Child Poverty Reduction Bill

Madam Chair, thank you. It’s a pleasure to kick off the debate around Part 2 of this bill, which is the more substantive part, and, I imagine, the part where members will want to make a contribution, so mine will be brief.

Just to acknowledge the statements that were actually made both by the Hon Alfred Ngaro and also Marama Davison from the Green Party of Aotearoa, around the drivers of deprivation, I do think it’s absolutely fair to say that we do need to take into account the totality of the environment that children are coming from when we consider issues of deprivation, income deprivation, and material hardship. That is why the bill does include the well-being strategy. That is the place where we do look at some of those much wider issues: where we look at the impact of deprivation on things like access to education, the quality of housing, access to healthcare, and all of those additional issues. But, in terms of the drivers of deprivation, the measures themselves give us a little bit of an indicator, too.

Putting aside, of course, what we already know about inadequacy of income—what we should know as a Government—it tells us a little bit around the before and after. Housing costs give us an indication of whether or not, for instance, housing is driving some of the issues that we’re seeing within households. So, actually, the measures themselves help.

The persistence measure also tells us a message, particularly when you see some of the indicators telling us that children at a certain age—and, again, we know that we need to improve the data set around persistence. But when you see that children under a certain age—for instance, zero to, say, five—are experiencing that more persistent poverty, that tells us a little bit around the impact of the expense of childcare costs in early childhood education and the inability of caregivers to be able to balance those roles of work and care. It tells us something about the income adequacy of sole parents. So the measures themselves do give us a bit of an indication around the drivers of deprivation at one level. I accept that there are many levels to that, but the measures themselves are quite helpful tools to Government, and I just wanted to acknowledge that.

Of course, Part 2 of the bill establishes the measures, the targets, and the reporting. I want to acknowledge that the targets themselves—the reason that we have been very careful around giving some flexibility in that regard is, of course, if there is a change of Government, it will be their prerogative as to how they want to utilise those targets. So there’s a requirement over certain core primary measures having targets set out, and then others which remain an option for the Government of the day. That is because there’s an ultimate hope here that we will see this legislation, as a framework, endure—that it won’t just be the tool of one Government but the tool of many.

Members will know that outside of the four primary measures, which are made up of two income, one hardship, and one persistence measure, we also have the material hardship measure, which is made up of the more direct measures of actual living conditions for households, and the persistent poverty measure, which is where multiple years are spent in income poverty or hardship. There are also six supplementary measures in the bill. Those are included to allow further comparisons. It allows us to report on changes in the depth and severity of poverty. But, again, those are the areas where there’s a bit more flexibility.

Overall, though, our hope is that this suite, when taken as a whole, will enable Governments of every persuasion to be able to use evidence-based policy making and evidence-informed policy making, using these measures as an indicator of where the greatest need is and what will make the biggest difference. But I leave it to members now to make contributions and I’m happy to contribute from the chair.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I have to commend the Prime Minister—or at least, in this case, the Minister for Child Poverty Reduction—for bringing this bill to the House and making child poverty a priority in the way that she has. It is an enormous shame that we live in one of the wealthiest societies in human history, and yet we still find ourselves with stories, every day, of children brought into this world who do not have adequate clothing, housing, often dignity, access to education, shoes, and children who are admitted for dental surgery—not just a trip to the dental nurse we’re all used to, but surgery—to have the stumps of their rotten teeth removed because they have been subsisting on a diet of Coke and Sprite. That is one of the most extraordinary things about New Zealand in 2018.

I want to commend the Minister for bringing a bill that I’d describe as “measurement legislation”—legislation that measures how we’re doing. It doesn’t force Governments to do any particular thing; it just allows the public to see how the Government’s doing. We have great examples of that which passed through this House: the Public Finance (Fiscal Responsibility) Act almost completely put an end to deficits when Governments had to open the books before each election—funny that. The Reserve Bank of New Zealand Act has stopped Governments flooding the country with cheap money before each election, because it required Governments to put their inflation expectations in writing.

