Social Security (Mandatory Reviews) Amendment Bill

I move, That the Social Security (Mandatory Reviews) Amendment Bill be now read a second time.

This bill seeks to amend the Social Security Act to enable regular reviews of some benefits. The bill will ensure more clients are paid the correct entitlement by introducing a requirement that the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) must review some specified benefits annually. The specified benefits are notable because they do not expire. Without the requirement to reapply, some people receive these benefits for many years, without the need to contact MSD. In this speech, I want to touch more on the nature of the reviews and how they will operate. The only reason a client’s payments would change as a result of this bill is if something has changed that affects their entitlement—like their income, for example—since they last confirmed their details to MSD.

As a result of these changes, it is possible that some clients will see their payments increase. For example, they may have additional costs relating to their disability that is not reflected in their disability allowance because they hadn’t informed MSD. It is also possible that some people may have a reduction in their payment rate, or lose entitlement if they are no longer eligible.

The process is very different to a reapplication, which is required for people seeking the jobseeker support and sole parent support. Clients will be given at least 20 working days’ notice of the review. MSD will present the information it holds about clients to them, and all they have to do is say whether or not that information is still correct. If the information is correct, their payments will automatically continue; if the information is incorrect, a staff member will work with a client to update their information and confirm their new entitlement, if any. Clients will be able to complete their review through various channels and they can request support from MSD if it’s needed. If a client doesn’t respond to the review within the given time frame, MSD will stop their benefit. They will have further time to respond; if they do not, their benefit will be cancelled and they will need to reapply. I commend this bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Now, quite obviously, we don’t agree with the motion, and it’s another kick in the guts for people at ground level. It just continues, this afternoon—a continuation of that.

I thought I’d read a couple of things that some of our very learned people out in the community are saying. The Salvation Army, for instance, regarding automation stated that automatic decision-making “cannot account for the complexities we often see in the individuals we support”, such as financial hardship, ejections, and mental health or unstable living conditions. I would always think that you would take into account the Salvation Army’s recommendations, given that they’re a pretty much apolitical organisation. They work with whoever the Government is to do some sterling work in our communities. So that’s a group that you should be listening to.

The Law Society say that “This raises significant concern about how the use of automated systems will apply where the sanctions provisions involve some sort of evaluative judgement, for example those relating to money management and community work.”

These types of views and recommendations have to be put into perspective. The Welfare Expert Advisory Group 2019 report made the recommendation to remove the requirement to reapply for a benefit every 52 weeks. “MSD is expected to provide full and correct entitlements through regular reviews (at least annually)”. So I want to commend the previous Minister, Carmel Sepuloni, because we were certainly on track in terms of some of that work.

The regulatory impact statement (RIS) alone shows that the Government should not have proceeded with these changes. The RIS for this bill highlights that one of the consequences may be that MSD will have to direct more resources towards compliance and therefore away from employment initiatives. The other side of it is, with respect to our MSD staff, some of them are so busy with the administrative work that they won’t be able to apply the time needed to actually roll out some of the changes that this Government wants. So the reality is they’ll have to literally put less resources into helping beneficiaries into work. Surely that’s where the time should be spent. That’s where the priority should be.

Research also cited in the RIS highlights that sanctions may increase again. I know the other side say, “Oh, this is not about sanctions.”; this is all about sanctions.

💬 Joseph Mooney: This is nothing to do with sanctions.

Oh, here we go again! I’m going to have to have a cup of tea with Mr Mooney. Madam Speaker, me and Mr Mooney, we’re going to have to go and have a cup of coffee, because clearly he does not understand—

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Lunch time is coming. That sounds like an invitation.

Lunch time is coming! Yeah—he can buy me lunch, Madam Speaker. He can buy me lunch, because, you know—

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Now we’ll go back to the bill.

Going back to the bill. But, as I said, research cited in the RIS highlights that sanctions—again, and I keep saying it—may increase mental and physical health problems, including substance abuse and poverty. The RIS highlights that previous work on reapplication showed that cancellations of the benefit as part of the reapplication process often led to a new application, suggesting procedural denials rather than ineligibility. The RIS also highlighted that focusing on those close to a return to work, via case management, was almost certainly to the detriment of long-term beneficiaries.

