Support for Children in Hardship Bill

I want to make a short contribution on this part of the Support for Children in Hardship Bill because clauses 1 and 2 have been controversial, particularly clause 2, which is, obviously, the commencement date for this bill. For those who may only just be tuning in to this debate, we are actually debating a policy that was announced at the last Budget—so, some months ago now—and we are debating a commencement date for this piece of legislation that means that this benefit increase will not kick in for those who are in the most significant hardship until April 2016. Obviously, the point of contention for members on this side of the Chamber has been that, yes, we support an increase in benefit rates for those in hardship—absolutely. Our argument has been around the adequacy, and perhaps the way that that increase has been designed. But what was not in question for us was that the need was immediate—the need was immediate. In fact, it has been in place for some time now.

Again—I have to come back to this, because it has been raised continually in this House—it has been lauded as the first benefit increase in 40 years, but that is not correct. Working for Families increased benefit rates when it was introduced under the last Labour Government—

💬 Jono Naylor: Your deputy leader agreed with us.

—via the family tax credit. What was that, Jono Naylor?

💬 Jono Naylor: Your deputy leader agreed with us in her speech on Part 2.

But am I getting a concession from the Government yet that benefit rates were increased? Because the one thing that I will add as a caveat to that is that we always said—and this was said first by Annette King when she was the spokesperson in this area—that we had unfinished business. No one on this side of the Chamber is claiming that Working for Families was the beginning and the end of everything that we had to say on poverty and inequality issues in this country. It was not, but it was a damn good start, and it was a necessary start, and a concession that it was a necessary start is the fact that the Government has not repealed it. In fact, it continues to play with elements of it in this bill.

Our contention has been, when it comes to clause 2, that we needed it right away. We needed it absolutely right away. In fact, as we have always argued in debating this bill, if you were really, genuinely looking at hardship, then you would look at some of the real catalysts for that hardship. Since Working for Families was implemented, one of the massive contributing factors to that growth in hardship—if you look at the income measures around median income and the before and after-housing costs, it tells you exactly what some of the problem is. Some of that problem is the after housing costs, because, of course, in our most populated city in the country and in the South Island, in Christchurch, we have had a significant increase in housing costs. That has taken a disproportionate amount of income out of those low-income families trying to put a roof over their heads, which has exacerbated the issue of income inadequacy. So that is a contributing factor.

The reason I raise that is that Working for Families, obviously, was dealing with income inadequacy across the board, but that has been exacerbated by an increase in housing costs, and that is now a new challenge that we need to continue to address. So these things are never static; they are dynamic, and we need to keep addressing them. What is not dynamic is simply the fact that the need exists, and we need to do something about it with immediate attention. That is why we have a problem with this commencement date. It should not have been delayed. As has been raised in the debate as well, the idea that the Consumers Price Index adjustment will kick in first, then the base increase, and the base increase of $25 will not be Consumers Price Index - adjusted—well, that seems unfair. We are waiting a year for it to be introduced. Why not Consumers Price Index adjust it at the same time?

Speaking briefly, then, to the title clause, this is the Support for Children in Hardship Bill. What undermines the notion of support for children is that, actually, income is one thing; parental support is another. Fundamental to a child’s well-being and their success in life is the support from, and the attachment they have to, their caregivers. We are increasingly becoming aware of the impact and the importance of that relationship between a child and their caregiver. It is known as attachment; it is also known as attachment disorder when it is a poor relationship. The flow-on effects of a poor relationship in that regard are costly to us as taxpayers. It may seem like it is just a relational issue, but, actually, when it comes to things like conduct disorder and behavioural issues, which we as taxpayers end up putting money into from a remedial perspective, we all end up paying for a poor bond between a child and a caregiver. I use the word “caregiver” loosely because we do know that it is not specific as to who that individual needs to be. It just needs to be a trusting relationship and a consistent relationship between a child at a very young age and an adult. In fact, I think it was David Fergusson who estimated that the costs of a poor attachment and potentially, later on, conduct disorder generally can be up to a million dollars per child, so it pays to invest early.

