approach taken in decisions affecting children has to be holistic. That means that all of the factors that impact on a vulnerable child must be taken into account. To do that requires access to a whole lot of knowledge, and that is often missing in the thinking, practice, and behaviour of many who use terms like “holistic approach”. A whole library is written about the holistic approach in social work practice. Very little of that translates into those who tell us that they are practising using a holistic approach, because it simply does not happen.

These are critical tests about what holistic is, what its components are, and how theoretical ideas, research ideas, and research findings dovetail with the ability to do the work, the ability to use your skills to get the point at which you are able to assess or analyse the particular situation for a vulnerable child. That is a particular one. So in order for that clause to be satisfied requires a particular kind of practitioner—one whom currently we have no guarantee is regularly available not just in the State sector but in the voluntary sector as well.

There is another clause, clause 104, that actually requires that when a person who has been found guilty of abusing children has subsequent children, they have to be carefully assessed “to the satisfaction of a social worker”. The amended legislation is silent on what kind of social worker that is, so it could be anybody. I think this Parliament ought to seek guarantees that the social worker, who is to be satisfied that a parent who has a subsequent child will be disabled from having that child, must be a person who demonstrates his or her skills, awareness, knowledge, and attributes to the satisfaction of some external authority. But there is nothing in this particular bill, or in the current policy surrounding social work in New Zealand, that will actually give us that guarantee. The assessment of parents of subsequent children is a very serious holistic assessment, and the person or the group of people doing that must be able to demonstrate a particular set of attributes.

As to clause 110, I say to the Minister for Social Development that, in the end, I would like her to respond to my Supplementary Order Paper and the change it recommends, because if there are strong reasons as to why the Minister is not going down that track, then I think this Committee ought to be given that explanation. The family group conferences are also being redeveloped by clause 110. To develop plans, and plans that will list the kinds of changes an individual or a family would have to go through to satisfy, in respect of the vulnerability of another child, is no longer an issue. In order to do that, the practice, more often than not, is to bring a group of people together who then, out of their own experiences, suggest the kinds of changes that a family would be required to go through, and often that is not even vetted by those who have expertise through training and the professionalism to do this. Yet, to meet this particular requirement the Minister requires very skilled interventions, and we are not guaranteed that.

The same applies to courts requiring a report from a social worker before making certain orders of the type that Jacinda Ardern was talking about earlier. What kind of social worker, what kind of report, and what are the attributes of that social worker? What my Supplementary Order Paper says is that social workers will, within a 5-year period, be required to be registered. Five years is enough time; in fact, it is too long. The Social Workers Registration Board and the training institutions tell me that to get social workers professionally trained and registered can be done in a far shorter time. This Supplementary Order Paper says we should start that process. I ask the Minister to be bold and accept that, because it is simply saying that in 5 years’ time this will happen and the process can start. We do have the training institutions. There are not many but they are very variable. What they produce is very variable: some good, some bad, some indifferent. There are many others that are not.

If we look at the figures within Child, Youth and Family, of the 1,337 total staff, 856 are registered, and of those, 228 are supervisors, so that means there is still a significant number of front-line social workers who are untrained, and here is a risk. To satisfy the provisions of Part 3, this bill requires well-trained social workers who are held to a particular standard. The registration holds them to that standard, and we can improve on that as well. This Supplementary Order Paper does that and I really urge the Minister to think about that and to accept it, and I hope that her party will support this. I know that this Supplementary Order Paper has been to Cabinet and been put aside. The White Paper for Vulnerable Children, the vulnerable children programme, was supposed to be addressing all of this but it is not. The kinds of requirements that are contained in Part 3 are serious and they require a much higher level of skill than those currently guaranteed across the board.

If there are reasons as to why it is not the time to require social workers to be registered, I ask the Minister to explain what those reasons are. The Supplementary Order Paper was designed with some thought. These are comments that I have made elsewhere. These are comments that others have made. These are requirements the profession has, and I think that Parliament should now move on that with some urgency. The time frame is there. Five years is plenty of time to develop our courses, to take our social workers through to the level of this provision. I think that even those within Child, Youth and Family who are currently untrained and not registered but doing very, very serious work will get to meet the standards far more quickly. In the past, Child, Youth and Family has fought against these kinds of standards and it will not get itself there. It has to be this Parliament that requires it to get to that point. If that happens, then I think there is a good chance that the higher requirement of Part 3 of this bill, the interests of vulnerable children, might be satisfied.

I really would like to hear the Minister on these particular concerns that I have raised, and on this particular Supplementary Order Paper, and on the reasons for not supporting these kinds of provisions, which I trust—

Meitaki, Mr Chairman. I was hoping to speak on Part 1 of the Vulnerable Children Bill last night, but the opportunity did not happen, so thank you for the opportunity to speak on Part 3.