I think damning job seekers and their partners with needless bureaucracy that will be managed by a faceless artificial intelligence (AI) programme, as if their disability has magically healed since you last asked them, is not the track or the way that they should go.

Apparently, Elon Musk, a great supporter of the National Party, is concerned about AI, but apparently MSD and this Government are not, despite concerns from the Privacy Commissioner, who has really come out on this. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner has requested the inclusion—and Mr Mooney will know that—of the following comment: “The Privacy Commissioner was not consulted during the policy development and non-financial section initiatives were not traversed as required by the Cabinet manual.” Automated decision-making can provide significant efficiencies, but we also know from overseas experience that it needs to be used judicially—judiciously, I should say—with care to avoid privacy—

💬 Joseph Mooney: Say it again!

Judiciously—how does that sound? Is that a bit better? Do you want me to say it in Māori for you? Ha, ha! I won’t, because none of you understand Māori. You’re a disgrace to the country in that area. You already know that. Where’s your one Māori speaker? Oh, he’s gone. Oh, no—Greg. Where’s Greg? Oh, no, he’s gone too, so never mind.

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: No. You can’t refer to who has gone.

My apologies, Madam Speaker. My apologies.

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Thank you.

The Government wants AI to find ways to sanction job seekers. It’s not going to be used to help them find jobs. That’s the problem here. The use of AI and technology, that’s all fine, but how are you using that? You’re using that against people at the coalface, people who should be supported. Penalising them with sanctions that remove their agency of spending money with the money management scheme—which makes it impossible, as we’ve highlighted through this process, for beneficiaries to pay for rent, for the power bill, and for kids’ school uniforms—is a terrible way of working.

This isn’t welfare reforms. What people are seeing from this Government, it’s like a campaign against the vulnerable. It’s like a campaign against the poor for having the temerity to ask for help from their Government, who’ve purposefully crashed the economy and pushed unemployment up higher. We know this to be the truth—we know this to be the truth—purposely crashing, and then blaming Labour for everything. That’s the strategy. “Oh, it’s Labour’s fault. Everything is Labour’s fault.”, that’s what they’re saying.

But we know that the tide has turned. And with the recent attacks on women in this country from this Government to subsidise their Budget—what an embarrassment that was the other day, that you had the Minister of Finance—

💬 Hon Member: Where’s Barbara?

—admitting that they had to throw women under the bus to get the Budget out. Twelve billion dollars taken off women just so they could get a Budget out.

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: I’m sorry to interrupt, Mr Jackson, but I’m hearing calls from the other side of the House specifically asking where a person is by their first name, and it’s not appropriate. Please stop.

Oh, my apologies, again, Madam Speaker.

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: No, not you.

Oh, not me?

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Not you—no.

OK. I knew it was them!

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: You’re doing fine. You’ve got one minute, 23 seconds left if you wish to take it.

I knew it was them! It was probably Chris Bishop’s fault, Madam Speaker.

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: No, no. We’re not blaming—

No, it wasn’t Chris Bishop’s fault? OK.

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Carry on, otherwise you won’t have one minute, 12 seconds left.

Oh, thank you very much, Madam Speaker.

This bill is another shameful bill, though, from Chris Bishop, who drives the ship, and it’s another punch down in terms of beneficiaries and our community. Why did you do this, Mr Bishop? Why did you sacrifice women? Why did you throw them under the bus for your Budget? Why did you let David Seymour embarrass you? I know he’s one of your best mates from way back, but you still shouldn’t have let him embarrass you like that. I was looking at a photo of you and David in the old days. You looked a bit younger then. But why did you—

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: About the bill.