So child poverty is important, and putting in place infrastructure, as the Minister called it, or “measurement legislation”, as I would call it, is a powerful tool for changing the outcomes that New Zealanders get—so far, so good. But I thought, when I read through the bill, that it has within it the danger of being a monumental own goal because, with the exception of the hardship measures, it is overwhelmingly focused on income. It’s not a direct measure of all those questions that you might ask about shoes and food and clothes and physical safety and access to education and housing and the things that actually give kids a future. It is overwhelmingly focused on the questions of what proportion of kids live in a household that has more or less than 40 or 50 or 60 percent of the median household income. That’s a real problem for a couple of reasons. One is that it doesn’t actually capture the real question of how kids are being looked after. Are the kids all right—this is not captured by this particular bill, for the most part.

Secondly, it introduces perverse incentives. If we agree that this infrastructure or management legislation is designed to change the behaviour of Governments in the future—just like the Public Finance (Fiscal Responsibility) Act, just like the Reserve Bank of New Zealand Act—then what’s going to be the effect of this legislation on future Governments? Let’s say that the Minister in the chair, Jacinda Ardern, gets her wish and it is taken seriously by Governments of all stripes well into the future. What will happen is this: for the most part, under this bill, future Governments will be able to absolve themselves of responsibility and claim to have solved all the problems of child poverty, if only they tax and spend more. If only they tax people at or above the median income and redistribute it to people in the lower half of the income distribution, the gap closes, the percentage of children in poverty under the measures in this bill reduces, and the Government can say that it’s substantially reduced the problem under the measures in this bill.

Of course, we know that there are households with very high incomes with very delinquent activity and behaviour, and we know that there are households with very low incomes and real thrift who manage to bring up kids who become world-beaters. There are exceptions at both ends. Income alone does not capture it. But there’s a second problem. Not only will this legislation, so focused on income distribution, be ineffective at capturing how kids are really looked after; secondary to that, it actually introduces perverse incentives for Governments, because if Government’s incentive is to tax and transfer more money, one of the effects of that for people who are near the poverty line, as defined by this bill, is that if they work and if they earn more and if they improve their lot, then they’re going to lose the redistribution that Governments put in place to get them above that line.

There is an unfortunate dynamic in this bill. I predict one of its likely effects is that it will encourage Governments to tax and transfer, it’ll make the poverty trap steeper to get out of, and, ironically, it will keep more children in poverty than would’ve happened had the bill not existed at all. That is the perversity of it, and, sadly, that is the logical conclusion of introducing a bill that says Governments can reduce poverty by reducing relative income gaps, because relative income gaps are reduced by Governments using tax and transfer, and tax and transfer increases the marginal tax rates and makes the poverty trap harder to get out of. So that’s the first problem with this bill: its overwhelming focus on income statistics and relative incomes is actually going to make poverty worse in the first instance, and fail to capture what it is in the second instance.

So, in the spirit of—nearly—Christmas, I thought I would help. I’ve brought and tabled a Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) which substantially reforms the bill to focus it on what really matters. This Supplementary Order Paper does two things. Number one, it removes the part of this bill that is disagreeable: all of that focus on income distribution that has the risk—in fact, sadly, I predict, the reality—of increasing poverty and of allowing Governments to avoid the real issues. But, number two, it strengthens the part of the bill that’s actually very agreeable, and that’s the part of the bill that says the chief statistician should ask real questions about whether kids have a separate bed, whether children over 10 have a bedroom free of opposite-sex siblings. It tells you whether or not kids have access to two pairs of shoes, warm winter clothes, etc. That’s the admirable part of this bill, and what this Supplementary Order Paper 155 does is it codifies exactly what should be done and sets out how it should be done.

What should be done and how? It should instruct the chief statistician to borrow from the world-famous Dunedin study and actually interview kids between six and 17 and their families and actually ask the questions. Those questions come in three basic categories. Are the children provided with the essentials—all the things we’ve talked about that are sort of glanced on in the bill but not really defined. Do they have warm winter clothes and a house that’s safe, warm, and dry? Do they have the ability to have friends around for a birthday party, usually once a year? Do they have those basic essentials—material well-being.

But, secondly, are they accessing education? That’s the only way you really get out of poverty. So there’s a series of measures that 200 kids per cohort, per year, would have to be interviewed about—and it’s from six to 17, so you get about 2,200 kids in the study at any given time. Are they going to school regularly? Have they been attending co-curricular activities? These are the kinds of things that most people would want for New Zealand’s children. Those are the questions that the chief statistician would have to ask, by law, of a random sample of New Zealand kids—not “Where are you on the income distribution?” or “What do the relative statistics look like this year at a macro level?”, but what’s happening for actual kids. And that’s the second category, being education.