That idea of support is not just monetary; it is about that physical connection with and presence of a caregiver. What this bill does is it gives with the one hand on the income side and it takes away with the other, in the sense that we are now putting in a requirement for that potentially single caregiver to be in work when that child is at a younger age. What we do not seem to factor in is the detriment and the undoing of any positive effect we might have with that income boost caused by the negative impact of that change in threshold.

The use of the word “support” does need to be taken more broadly. As a Labour Party we have always talked about income inadequacy as one issue when it comes to the deprivation that children in poverty experience across the board. But it is not just about money—it never has been—it is about the wider support network that sits around that family and that child. Again, we would have liked there to be more analysis of the evidence that tells us where that support is most needed because we also know, as I mentioned in one of my contributions around where that persistence in severe poverty exists, that it is predominantly in sole parent households. So if you are looking for support for children in hardship as a bill, actually, the support also needs to go specifically to those single-parent households. We know in those cases that, obviously, care arrangements are difficult. They are more restricted. You cannot simply just take in those extra 20 hours of work without thinking about your care arrangements. Again, this is supporting with one hand with the increase of the 25 bucks, but taking away on the other by increasing those hours of work and, potentially, again restricting what that caregiver is able to manage in terms of their relationship with that child.

So I think the title is disingenuous. It is singular in the sense that it is simply about income, and not about that broader support network.

We would also highlight again, I think—because, as I have said, it is not just about income, from our perspective, when we are talking about those families in most need. We make an assumption in our society that a family, particularly, maybe, a sole parent who is raising a child, has a support network. That is not a given. It is no longer the case in New Zealand that you have that village, that community, or even, necessarily, that whānau around you, but this bill is based on that premise. It assumes someone else can pick up caregiver roles when that individual is unable to do it because of work obligations.

All of the policies we have always looked at around income inadequacy and poverty and deprivation have also included what we can do to improve that support mechanism—what role Well Child / Tāmariki Ora can play, what role Plunket can play, and what role can those networks play universally by being in the home, providing that contact with the family to other support agencies to bring in the village that used to exist in raising children but has ebbed away. That is what true support looks like, and if we were genuinely considering a bill that was true to the name, true to the title of “Support for Children in Hardship”, there would be elements of support that went beyond a single child and that would look to the network that exists around that child’s family as well.

Thank you—

💬 Hon Member: Is that it?

No, no. The interesting thing about this bill, and a number that are before the House—and there will be a bill before the Committee after this one, on tax—is that it seems to me that a lot of tax legislation, i.e., giving the ability to the Government to, usually, take money off Kiwis, is retrospective.

Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): Kia ora mai tātou. Tēnā tātou katoa. Members, we are debating the Support for Children in Hardship Bill. When we adjourned for the dinner break, Stuart Nash had 4 minutes and 45 seconds remaining. He was obviously cut short prior to dinner. He is welcome to resume his call.

I think I will resume that call. I was sort of cut off in mid-flow, 15 seconds into my speech. What I was talking about is that the commencement date of the bill, called the Support for Children in Hardship Bill, is April 2016, and after this bill, we are about to go to a tax bill, as we have done quite recently in this House, and there are a number of clauses in that tax legislation that are retrospective. It seems a little odd that when we have bills that take money off people or change tax laws, which are quite fundamental to our economy, often they are retrospective, but when we are giving money back to people, and often the most disadvantaged, for some reason there is a big lag before this comes in.

What this bill does is actually give $25 a week to some families, come April 2016. That is not to be sneezed at—$25. It will make a big difference to some families, but the interesting thing about this is that it is not indexed to how many children a family has. So if a family has one child, they will get $25 a week. If a family has six children, that family will also get $25 a week. That does not seem very equitable to me. I am unsure whether that is an unintended consequence. I am unsure whether it is a cruel joke or what the intent behind that is, because if it is an unintended consequence I expect us to be back in this House with another remedial bill within 6 months, remedying that—well, I hope we are.