About the bill? I thought I was on the bill. Anyway, all I want to say is this is yet another bill that we oppose because we have got the right strategies for our people. We are sick and tired of the punitive, harsh, cold, ruthless strategy from Chris Bishop and his National Government. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s really clear that the Government has decided to let beneficiaries eat coal, because the savings produced by this Budget are coming from some of our most vulnerable and poorest communities out there. The Government has chosen to target low-income renters and people on the benefit to save a substantive amount of money. If we look at this bill, what we do know is that the Government will be saving over $200 million in savings over the next five years due to the 225,000 claims being reviewed. What we also know is that, despite what the Minister may say and may claim, the regulatory impact statement has warned the Minister that, actually—and I will quote; this is about improving accuracy. She talked a lot in her first reading speech about how this will help improve accuracy, because, right now, almost half of benefit entitlements are incorrectly assessed. That is, in large part, due to the stresses that the front line is facing. The Minister is quite happy to offload this to an algorithm, and the regulatory impact statement told us, “However, depending on the design of the algorithms used, it is possible for the use of [automatic decision-making] to entrench existing inequities in the welfare system as these can be built into the data collection.”

What we do know is that there is the potential for harm in this piece of legislation. The Government, as usual, didn’t allow for adequate consultation to happen, because they’re so arrogant that they think that they can just ram this through, scared of facing up to the communities that this could be negatively affecting. I challenge the Minister to release the information to guarantee to this House and for us to have an adequate, robust debate at the committee of the whole House on the algorithm that the Ministry of Social Development will be using to assess and evaluate the benefit entitlements of some of our most vulnerable, most at risk of homelessness, most at risk of hardship, and most at risk of violence communities impacted by this bill.

I challenge the Minister to release the RIS—the regulatory impact statement, which is, basically, the only document that we’ve been given to see the analysis of the Ministry of Social Development in relation to this bill—unredacted. They’ve covered up a bunch of sections of the regulatory impact statement, which means that they’re preventing adequate scrutiny in relation to the legislation. They should give us the whole document, completely unredacted, so that they can be held to account for the decisions that they’re making, because it is the most vulnerable people who will be subjected to these 52-week reviews.

I know that the member before me, the Hon Willie Jackson, called these “benefit sanctions”. They are benefit sanctions by another name because it’s another tool for the Ministry of Social Development to deprive people of income support. If people do not comply with these reviews adequately, they will be stripped of their income support. That’s a benefit sanction by another name. It’s another tool for the Minister to meet her target of 50,000 less people on the benefit. It’s not about getting 50,000 people into work and out of poverty; it’s 50,000 people who are not receiving income support. This bill will help her meet her target of punching down on those who need support.

I think the Minister was afraid, once again, of being told by people on the benefit that their experiences with Work and Income have not been positive. In fact, not just under this Government but throughout decades, we have had the Welfare Expert Advisory Group tell us about the many challenges in relation to the culture at Work and Income and the challenges that people face. Under this Government, we have seen reports of an increase in decline of hardship grants. We have seen reports of an increase in declines in emergency housing grants, and now we have a bill, under urgency, that does not guarantee a material benefit for our communities doing it tough but, instead, offloads work from the front lines on to an algorithm without a guarantee of having positive impacts on our communities. This is all part of a plan to offload and under resource the front line at the Work and Income offices and pass things either to the phone line, to MyMSD, or to a faceless algorithm at a time when people are reporting they’re waiting, for example, hours to get to someone on the phone at MSD or waiting days—sometimes a week—to get a face-to-face appointment.

The Minister also hasn’t outlined what the so-called potential and safeguard mechanisms are for someone to challenge the findings of the algorithm and the automated decision-making in the analysis given to us. For example, there are supposed to be options that someone who’s receiving income support can state that the information presented to them by the automated decision-making systems is incorrect, and then they say, “Well, all we have is that a staff member processes the review and resets the review date or will stop the benefit if the client is ineligible.” It doesn’t talk about exactly how that will be communicated to them—for example, there’s no guarantees about the timelines where a staff member will actually get back to the person on the benefit. But what it will do is increase the stress that someone will be facing, because, for example, if the automatic decision-making system tells someone, “Hey, I have found that your benefit entitlements have been incorrectly assessed and you risk losing your entirety of your benefit.”, that person will now be wondering, “Am I about to become homeless?” That is the reality that people face. In the regulatory impact statement, due to a lack of a select committee process, we haven’t been given enough information about exactly how a staff member will process the review and reset the review date.