I want to talk about how excited we were in the community family violence sector to be given the chance to make submissions on the Green Paper for Vulnerable Children—the process that kick-started the development of this bill. The organisation that I was with at the time worked really hard, in partnership with many agencies in the community, to ensure that we had as many people as possible who had the opportunity to present their ideas on the paper. We even co-hosted the Minister for Social Development on one of her roadshows, and I recall thanking the Minister at the time for providing us with the opportunity to work on what I thought was going to be the most important children’s legislation for many years.

It does seem, at this point, to be a bit of a wasted opportunity. There were over 8,000 submissions made, and all of the ones that I read clearly stated that it was impossible to make a worthwhile submission without a working definition of vulnerability, rather than targeting universality of services, which was with the preferred option, and that we should define and measure the outcomes we wanted for our children. The sector was clear. We should set out our bottom lines for children: warm, dry housing, access to medical care, food to eat, decent education, and being safe. You can say that that is what we want for all of our kids. But when you make a statement about what you want for your kids, you need to be brave enough to measure your work against it. You need to be brave and ambitious for our kids.

Specifically, in Part 3 there are a couple of parts I want to talk about: family group conferences and Home for Life. Although I support the intent that every child deserves to be in a stable home environment, and that the responsible caregivers and that child benefit from the formalisation of this agreement that permits the carers to carry out their duties lawfully, I worry about the number of children who have been harmed while in the care of those carers.

The intent of this bill is to protect children from harm, but so many have actually been harmed while in the care of the State-supported caregiver. Let us face it, the Government has been a bad and neglectful parent. Although I express concern at this aspect I must also, from personal experience, tell you that I am not comfortable with the ministry’s ability to assess and monitor those people whom we entrust our children to. I do not in any way want to diminish the work of our Child, Youth and Family social workers. They have extraordinary workloads and they do the very best that they can, but they have way too much to do. The Minister herself said in the House yesterday that the number of notifications and investigations was increasing and there was an ever-increasing burden on the teams of social work staff to get the job done and done properly.

I have, through very dear friends of mine, some knowledge of when this can go wrong. My friends are a lovely couple who at the time had a 10-year-old, and they became caregivers. They wanted to share their home with another child, so they filled in the application, submitted to the police vetting, attended a couple of meetings, and were part-way through the vetting process, as it was not completed by the ministry, only to get a request for a placement to be made with them. A very troubled 16-year-old boy was placed in their care. Why was this boy placed in their care before they had completed the proper security clearances? Because the ministry is desperate for somewhere to place our children.

It is not just him. There is an extraordinary amount of pressure on the staff to find suitable placements, and often, as in this case, there is not enough time to complete all the processes. There is just a child needing a placement, and the staff acting in the best way that they can to get the job done. In the case of my friends, it did not go well. It could have gone better. When the boy who was placed with them started acting out in a sexually inappropriate way towards their 10-year-old son, they had to call Child, Youth and Family to take him back. They could not continue to put their own child at risk.

This situation speaks to me of the woeful lack of support the ministry has for its placement teams. It has to rush through prospective caregivers, without proper checking, in order to fill placements for kids, and they do not match the placements well. Mismatched placements do not make for successful placements.

I have to say, from my dealings with Child, Youth and Family, that there are significant staffing resource pressures in every area of social work. The Minister confirmed it yesterday when she said that notifications and investigations were increasing, and yet this bill, which could have delivered so much, as my colleague said yesterday, to stop the children from falling in the stream is not delivering enough. If we want to ensure the safety of our children in a Home for Life placement, we need to ensure that we are doing everything we can to make that placement safe for all involved.

I also welcome the intent to strengthen the family group conference process. Family group conferences are a great mechanism to gain the support of the child’s wider community, be they grandparents, aunts and uncles, and other people who are keen on ensuring the child does well, such as teachers, social workers, and the like. I know, having sat in on a few of these conferences, that they are staff resource - heavy, and as the process of engagement is set out in legislation it must be followed accurately in order to comply. In this regard I support any measure that makes the process easier on the child and the family, while retaining its robust character. I do worry that the increasing use of the family whānau agreements, which are not binding, will increase as the level of resourcing for family group conferences is high in comparison.

I mention my concern for the staffing resources available to Child, Youth and Family to conduct their core businesses as I have seen firsthand how hard they work, but when they are required to do more and more investigations, and respond to increasing levels of notification, I worry that they are only able to give these cases the most cursory attention.