We are talking about children in hardship. Let us put some context to this. There are 305,000 children living in poverty at the moment. I think we can transpose the word “poverty” for “hardship” because it is pretty much the same. But the interesting thing about this is 60 percent of these are beneficiary families, but 40 percent of these children come from families whose parents work. This is a new category called the working poor.

We had a very interesting meal last Friday, when we gathered a whole lot of old, or former not old—[Interruption]—yes, some of them were Labour MPs to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the election of the first Labour Government. It was interesting because on the placemats we had a Speech from the Throne from Michael Joseph Savage. What he said was that the Labour Government believes that every man—he did say “man”, but I am sure he meant “man and woman”—earns enough money to support a family. That principle is universal, and yet here we are, literally 80 years later, still fighting for the right for people to earn enough money to support a family.

The fact that we have not progressed in 80 years, to me, is a real shame. In fact, you could argue that by the end of that Labour Government, men and women were earning enough money to support a family. I think that was one of the major legacies of that first Labour Government. But now here we are, back in the House, arguing for the fact that people need to be able to earn enough money to ensure that their children have every opportunity to reach their full potential. Every now and again what we hear from people is: “Oh, these people, they earn too much money. They get too much money back from the Government.” The interesting thing about that is that very, very rarely is that criticism heard from someone who has to live on these tax credits.

Parliament has deemed that people have to receive a certain amount of money to be able to live with dignity if they have children. It was passed and it is accepted, but we would argue that at this point in time it is simply not enough money. An increase of $25 a week really does not go far at all, especially if you have more than one child. In fact, if you have a lot of children it does not go anywhere, to be honest. But the interesting thing for me is—and we heard this from some people on the Government benches—sure, this should be enough to support a family, but what it has also got to be is enough to ensure that families can escape that poverty trap.

People in New Zealand need enough money to ensure that their children have every opportunity to be as good as they possibly can be. The travesty of what is happening at the moment is that a lot of our children are not actually afforded that opportunity. The thing that I would argue is that we need to do more to change, to get society back to the conditions and to the principles espoused by that Savage Labour Government in that first Speech from the Throne. It was a fantastic speech.

I just want to discuss the commencement date of this bill and point out that actually the decision to fund this package was made on 21 May 2015—Budget day. That is when the announcement was made. I guess our concern is that the commencement of this bill will not actually be until 1 April 2016. What we are all aware of in the House is that with 305,000 children living in poverty, there was a very real immediate need to address that poverty. With 60 percent of the 305,000 children living in poverty being from beneficiary homes, the Government had a very real opportunity to move this through quickly and to make a very small difference, but, none the less, a difference, in the lives of those children.

We are disappointed with the commencement date. We are particularly disappointed with the commencement date, given that through urgency just a couple of weeks ago we had the Government pushing through the Social Security (Commencement of Benefits) Amendment Bill, which saw a number of people deprived of the opportunity to make claims after they were underpaid because of some technical error over the last 17 years. It is disappointing that the Government uses urgency in those situations, but here we have a very real need—we have 305,000 children living in poverty, with 181,000 of them living in beneficiary homes—and yet the Government did not see it as necessary to try to push this through any faster.

So now we wait until 1 April 2016, and it is an unnecessary delay, because you would not have any opposition from any party in this House if you decided to move the commencement date of this bill forward. That is a concern that I wanted to express. In fact, I want to know from the Minister whether the Minister would consider actually amending the commencement date to bring it forward earlier so that these families may have a little bit more money in their pockets, particularly around the Christmas period and in January and February when the kids go back to school. Would the Minister consider shifting the commencement date of this bill?

The title of this bill is the Support for Children in Hardship Bill. I am just going to put it out there right now and say that, given that it does very little to address the needs of the 305,000 children living in poverty, perhaps a better title for this bill would have been the “Supporting a Few Children in Hardship Bill”. I say that because the Government decided that it wanted to spend $250 million per year on a package that would make it appear as if it was addressing the issue of child poverty, but it picked a measurement of material hardship that really suited its half-baked approach. We see that the Government’s selected measure, which would give it a figure of between 60,000 and 100,000 families—not the household income measure that has been frequently reported in the past, the latest of which shows the number of children in poverty has increased to 305,000—meant that it was choosing the lowest possible figure in terms of estimates around children in poverty, which has also meant that it will be assisting, at the very most, only 18,000 families with children. That is a smidgen of the 305,000 that we know of.