The third is safety. We need to know how many kids, for instance, referred to Oranga Tamariki have parents who are visited by the police, have been living in a place that is unsafe structurally in terms of housing. This bill would introduce another set of measures which are all about the child’s physical safety.

So I put it to the committee that this is a noble effort using good legislative technology, but it measures the wrong things and it gives Governments the wrong incentives. It’s going to make the problem worse. This SOP 155, on the other hand, would instruct the chief statistician to ask randomly selected kids—200 per cohort per year—the questions that most New Zealanders really want to know about when it comes to child poverty. If this amendment was to be adopted, then we would achieve so much more of what the intentions of this bill are. I hope that the Minister and my parliamentary colleagues will give it some serious thought. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Madam Chair, and I’m pleased to rise and speak in Part 2 of this Child Poverty Reduction Bill on behalf of the National Party, who, of course, will be supporting this legislation. One of the reasons that we are supporting this legislation is the fact that we’ve had the opportunity to improve the bill on its initial drafting.

The reality, though, in terms of the intention of this legislation, is that supporting any attempt to lift children out of poverty is, of course, important for any parliamentarian. If we look at what National achieved in our previous term, particularly highlighting the time coming out of the global financial crisis, we actually shifted and lifted 130,000 children out of poverty during that time. So we do recognise, as a Government, it’s important—as this part does—to measure, to have targets, and to have reports, and one of the areas that I want to come back to is the issue of indicators and, of course, monitoring.

We had a really interesting select committee process. I think it’s fair to say that the majority of submitters had lots to say—in particular, about the measures. Some agreed with all of them, but most of them agreed with some of them. There was quite a debate around whether the percentages were set at the right level, and I do want to say that in terms of the process in the Social Services and Community Committee, it was a thorough one, and I want to acknowledge the efforts of the officials during that process. There were a large number of submissions, and there were a number of suggestions that were incorporated into what is now the final bill.

Just coming back to some of the concerns that National originally had, though, with the bill as introduced—one was the concern about whether or not the targets set by the Government were actually ambitious enough. Part of that was based on the 10-year horizon and 70,000 children being lifted out of poverty, when, actually, in the last five years, National lifted 85,000 children out of poverty. So that was a concern that we expressed throughout this process. I think where we landed, though—and this is where I want to put some of my focus—is on the inclusion of the Supplementary Order Paper around child poverty - related indicators

Just as the speaker before me, David Seymour, spoke about, it is a lot more than income. We want to look at what some of the issues are that indicate to us that there’s a challenge for that child—and, coming back to another speaker, the child obviously doesn’t exist without a family. So it’s being able to look at what some of those other indicators are that tell us useful information and provide us the ability to intervene much earlier with that child or children and with that family. So I do want to thank the Prime Minister for working with leader Simon Bridges, and for the opportunity to meet in person and to work through these particular indicators.

Clause 36A includes child poverty - related indicators, which actually require the Minister to identify one or more indicators. They are not specified in legislation, so there is some flexibility for the Minister, but it’s in one or all of the following areas: income and employment, housing, education and development, health and disability, and any other areas. I would’ve thought that that inclusion of the child poverty - related indicators would have satisfied Mr Seymour in some of the concerns that he raised.

Part of that comes back to the area of focus in the National Government’s time around Better Public Services targets and being able to set targets and to measure, to report to the public on what the progress is, and then the ability for a whole-of-Government approach to intervene earlier to get and to change the trajectory of those outcomes. So I am pleased that we have managed to get the inclusion of those child poverty - related indicators.

This legislation has been a good example of cross-party work. At the heart of it is the commitment of both the Government and National, as the major Opposition, to lift more children out of poverty. It continues the track record that we were on. The baton has now been passed to the current Government, and I acknowledge you for your efforts.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I thank the Hon Louise Upston for her contribution, but I actually want to respond directly to the Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) that’s been put forward by the member David Seymour, SOP 155, not least because, of course, he remains the member of the House yet to be convinced of the wisdom of this legislation, so it might mean that I pay him a little more attention on this occasion.