I want to pick up on a comment that Jan Logie made yesterday regarding family violence, about the incidence of family violence as a factor of vulnerability for children. You are absolutely right. The Chief Social Worker, Paul Nixon, talks about the unholy trinity in relation to the top three indicators of vulnerability for children who come to the notice of Child, Youth and Family, and those indicators are when the parent is impacted by mental illness, problematic substance abuse, and family violence. The unholy trinity and vulnerability for kids is a big concern. Family violence being a factor in that child’s home is not an automatic criterion for Child, Youth and Family to investigate the safety in that child’s life.

It is not widely known, but family violence in the home does not meet the threshold for which Child, Youth and Family is required to investigate. It is only when family violence is a repeated issue in that child’s life. How much trauma must a child experience before our Child, Youth and Family social workers will be permitted to investigate and intervene? It is astonishing and it is very wrong. It is so not in keeping with the intent of this bill, which is to make our most vulnerable children safer.

If Child, Youth and Family do not, as a matter of right, investigate when family violence is a feature in a child’s life, until that harm is well and truly done, then what can be done for that child? There are too many kids impacted by family violence for the social workers to deal with. We have a bill called the Vulnerable Children Bill with no working definition of vulnerability, where the Chief Social Worker’s definition of vulnerability includes family violence, and we do not intervene when family violence is present. Are you confused? I certainly am. Thank you.

Tēnā koe, Mr Chair. I would just like to echo the speech before me, really, from the member Poto Williams. It is not all the time that I feel that a speech from a member of the Labour Party is like one I could have given myself. That was a speech where I really agreed with a lot of what you were saying and I thank you for making those points around family violence. Again, I do not think that most New Zealanders realise that Child, Youth and Family does not as a matter of course look to intervene to protect children when there is family violence present. I do believe that it would be an expectation of our public that our systems work to protect those children, because regardless of whether those children are physically abused when there is intimate partner violence, they are harmed. There is harm from witnessing violence between parents. As a country that is trying to grapple with this issue, we need to have the systems to respond in order to protect them and to change our society and get rid of this curse that we have at the moment.

There are a few points I would like to speak to in Part 3 of the Vulnerable Children Bill. This part does contain quite a few policy points, and there are questions I would like to ask of the Minister for Social Development. I have not been the primary MP for this bill, so I am not sure where some bits are and I have been trying to find them in reading the bill. One of them—the primary point that I would love for the Minister to provide some clarification on—is whether this bill is fixing the concern that has been raised by the Human Rights Commission and various disability groups. This is another area where I think most people in New Zealand would be surprised to find out that we have a differential provision in law for the treatment of children with disabilities and the ability to take them from their family and put them into placements, into care.

We have been asked by most of these groups to delete sections 141, 142, and 144 of the Children, Young Persons, and Their Families Act, which enable children to be taken from their homes. It was pointed out that children are often being placed outside their local community, sometimes in really lengthy placements without a clear point of review, and sometimes those communities are not even a good social or cultural fit for that child. As we have heard, there are definitely some struggles in New Zealand about providing the right support for those families that are taking children in. We know, actually, that attachment to the family of birth—and from a really early age, to a parent at least—is really important for the development and the opportunities of all children, and that includes children with disabilities.

The Human Rights Commission as well as specific disability groups have asked Parliament to give consideration to this issue and to the need for more to be done to actively increase the opportunities for disabled children to be supported in their homes, including, as the commission said, “facilitating tailored and creative solutions, that are properly resourced, and which enable a child to safely remain with their family, or to retain a strong family connection.” I could not find this in the bill, and I am really hoping that the Minister will point out to me where it is, because it may well be there but I just could not find it. To me, if we are talking about vulnerability, then to be explicit about the needs of our children with disabilities and what we can do to support them and families that may be struggling in order to enable them to have that parental attachment is incredibly important. It is hard to see how their needs could not be right up there at the top of the hierarchy of the most in need.

Currently, the Children, Young Persons, and Their Families Act—this is from the Human Rights Commission—gives disabled children “lesser rights than others”. It allows disabled children, unlike non-disabled children, to be placed into full-time residential care for an indefinite period, and the provisions that enable non-disabled young people to have a say in their care are not extended automatically to disabled young people. That seems wrong. If a child has a disability, it does not mean that they do not have needs and that they cannot communicate. I believe that the onus should be on the State to create systems for those children to be able to communicate their needs wherever possible. Also, we have been told that our law enables children with disabilities to be sterilised and that we have no protection in our law to prevent that from happening. That seems just so horribly wrong that I am hoping that the Minister will tell me that this bill is correcting that.