I want to say that it was really disappointing, actually, to hear National MPs like the chair of the Social Services Committee, Alfred Ngaro, use that 100,000 figure when he was referring to children living in poverty, because I am sure that member, like so many other members in the House, knows that that is a major understatement, and he is doing a disservice to those children and those families who are living in poverty.

How much extra do those 18,000 families get? Well, actually, they get $23.10 per family a week. I want to just refer back to what my colleague Stuart Nash was saying—and this is why I think it should be the “Support For a Few Children in Hardship Bill”, which was that, actually, that amount of money is per family. It is not per child in those families, so it does disadvantage those families with more children. It does mean that that small amount of money is going to have to be stretched across these families, and it makes it much more difficult for them to get any benefit out of it.

I want to refer back to the title—the “Support For a Few Children in Hardship Bill”—and I also want to maybe relabel this bill, and what else can I call it? Actually, no, I am going to call it the “Lack of Support For the Parents of These Children in Hardship Bill” because there are measures that this Government has put through that we do not support in this bill. We are forced to support this bill because these families are so hard up that the $25, even though it is only a little bit, is going to be something that will go into their pockets.

But what we are concerned about, in terms of the “Lack of Support For the Parents of These Children in Hardship Bill”, is that we see a Government that is pushing through legislation that has no evidence base. We have the age where work obligations kick in going from 5 years to 3 years, despite the fact that there is no evidence to support that doing that will see these families better off. In fact, when I put parliamentary questions through to the Ministry of Social Development to ask it what evidence it had collected to support the measures in this bill, it has said, over the last 2 years, nothing—no evidence whatsoever. And when we started to look for evidence to see what happens when you impose these types of work obligations on families, what we found is that families can actually be worse off. Families can actually be worse off because what you end up doing is pushing parents out into the lowest-paid jobs, and they can be worse off working than they actually were on a benefit. That is in no way supporting the children in hardship whom this Government says it is supporting.

We have major reservations about extending the work obligations from 15 hours to 20 hours. And our reason for that is currently we know that the parents of these children have access to 20 hours of free early childhood education, but there is also travel time that needs to be taken into consideration. The Government would have us believe that parents could access a childcare subsidy on top of that that would help with the additional hours that would be travel time in terms of the picking up and dropping off of their children, but we have seen evidence this year that shows that once they are off benefit, parents are less likely to access the child subsidy that they may be entitled to access. In fact, I have seen letters to parents where they have been told: “No, you’re not eligible for childcare subsidy because you’re able to access 20 hours free.” It makes absolutely no sense, but I have seen it in black and white. So we have got concerns for the parents of these children living in hardship because they are actually going to be stretched more, and it may impact on their ability to be able to look after their children.

As I said before, in renaming it the “Lack of Support For the Parents and Caregivers of These Children Living in Hardship Bill”, I just want to point out that the National Government voted against a Supplementary Order Paper that I put up that would have put study alongside work obligations, so that these parents would be supported to go into part-time study or to take up part-time work. And the reason that makes sense to us—and I am sure it makes sense to the general public as well—is that actually we do not just want to be pushing out the parents or caregivers of these children living in hardship into minimum wage jobs. Where we can we want to be providing them with the opportunity to upskill, train, potentially increase their earning capacity, and potentially increase their options in terms of getting into more secure work when they go out into the workforce. But, unfortunately, National—so short-sighted—has not supported that Supplementary Order Paper.