He made some comments around the targets that are embedded in this bill, and he specifically talked about the relative measures. Look, those have been accepted broadly by the international community. Of course, the relative measures are used by UNICEF, by the OECD. They don’t give us a complete picture on their own, and I accept that, but I would be alarmed if the member is rejecting those measures altogether, because they are well entrenched within the international community as being a good indication of the general well-being of a society, based on those who are living with 50 percent of the median income.

But I just want to acknowledge what the member has said about his Supplementary Order Paper. He said that we might get a better picture if we break down some of the circumstances of individual children into questions, surveyed by the statistician, around things like whether a child lacks pairs of shoes, sets of warm clothes, a waterproof coat, access to meat, fish, or chicken, a separate bed, etc., etc. That is all incredibly important information to know, which is why the member might be interested to know what the definition of material hardship is.

Material hardship, of course, is measured by the number of individuals who identify with not having seven out of 17 particular forms of well-being, in the form of food, clothing, their accommodation, or their ability to pay bills. The list looks like this—you might recognise it, because it’s very similar to the member’s list: enforced lack of essentials, meal with meat, fish, or chicken at least every second day, two pairs of shoes, suitable clothing, home and contents insurance, whether you have borrowed money in the last 12 months, whether or not you could pay an unexpected or unavoidable bill of $500, whether or not you put up with feeling cold to save on heating costs, or whether you postpone visits to the doctor and visits to the dentist. I acknowledge most of these, as far as I can tell, are actually in your list, Mr Seymour.

Mr Seymour, so that is the definition of “material hardship”, and you’ll be very pleased to know that clause 12 in Part 2 of the bill includes material hardship as one of the things that the Government must measure and report on. So exactly what you’ve asked for is exactly here in this bill. We have not taken a singular view of what poverty issues are. We have included reference to material hardship. It is something that we are mindful of and we will be reporting on, and we will be driving activity as a result of reporting on that.

So I hope that the inclusion of the range of issues that you’ve highlighted, and I think you’re right to highlight—we haven’t put the expanded list in the bill. So look, there may be things where there are some minor differences. I think, for instance, you’ve said access to meat—“a meal with meat, fish, or chicken … each day:”. Look, the Minister of Health might have some questions to raise over whether that’s good for bowel health. Apart from that, there’s some slight differences there, but, by and large, many of the things that you’ve raised are included within those surveys that are undertaken around the 17 essential items and whether or not someone falls in the category of being in material hardship by being without a certain number of those. So I’m happy to discuss that further, but I’m hoping we may have convinced the member to support the bill.

Madam Chair, thank you for the opportunity. As I listened to Mr Seymour earlier, on hearing him, I think he was suggesting to the committee that to measure income was the wrong pathway to go forward on this. I could not help but think that in my engagement with the community over the last 12 months in talking about this particular issue, it is often people who have lots of money that tell the people that don’t have a lot of money that we shouldn’t be focusing on measuring income. That is sad, because if he’s the only one that feels that way, then nothing is going to improve in the lives of the people that we are targeting in terms of trying to lift their general well-being. I have not yet seen a shop that gives away bread, other than when the community themselves end up giving away food. But businesses do not, by their very nature, give away ingredients that families might need to feed themselves.

So I go back to the measures. I think it is important to measure income. It is one of the fundamental principles of this country and many democratic countries that the principle of solidarity requires that we all live up to the fact that we allow ourselves to be taxed so that through the collection of that taxation, we are able to provide sufficiently to make sure that every child on our streets gets an education, that every family who needs healthcare gets healthcare, and that everybody has something to be able to put bread on their table. So the measures are important.

In fact, as I sat in the select committee process, by far and large those who made submissions on it thought that this was landmark legislation, and I want to acknowledge the Prime Minister. They all acknowledged the Prime Minister and her leadership in regard to this legislation.

Alfred Ngaro and the colleagues—I think we need to acknowledge the fact that they’ve come on board. They acknowledge that they’ve made some achievements in moving children out of poverty. But I think that what they haven’t acknowledged is the complication of this issue, because the figures still say that 200,000 to 300,000 children are living in poverty, and 150,000 children are living in material hardship, where they are going without seven or more things they need for their general well-being. So it is important that we’re able to measure and track.