Another issue that I would like to talk to around this is the requirement for consideration to be given to requests for support for young people leaving State care to live independently. We heard from the Dingwall Trust on the day I got to hear some of the submissions to the Social Services Committee and from a very amazing young man who had left State care at the age of 17 with no identification and no ability to sign tenancy agreements or any other agreements. Sadly, he ended up on the streets with alcohol and drug problems, just trying to cope with these things that had been thrown at him at the age of 17, but later he came in contact with the Dingwall Trust, and with the support he got he was able to turn his life round. He is now in pre-med and is working with Māori Television. It was a truly inspirational story.

The trust was calling for there to be a transition period and an extension of State care to the age of 25, I think it was suggesting that as a matter of course, because we are throwing young people out earlier than any other English-speaking country. I just cannot understand why we are being so harsh in this country to our young people, whom I do believe we all care so much for. The view of young people who have experienced this system and of their advocates is that this bill needed to provide extended duties of care—not just exceptions and the ability for the State to intervene in exceptional circumstances but providing extended duties of care to enable gradual plans to transition young people to independence.

Some Monash University research found that the cost to the State of a poor transition was $738,000 per person. So even if you have to go to those rational economic arguments and everything coming down to a dollar figure, which is painful to me, this is still a sensible investment, and I do think it would pay off. I am very disappointed to see that the bill has not separated the transition from birthdays or taken the opportunity to link it to the end of exams and put it in the bill that care continues until somebody has finished those key milestones in their life. But to extend it right through that period of youth up to the age of 25, which does not preclude independence, I would have thought would be ideal.

Another point I would like to speak on, which is a core point for us and maybe one of the main ones why we are having to oppose this bill, is placing the onus on the parent of a subsequent child to demonstrate that he or she is safe to parent if a child was previously permanently removed due to abuse or neglect. We know that protective parents are losing custody of their children because of the behaviour of abusers. That is happening. We would hate to see a situation where a woman had managed to escape—and even, imagine, if her partner had been through treatment and managed to get himself sorted and they were back together—but where she would face the possibility of losing her next child because of the actions of an abuser. That, to me, does not seem to be about justice. Reversing the onus of proof is a very big step, and one that we do not believe in.

I move, That the question be now put.

No, I have seen Asenati Lole-Taylor miss several calls, so I am going to call the honourable member Asenati Lole-Taylor. Malo.

Fa‘afetai lava, Mr Chair. I am going to take a very brief call on Part 3 of the Vulnerable Children Bill. I know that last night when we talked about Part 1 and Part 2, I felt that there were very important contributing factors to Part 3 when it comes to the caregivers and permanent guardians or special guardians for children. I am going to take a bit of a different approach to this. There are three areas that I really want to look at. One is the situation of social workers engaged by Child, Youth and Family. The other one is cultural identity, as in section 5 amended by clause 102 of this bill, and also the suitable placing of children who are often in a situation of vulnerability or risk.

You see, there is a young man aged 14 in Whangarei who fell through the cracks of the current legislation, and I am talking about New Zealand’s current legislation. This young man of 14 years of age stopped going to school. The mother had lost control in terms of guiding him in the right direction and the grandmother had also tried really hard and was not able to provide this child with the right approach in order for him to get back on the right path. Both the mother and the grandmother had been trying to seek help, both from Child, Youth and Family and also from the police. I was called to go all the way up to Whangarei to try to attend to this poor family. What I discovered was that this young man started having his problems from the age of 6. He experienced the issue from the age of 6. The young boy was faced with challenges and there was no way of knowing what the challenges were. One would hope that this bill will address situations where the mother and grandmother can identify and pick up what those issues would be at that age.

The influence of negative behaviour, aggressiveness, and violence became obvious at that time and it was at the age of 7½ to 8 that this child’s name became a regular name in the police records. Often the police would pick him up. It also started when the police actually advised the mother and the grandmother that perhaps the child should be moved out of the family because he would no longer listen to his mother and grandmother. The sad thing in this situation is that both the mother and grandmother are loving people. They really care about this 14-year-old boy. The 14-year-old boy, at the same time, was actually manipulated by other people. These other people were very heavily involved in drugs and were heavily manipulated by outside influences to serve their own needs. The system in New Zealand had actually failed to provide a safety net for people like this 14-year-old and also his parents. The education of this particular child had actually suffered. Education in New Zealand should be made available to every young child in New Zealand, yet this was one child whose own school in Whangarei could not bear to see coming to school because of the issues that the child created in order to be seen to be the man in the school environment.