In fact, in the Social Services Committee we had National members of the select committee saying: “Well, they can get a student allowance.” They can only get a student allowance if they are studying full time, and that is 32 hours or more. So there is no opportunity here now for these parents to be able to access part-time study—let us say, 20 hours to 31 hours. In some instances that is all that would be practical, perhaps because of the needs of their children, or perhaps because of the number of their children. But it would have made sense for the National Government to support that provision, and as I said, it just goes to show that in many ways this bill should be named the “Lack of Support For the Parents and Caregivers of These Children Living in Hardship Bill”.

We are supporting this bill because of the $25 increase, but we have major reservations that might cause us to rename this bill.

I am very happy to take a brief call on the Support for Children in Hardship Bill, when we are talking about the title and commencement clauses of this legislation. I have to say that I am a big fan of the non-political naming of bills in New Zealand. It has been a tradition in the New Zealand Parliament that the way we name bills is that we use factual descriptions for bills in Parliament, not political sloganeering. I think one of the best examples of where you see political sloganeering in the way bills are created is obviously the United States Congress, where you get bills like the No Child Left Behind Bill, which became the No Child Left Behind Act, which does not actually tell you very much about what the bill does.

The point that I want to make is that the Support for Children in Hardship Bill basically creates an expectation around what the legislation is actually going to do that does not necessarily match up with what the legislation actually does. That is one of the reasons why I think the bill is misnamed. In fact, we should just go back to the Kiwi tradition, the New Zealand parliamentary tradition, of naming bills after what they actually do. So in this case it is primarily a bill to amend the Social Security Act. Previously this would have been called the “Social Security Act 1964 Amendment Bill”. That would be what Parliament would have called it. The naming of it as something else actually politicises the title of the bill and therefore creates expectations around it. So it is a marketing ploy rather than a good legislative ploy.

Therefore, the House then brings itself to the question of: well, does the substance of the bill match up to the marketing that we are getting within the title? If we look at it and we say “OK, the bill talks about support for children in hardship.”, one would think that applies to all children in hardship. The estimates suggest that this might apply to 18,000 families with children, and yet there could be up to 305,000 children living in hardship in New Zealand, depending on whose measure you are willing to accept. Therefore, the bill fails at its first hurdle, in the sense that I do not believe that it is appropriately named.

But I actually have a technical issue that I want to get some clarity from the Minister on, and that is to do with the commencement. If we look at clause 2(1) of the bill, where we are talking about when Part 1 comes into effect, it comes into effect on 1 April 2016 if an Order in Council is made under section 61HA(2) of the Social Security Act. Incidentally, section 61HA(2) of the Social Security Act is actually being inserted by this very bill, and that is the point that I am about to come to. If an Order in Council is made under that section, then the Act comes into force on the same date, but Part 1 comes into force immediately before that order.

The reason that is interesting is that it suggests that the Government can make an Order in Council to come into force before this bill has actually come into force as a piece of law. That, to me, seems to be quite an interesting legislative instrument. I suspect that the reason that the Government is doing this is so it can determine what it wants the Order in Council to be on 1 April, when the legislation comes into force, and it is just trying to avoid any sort of legal irregularities around the fact that the Order in Council was made immediately prior to the Act—as it will then be—actually coming into force.

It seems to me to be a slightly interesting legislative instrument. It is the first time that I have seen something like that, which basically gives the Government the ability to make an Order in Council under an Act that has not yet come into force. I just wanted to check with the Minister in the chair, Nathan Guy, that, in fact, the intention in doing this is to ensure that, basically, the Order in Council can be prepared prior to the Act coming into force. But it is just to avoid the technicality, I guess, of the Act and the Order in Council coming into force at the same time, and there potentially being some sort of circular legal argument that somehow invalidates the situation.

The rest of the commencement clause, basically, is relatively straightforward. It comes into force either on the day after on which it receives the Royal assent—i.e., when it is signed by the Governor-General—or on 1 April 2016, which is not unusual when it comes to Social Security Act amendments because they tend to be for the full year. Having said that, I think that some very legitimate arguments have been raised for why we always treat the expenditure side of the equation as coming into force some way down the track, but often, when it comes to the other end of the equation and the revenue generation side of things, the Government seems to be a lot harsher. We dealt with some issues just recently, in fact, where there was legislation that was backdated, and I think that is generally a bad principle.