It’s important that this whole House gets on board if we are going to make a difference, and the reason why is because it is internationally known that it takes at least three or four generations to lift people who are living in poverty into at least a middle-income situation. I know that in the last year or so, our communities were measured in terms of our economic well-being. The net worth, from my recollection, for New Zealanders was $114,000 for ordinary New Zealanders, $24,000 net worth for Māori, and $12,000 net worth for Pacific families, and that’s just not good enough. It’s not good enough for a country that once upon a time was the leader in ensuring that everybody had something to be able to achieve an income for themselves and their families.

So just before I finish off my contribution, there is a song that comes to mind from many years back, I think in the 1980s:

We are the world

We are the children

We are the ones who make a brighter day

So let’s start giving

I make reference to that because I think the Prime Minister, through this legislation, has put a stake in the ground for every party in this House but also for every citizen and taxpayer of Aotearoa New Zealand. This is important. This is fundamental. If we’re going to lift the well-being of all of our families for the next generation or more, we need to start the work here, and starting the work means that we’ve got to have some benchmarks. We’ve got to measure ourselves and, hopefully, future Governments will follow suit and increase the measurements that are required.

I must add my thoughts to Part 2, picking up on the discussion in this part so far on the floor, and particularly the importance of the measures, and I absolutely tautoko Aupito William Sio’s emphasis on how important it absolutely is to measure income—absolutely important. I was reminded of speaking to a constituent food bank worker in Palmerston North just last night. They do offer—to illustrate the point of incomes—budgeting advice, but she said very, very clearly, “These families do not need budgeting advice. They need more income.”

So I was really wanting to pick up that, of course, Part 2, right from clause 9 through to, I think, at least clause 20, is very specific and takes a varied number of income measures, particularly around disposable household income and certain percentages that children and families may fall into at various parts of the year. I absolutely welcome that, because we know that income is important.

I wanted to move into—with Madam Chair’s permission—as other members have highlighted, some of the ideologies around those measures that I think are really important to debate, and say that those measures are in a context. No legislation in this House is in an isolated context. All the legislation that we debate, getting down into the parts of each bill, is within a context of the whole other work programme and other bills that we debate here in this House. We cannot talk about child well-being and about setting targets and measures of child well-being that pick up on income and disposable household levels without also understanding what are the systemic factors that bring groups and communities to certain income levels and picking up on exactly the systemic bias and discrimination that is inherent, and has long been for at least decades, particularly to Māori and Pacific children of their families.

We can take any number of examples, which is why, as David Seymour wanted to go further outside the measurement of the incomes in this part of the bill, he went to a different place. He went to getting into the agency of families inside the homes, actually. I’d prefer us to trust a little bit more the agency of families with incomes inside their own homes. I want us to step outside that, actually, and go to the systemic injustices that have an absolute impact on how child well-being manifests itself.

We can take any number—discrimination in who is targeted and charged with cannabis, for example. Some of those are young people and some of those are parents of these very children who we are trying to keep well. Automatically, you can think of the fact that non-Māori and Māori young men smoke cannabis at the same rate, but it is Māori young men who are more disproportionately apprehended and criminalised. I can see Madam Chair’s face—

CHAIRPERSON (Poto Williams): Thank you.

—so, coming back to the bill, what that means then is that I also agree with David Seymour that we need to go wider than incomes, but let’s go to the systemic injustice causes of what brings children to well-being or not. I simply wanted to stand and make that point—

CHAIRPERSON (Poto Williams): Kia ora.

—very clear. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you very much, Madam Chair. I rise to take hopefully a short call and respond to a few things that have been said. Aupito William Sio—well, where to start? First of all, this is not about income as he said; it’s about relative income, and that’s one of the problems with the bill, and that’s one of the reasons why I have proposed to change it and remove those relative income measures, because knowing that a household is within a certain percentage of another household’s income doesn’t actually help. The whole society could get twice as wealthy and have the same people underneath half of the median income—it doesn’t make any difference at all as to what can be bought. And I’m not surprised that Aupito William Sio didn’t understand that because his argument was ad hominem—to attack me because I’m rich, I mustn’t understand what income is about. And I’ve got good news and bad news for Mr Sio. The bad news is I’m not rich; the good news is I do understand.

Now, of course, I can’t really blame him for his poor standards of argument, because he’s got a leader that does similar things. Jacinda Ardern, the Minister in the chair, stood up and said, “Well, I don’t have any answer to David Seymour’s criticism of these relative income measures. I can’t explain why they work or why they will make New Zealand a better place”—in fact, it almost sounded like she was accepting the criticisms. And then she said, “But the rest of the world does it, so it must be right.” Well, imagine if Kate Sheppard had used that logic.