When I look at Part 3 of this bill, the part that talks about the responsibility of Child, Youth and Family, and also the engagement of the social worker, it is one area that I would like to put a very strong emphasis on. That is, it is all very well for us to appoint and engage so many social workers, put a lot of money into them, and have to look at them as an investment, and I accept that there is a need for that to happen, but there is another fundamental part to this and that is the specialised area where it deals with—and I am really using that word “specialised”—cultural perspective. It is not—

I move, That the question be now put.

No. I am going to call the honourable member Sue Moroney. She has been seeking the call for some time.

I have been, thank you, Mr Chair. In rising to speak to Part 3 of the Vulnerable Children Bill, I just want to let those listening to the debate at home know that if they were listening last night, heard us debating Part 1, and are now wondering why we have suddenly gone on to Part 3, the whole of Part 2 was entirely struck out. That is because it was dedicated to the issue of child harm prevention orders. Obviously, a lot of effort had gone into drafting up this new concept, but it was ditched. We on the Labour Party side are pleased that that sensible approach was taken but a little worried that there was so much effort and, I guess, ministerial time and drafting resources going into something that was clearly never going to work. It is a bit sad that it took so long to actually get as far as it did before it went away. But the good thing is that that approach, which was going to be extraordinarily difficult to actually bring about, has gone from this bill.

In this debate on Part 3 I want to address some of the issues that were raised with us by submitters that, unfortunately, have not been dealt with by Part 3, as far as I can see. I would be interested in hearing from the Minister for Social Development on the issues that were raised with the Social Services Committee. One of them was the issue, which was traversed a little by Jan Logie when she spoke, around children with disabilities. It is something that I had never even thought about, to be honest, until submitters came before our committee to tell us of the plight of children with disabilities, who are treated differently and not given the same rights under our current legislation as children without disabilities. They asked us to use the opportunity of the Vulnerable Children Bill to address that, because, they said—and I think they were quite right—who better fits the definition of a vulnerable child than a child with a disability so severe that their family cannot cope, or chooses not to cope, and who is therefore committed to a lifetime in a residential care facility? Who could be more vulnerable than a child in that situation?

What the submitters—and there were three or four of them, from memory—asked us to consider was why these children should not have the same right as other children whose families had given up on them, or perhaps not been able to cope with them or not treated them well, and to have the opportunity that other children have under the same legislation for a family who did want to have them in their lives to take care of them. It was a really salient point, I felt, that the submitters made, because it was one that I certainly, thank goodness, had never come face to face with before. But it made a lot of sense. Why is it that children with disabilities in that situation do not have that right, if there is a family that would like to take care of them? Why can they not have a home for life that is not in a residential care facility? If their own family is unable to provide that for them, why not another family? I think that is something that I would like to hear from the Minister on, because it would have been under Part 3 that that would have taken place, had we been able to take the opportunity to use this bill, the Vulnerable Children Bill, to actually address that issue.

I want to support the amendments to this part proposed by my colleague Jacinda Ardern and my colleague Dr Rajen Prasad as well, because they are both very, very sensible and really important amendments for this Parliament to debate tonight. The amendment from Jacinda Ardern that I particularly want to address is the concept of actually fixing the problem where at age 17 children who are in the care of the State are suddenly out on their own. That submission that Jan Logie again referred to—it was incredibly powerful to hear from that young man. What an amazing effort he had made. He was able to describe very eloquently to our select committee how he felt abandoned—how he felt abandoned by the State and by the country, effectively, at the age of 17. It was really poignant for me because I have sons of my own who are rapidly approaching that age, and the idea that they could be cast out into society without any backup and without any ability to find—as he said, he did not even have the legal right to sign a tenancy agreement—

I move, That the question be now put.

The question is that the question be now put. As many who are of that opinion will please say Aye, to the contrary, No.

I raise a point of order, Mr Chair. I have been consistently seeking the option of another call. I have Supplementary Order Paper 436, which I have been unable to speak on. Part 3 is the final—and is still a very substantive—part of this bill. Although I had the chance to speak earlier on, it was only on two parts of the bill. There are an extra two sections I would like to speak on, including my amendments. I ask that you consider that I have the opportunity to do so.

💬 Tim Macindoe: Speaking to the point of order—

I do not need help. Can I just advise the member that once the Chairperson has accepted a closure motion and commenced to put the question, it does not matter how far the Chairperson gets. Anything else is deferred until the closure motion and any subsequent consequential questions are determined.

Motion agreed to.

The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 435 in the name of the Hon Paula Bennett to Part 3 be agreed to.

Amendments agreed to.

The question was put that the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 436 in the name of Jacinda Ardern to clause 131 be agreed to.

I have to advise the honourable member Dr Rajen Prasad that your amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 437 inserting new subpart 3 in Part 3 is out of order because it is outside the scope of the bill.