Overall, I think the bill is worth supporting, because the clauses we are supporting—support for children in hardship is something that the Parliament should take seriously. I am disappointed, in the sense that I do not believe that the bill lives up to the promise in the title. I do not believe it supports enough of the children in hardship. I think it overlooks many of the impacts. Again, let us come back to the title—“Children in Hardship Bill”. Actually, why do children live in hardship? It is not because the children do not earn enough money. It is actually because the parents do not earn enough money to support them, which is another reason why I think—and, in fact, the bill deals largely with parental income issues, and I do not know that the title of the bill adequately reflects what this bill actually does.

If we want to get really serious about dealing with children in hardship, we do have to look very seriously at the fact that 305,000 New Zealand children—if you accept the most commonly accepted definition of poverty—are living below the poverty line in New Zealand. That is a major, major embarrassment to a country like New Zealand, and we should certainly be doing a lot more about that. We need to look at early childhood education and the barriers to participation in early childhood education, and the link between workforce participation and early childhood education. I do not think that those are sufficiently understood yet, and I think we need to look much more closely at those. The bill is worth supporting. It has a lot of gaps in it. It is a start, but it is certainly by no means a big step.

Tēnā koe, Mr Chair. I will start with the title of the Support for Children in Hardship Bill. Like other colleagues, I want to refer to the word “hardship” within the bill, because over the course of the debate that has become interchanged with “poverty”, “deprivation”, and other words that indicate that our children are actually suffering. However, what has failed to occur in all of the debate is actually some measure of that, or some definition around what hardship might actually look like.

It would appear that hardship occurs to only the 18,000 or so children who are going to be impacted on by this particular bill. That, of course, is not the case when we consider the 300,000-odd children who are living in poverty, which no one in any part of the Chamber is disputing. Calling the bill “Support for Children in Hardship” does cause us to consider whether we should define hardship. Should it become a measure that we then make some advance to ensure that we can reduce those targets, because when you are talking about hardship, or poverty, or deprivation, you cannot ignore the other things that surround the difficult lives that these children have. Perhaps in the title we should be looking at developing words that encourage a suite of responses to these children, such as adequate, warm, dry, affordable housing and such as access to decent education, with all the resources that level out the playing field for all of our children so that they have equal opportunity—so I do have a problem with the word “Hardship” within the title of the bill.

I also have a problem with the word “Children”, because, as we know, the bill is really more around the household income, as opposed to supporting individual children. We know that the bill will support a family—increasing benefit rates up to $25 a week—but not necessarily the individual children within that family. Your family might have four or five children but be able to access only the $25 a week. The fact that the children are part of the title I have an issue with.

I also have a problem with the fact that we have been led to believe that these families will get an extra $25 a week when we know that it could be anywhere in the region of $17, or $12, or $23, depending on the situation that your family finds itself in. The Government has been trumpeting the fact that it is providing more money to the family, which is great, and we support that. However, the view that has been widely trumpeted that it will be $25 a week for all families is clearly not the case.

I have a real problem with the commencement date. If we are desperate to ensure that our families are well resourced, should the commencement date not be the day after which this bill will receive Royal assent and not 1 April 2016? It would bring to a whole lot more families some support when they need it, not having to wait for a further 4 or 5 months for that to happen.

We could call this bill the “Complex Tax Changes (When They Should Have Just Passed Labour’s Bill to Increase Abatement Rates) Bill” because there are some complicated changes to the inland revenue Acts that will change abatement rates when, if the Government was really serious about supporting children in hardship, it would have supported Labour’s bill, which might have put an extra $50 into the pockets of our families.