The fact of the matter is that New Zealand, throughout its history, has not sought to be like the rest of the world. We’ve sought to lead the world. And I’d like the Prime Minister, or the Minister in the chair in this case, to stand up and explain not that UNICEF and the OECD have similar measures but, actually, why relative income measures are actually going to make New Zealand a better place and why they won’t be befallen by the criticisms that I raised. Because your saying “Everyone else has bad policy, as well” is not an argument for good policy.

The next thing I would say is that she is right in her attempt to win my last recalcitrant no vote on this bill to say that yes, some of the measures, but far from all of them that are laid out in this Supplementary Order Paper (SOP), this amendment to this bill, are in the current chief statistician’s definition of material hardship. That’s true. I’d be crazy not to have used some of the things that the chief statistician uses. But the bill as returned from the second reading doesn’t actually give those definitions; we just rely on the chief statistician to decide what the measures should be.

I put it to this committee that, actually, we’d better achieve the objectives of the bill if only we were prepared to put them out in writing. And I’d put it to the committee that, actually, the amendments proposed and the measures proposed in Supplementary Order Paper 155 that I’ve put forward are the right ones. They are the things that people want to know: are kids physically safe? Are they getting access to education? Are they getting access to essentials—food and so on? Those are the things, and if they’re the right things—and the Minister’s tried to say that they are—then let’s have an amendment that actually sets them out in the legislation, rather than having one line that says the chief statistician can decide what should be material hardship. That’s the next thing I’d say.

There was another problem with the bill as the Minister introduced it that she kind of let slip out as she was speaking. And it’s this: all of the measures currently in the bill are already being produced. Anybody can go to the website of the Ministry of Social Development or Statistics New Zealand and find out what income distributions are and find out what the material hardship measures are. And now the Minister’s turning around to ask the officials if that’s true. I love it. The Minister didn’t know. But the fact of the matter is that we actually have all of the measures that this bill brings about already available. What this amendment that I’ve proposed will do is stipulate that the Government will actually be reporting those statistics that matter.

And so I ask again, perhaps the Minister could be the first member to join me in supporting this SOP.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I’d just like to speak to Part 2 of this bill, because I’d like to sum it up by saying that, really, no one wants to live in a rich country that’s full of poor people. And I think even the previous speaker, David Seymour, mentioned that before, about living in a very wealthy age, when we’ve never been better off. But there are many people in our society who are a lot worse off, and one of the problems with the gap is that those people are never seen. It’s so easy in the modern world to travel through and not actually have to see those nasty bits of society. We read about them in the paper, perhaps, and tut, tut as we read them. We may even like watching the television shows that focus on poverty, and we sit there and enjoy, somewhat perversely, those things.

What this bill does—and I see you, Madam Chair, looking at me, wanting to know where I’m going—and what is important about this, particularly in Part 2, is that it focuses on that moment each year when, statistically, we are the focus of the media, when we have people lined up in the gallery here, when we have people sitting watching televisions: Budget day. At the moment, Budget day is just about the money. It’s about how we’ve gone, and we have those little measures that go through—what gets measured gets done. We have all that tick-box legislation. We tick off what’s been done, but, really, those who are watching aren’t forced to look at things they don’t want to see.

What we all need to look at is the effect of inequality, and what this bill means is that for at least one day a year those who are focused on nothing else but the economy will be forced on Budget day to look at it. If you look at the clauses here, 29 through to 36—where we focus on how we’re actually going to bring our real performance as a society, our real performance as a Government—somewhere, one day this year, whether it be 3.30 in the afternoon, we’re going to look and see how we’ve done. We may go on with our business till next year, but at least next year, once again, we’ll be reminded as to how we’re doing as a society—that, rather than the devil take the hindmost, we will actually ensure that those hindmost are brought to our attention.

So I’d just like to take this brief offering to say that this is an excellent piece of legislation and that this particular section—Part 2 of the bill—ensures that, whatever we look at on that one day of the year, society is going to have to be forced to look at how we are treating those at the tail end. Thank you, Madam Chair.