This bill should also be called the “Changes to the Definition of Part-time Work (And All That That Might Entail) Bill”. Of course, we know that the definition is moving from 15 hours a week to 20 hours a week. We are talking about families, probably mostly women, who will be required to go back to work, who will be work tested. They are likely to go into roles that are at minimum wage, or just above, and are probably quite precarious, in terms of being under the 90-day legislation. It will be probably fairly casualised employment. I have an issue with us wanting to have long-term sustainable support for children in hardship when we have not really done the groundwork to ensure that the workplaces, the types of work, and the payment for that work are going to be sustainable for those families in the long term, because they will be in a position of less power, being potentially new back to the workforce, low skilled, and going into low-paid jobs.

I also have concerns about what happens to the children. All those families, when they are required to be work tested and get back into the workforce, when we are in situations where adequate, good quality, and affordable day care is not available to some of those families—it could be that we are talking about families in rural settings. I also have a major concern when we are talking about the types of roles that might require shift work or working outside the normal hours, when decent and affordable childcare might be available.

So really, in summary, there are some major concerns about the naming of this particular bill. Does it really support children in hardship? How do we define hardship? Is it about the children, or is it about the income that comes into the family? Is it more about the definition of “part-time work” and what the nature of that work might be, or is it really about providing opportunities for families and parents and children to better themselves? I think not, but thank you for the opportunity to make this contribution.

It is great to have an opportunity to rise and speak about the title and commencement clauses of the Support for Children in Hardship Bill. I do intend to talk mostly about the title. I hope to get an opportunity to also talk about the commencement date, but we will see how we go because I have got quite a bit to say about the title.

I want to say what I really do not like about the title of this bill, the Support for Children in Hardship Bill. It is far too accepting, in my view, that in a country like New Zealand we will have children who live in hardship, and that all we really need to do is just support them. I do not like that concept at all, and neither does the Labour Party because the Labour Party has zero tolerance for child poverty—and that is the sort of ambition that you would want from a Government. You would want a Government to say it is not acceptable that children live in hardship or in poverty, rather than to actually give a bill a title that is very accepting of the very idea that in Aotearoa New Zealand, the sort of country where we produce food, where the living standards were once very good, right across the board—today the Government has to name a specific piece of legislation the Support for Children in Hardship Bill.

This bill will become the Support for Children in Hardship Act. It will be on our books for a very long time, in terms of our legislature. I feel offended by that as a New Zealander. If that Government still had the ambition it once said it had for New Zealand it would never think of giving a bill this sort of title—a bill that accepts that in this country children will live in hardship, and that the Government’s only real role in that is to fling them a bit of support.

What is that bit of support the Government is flinging them, under this bill? It turns out to be about $17, or maybe $23.10 at the outmost, per family. We have already heard a number of speakers talk about how the Government has kind of gone into poverty denial on this. Even though we know there are now 305,000 children in this food-producing nation of ours who are living in poverty, the Government lacks ambition so much in this area that it has decided that it will try to address only 18,000 of the most worst-off families.

The reason I raise this is that if the Government really understands poverty and knows the depth of this poverty, it surely knows that adding $17 a week, or maybe $23.10 per week, for each of these families, at the most, is not going to fundamentally change the problem for those children. In fact, statistically, not one of those children will be lifted out of poverty with this addition—not one of those children. These families living in—as the Government calls it in the title of this bill—hardship are living at the most extreme end of hardship in this country. It is completely unacceptable, and it should not be recognised in the name of a bill.

If this Government was truly ambitious for New Zealand and wanted to address this issue, then it would be addressing the fundamental causes of poverty. It would be addressing the lack of wealth distribution we have in this country now, under this Government. It would be addressing the fact that two out of five of these children live in homes where their parents are in paid employment—paid employment—and that that paid employment has such appalling conditions and wages going alongside it that those children live in poverty even though their parents are out earning wages.

These are the families on the zero-hour contracts that the Government wants to codify in law. These are the families that have been forced to choose—well, not choose. They have been told they cannot get the benefit after their child turns a certain age, 3 years of age, and that they must take whatever work is offered to them. That is putting these children in hardship, as this bill names it. If the Government was ambitious it would have had a better title for this bill.

At the outset I indicated that I wanted to address the commencement clause, but I did warn that I had rather a lot to say about the title. I will now move on and briefly address the commencement clause of this bill. Again, it shows a Government that lacks ambition. It shows a Government that lacks urgency over this issue. It announced in its Budget this year—in May this year, many months ago—that it was going to bring this measure in. That measure should have been taken urgently. There should not be a wait until 1 April 2016 before any family can get any benefit from it. If the Government truly understood the depth of the urgency of the need of these families it would have acted an awful lot earlier.

We are about to move into the most expensive period of the year for families. We are moving into the Christmas festive season. For many families this is the most expensive time of year. Yet here we are, on 1 December, and this Government could have moved much more urgently to address this issue and given these families a little bit to come and go on over the so-called festive season—it will not be terribly festive for these families, I can tell you. If the Government was truly committed to the urgency of this, then we would be talking about 1 December—today’s date—for introducing this additional payment.

We have got Christmas coming up. We have got the holiday season coming up. We have got the school year about to start next year, with the cost of uniforms, the cost of school fees, and the cost of stationery. All of those things impact upon families and make it extremely difficult for these so-called children in hardship to participate fully in their education.

I am going to wrap up my contribution there. I think it is extremely disappointing that the Government lacks so much ambition for New Zealand that it accepts that there will be children in hardship in Aotearoa and accepts that doing anything about it is not terribly urgent.

I move, That the question be now put.

I am pleased to take a short call on the title and the commencement of this bill, the Support for Children in Hardship Bill. I would like to reinforce initially, before going on to make other points, the point made by the Labour Party’s Sue Moroney about how sad it is to see the concept and the acceptance of so many of our children living in hardship being put on to the statute book.

That is not the Green Party’s vision for New Zealand. Our vision is for a country where all of our children are able to thrive, and that does not include living in hardship. We know that when a child is living in hardship and is living in poverty, their lifetime opportunities are being taken away from them. Childhood poverty impacts on your ability to learn, on your health, and on your ability to succeed in life, for the rest of your life. To accept that and to put it on to our statute book is a sad thing, and it is a sad day to be doing that.

I would like to also focus on the fact that this bill is suggesting that there is support for children. Just coming back to some of the submissions that were made on this bill, I note Unicef’s contribution. Unicef noted that it felt that we have been so focused on work that we have lost sight of children. To me, that speaks a truth that is quite reflected in this bill. The bill might be better named the “Support for Parents Into Further Work Bill”, because that does seem to be the main thrust of this bill. It is again removing parents’ choice in the way to parent and is putting more people into the job market, even though we have still very entrenched and, I think, unacceptably high levels of unemployment. Over 100,000 people who are in part-time employment are still looking for more hours. This is just flooding the market with another group of people when we know we do not have enough jobs to go around. So the bill would seem even to be better named the “Stick of Ideology Bill”.

I note also in the Unicef submission where it talked about the fact that children say that they want their parents around and that they want them to stop being angry, and that children in this country are really affected by the stress that their parents are experiencing—and these are parents in work and parents out of work. If we were focused on children and supporting children, then actually we would be looking right across the policy levers to improve that situation.

I was at the launch of the living wage in Porirua recently, when there was a young man who got up and spoke. He talked about running away from home at the age of 6 to go down to the local shops to ask for a job because he was so upset and feeling so bad for his parents who were working so hard and were struggling so much and were so stressed that he just wanted to be able to help them out. That is unnecessary and unacceptable. To quote the words of the great Russel Norman, Governments cannot mend a broken heart but they can put food in a kid’s belly, and they should.

If we were looking at supporting our children in this country, that is what we would be focusing on. We would be focusing on making sure that all of our children had enough food and that they all had a stable roof over their head—something that is increasingly unlikely for so many of these children. We would make sure that they were able to attend sports activities and cultural groups, that they could get to different places to visit different people and experience different things, that they would have warm enough clothing in winter, that when it is raining they would have shoes on their feet and raincoats—things that when I grew up in Invercargill in a family, with lots of friends who were working-class families, were just completely taken for granted.

I move, That the question be now put.