This being my first time in the chair, I’m learning some of the nuances of being in the chair, and one of them is the immense frustration one can feel at not being able to yell an interjection across the room during some of the more arrogant statements made by the last member, David Seymour. Of course, being the Minister for this bill, I couldn’t possibly know that there is currently no information for persistent poverty currently available as contained in the bill! If the member would like to know what I was turning around to officials to say, it was exactly that: there is no measure for persistent poverty, which is what this bill legislates. Through the legislation and through the independence of the Government Statistician, we have to develop up the persistent poverty measure and provide data for it. It is a primary measure, though, that we will have to wait a little bit of time to be able to develop and report on. But, of course, how could I possibly know that without relying on the officials behind me!

💬 David Seymour: Well, why did the Minister turn around?

Secondly, I’d like to refer as well—because I’d like to turn around and have someone that I can bemoan the fact that you didn’t know that. Secondly, I’d like to point out that if the member needs another reason why we can’t support his Supplementary Order Paper 155, he, of course, is suggesting that we would survey 200 children. That would be statistically not a robust way to undertake any kind of survey work. The member would know that, of course, if he’d looked at the household income survey, which doesn’t give us enough robust data as it is now. That’s why we’ve funded Statistics New Zealand to be able to survey 20,000, in order to give us the kind of data that we can rely on to make significant decisions.

Finally, the debate around whether or not measures that capture relative incomes—most members of the House think inequality matters. Most members of this House do. Now, if that member wants to argue that inequality doesn’t matter and it doesn’t have an impact on society, then he is welcome to make that argument; he just won’t find any support from this quarter.

Finally, the idea that rebelling against the Child Poverty Reduction Bill means that he’s the same as Kate Sheppard—I don’t think I even need to speak to that, so I’ll just take my seat.

Um—I’ll call Marama Davidson.

Thank you. I just think I might not be as fun as the member at my side here, but I did want to pick up—and it goes to my previous talk—clause 34A, which particularly picks up indicators. And I actually did want to mention that that goes to looking at all of the other related issues that absolutely impact on child well-being. It mentions here, for example, “(1) The Minister must identify, for monitoring reports, 1 or more child poverty related indicators related to all or any of the following areas;”. I want to go through them if Madam Chair would please: “(a) income and employment: (b) housing: (c) education and development: (d) health … and disability: (e) any other areas.” So of course that helps us to remain linked to the systemic causes and other factors and indicators of child well-being. Thank you.

I just want to explain to the committee that I would never compare myself with Kate Sheppard, but I just wanted to make the point that this Prime Minister’s a wee way off, too, if she’s only going to use the justification of policy as “other people overseas do something similar”. That’s the fact.

I’d also just make the point that when I challenged the Prime Minister that the statistics of this bill are already available, she accepts that’s true with the exception of persistence. Well, she’s going to need a lot of persistence in a lot of things, but the fact of the matter is that persistence is simply concatenating multiple years together. So to say that somehow persistence is not measured—and look, if I’m being arrogant it’s OK turn around and ask the officials—is simply not true. Persistent poverty is simply poverty over several years and if poverty measures are being collected each year then I think we can work out what the persistence of it is without any great difficulty.

I want to correct the Minister in a massive misapprehension about the amendment that I’ve put forward. She thinks that 200 people will be surveyed every year. It’s only needed to read, as the Minister is doing now, the Supplementary Order Paper—it’s less than three pages—and find the bit where it says “200 per cohort from 6 to 17”. That’s actually 11 years, 11 cohorts, and 11 times 200 is 2,200. You can make arguments about sample sizes and accuracy, but the fact is that if you’ve got 2,200 people as a sample then you’ve got accuracy down to 1 and 2 percent on the measures at the top level, and between 3 and 4 percent even if you go two or three layers down—so you break people up into different groups.

To say that that’s not statistically significant shows that she’s not thinking about statistics. Actually, to say that a piece of paper that says clearly 2,200 people is actually only 200 is not giving the amendments put forward in this committee due respect. So with that in mind, I’ll give a going, going, gone one last time. If the Prime Minister wants me to be the last person to vote for her misguided bill, then I’m going to invite her to be the first person to join me—and, who knows, maybe we could join in with Kate as well—to actually support some world-leading common sense of legislating to measure child welfare in a practical way that tells the people of New Zealand if the kids are really all right. Thank you, Madam Chair.

The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 155 in the name of David Seymour to Part 2 be agreed to.