I also think the Minister was factually incorrect when she said that these automatic decision-making, 52-week reviews are triggered as a result of changes in circumstances. They happen automatically, right? So, again, the way in which people will be targeted will be hard for people to actually get certainty and understanding of when that will be happening and the impact that it will have. I think, as the regulatory impact statement found, let’s name the groups that, once again, the Government has decided to disproportionately target once more. It’s not those CEOs doing it really well and hoarding all the wealth; it’s Māori. We’ve had in the regulatory impact statement that Māori could be disproportionately negatively impacted, particularly by changes in their entitlements to benefit, and Pacific people and older people, as well as disabled people.

I think that this speaks to a Government that is quite happy, as part of their savings, to target some of the communities that are most disproportionately impacted by poverty, not because of their own decisions or their own circumstances but because of Government decisions throughout the decades.

💬 Joseph Mooney: This is a ramble with no relevance to the bill.

RICARDO MENÉNDEZ MARCH: Once again, I find it pretty outrageous that Joseph Mooney, the chair of the committee that we could have evaluated this bill under, has decided to turn this whole debate into a laughing matter and simply just gives constant heckles when I think he should front up to the harms that this bill can cause. If he’s so confident that this bill doesn’t have the capacity to cause harm, then tell us. Tell us in your contribution.

Anyway, through the Speaker, what I do want to emphasise is that the Green Party, obviously, does not support this bill and we do have a completely different vision for an income support system that treats people with respect and dignity. In fact, having an income guarantee, instead of, for example, what we have right now, would take away the need for automatic decision-making for the purposes of assessing these many automated decision-making systems. It would actually probably save MSD far more money and time than having to do what the Government is doing right now. We have a fully costed plan to address this, and unlike punching down on those most vulnerable, as we have seen in the analysis presented to us in this bill, we’ll make the wealthy few pay anyway.

💬 Joseph Mooney: What a complete load of nonsense, Ricardo.

RICARDO MENÉNDEZ MARCH: I just heard that this is a bunch of nonsense. What I do think is nonsense, what I do think is a lot of BS, despite the part where Nicola Willis says this is a “no BS Budget”, is having this kind of legislation being rushed through urgency. There was no reason to have this under urgency. There was no rush for this. There’s no rush for this bill. All the rush we have here is because the Government had to scramble to save money now, because they realised they can’t afford the tax cuts for the wealthy. There was no reason to have this under urgency. There’s nothing in this bill, or in the analysis that told us that the Government was under some form of time pressure to make sure we can have an algorithm to review people’s benefit entitlements—there’s no urgency for this. But the Government chose to push it through under urgency none the less, to target beneficiaries, to create savings for the initiatives that will benefit the fossil fuel industry, the mining CEOs, the wealthy landlords doing it well, and the people that they talk to at the Koru Lounge, instead of, for example, the Salvation Army officers who have come out and—rightfully so—criticised the extension of automatic decision-making.

We don’t support the disgrace of a bill, and we call on the Government to actually allow for a select committee process so that people that they’re scared off can adequately contribute to this debate.

I’m more than happy to take this call and bring some common sense back to the House. It is not unreasonable to expect, if you’re receiving a benefit of some sort, to have a review once a year—a review. And if your information is all the same and it’s completely correct, nothing changes. How is that unreasonable? On this side of the House, we believe in common sense. We believe in treating taxpayers’ money with respect. So I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to support the second reading of the Social Security (Mandatory Reviews) Amendment Bill. There’s been a lot of talk about the automated decision-making (ADM) system during these debates. I’m old enough to remember the days when we worked out the payroll by hand. We got a document from the IRD and we manually had to look line by line to see how much PAYE went out for every single employee. But here’s the thing: times have changed and everything is moving forward. Everything is getting more automated. It is something that we need to do. We cannot stay stagnant and not move ahead with the times.

This is one way we can do things more efficiently, and here’s the positive thing about having the ADM used: when more of that is used, then that will free up some of the time so that a human can speak to a human when they need one-on-one support. So there is a positive in using this.

New Zealand First and our coalition partners are all about efficiency—not wasting time and money, and taking care of the people, not giving speeches that are just a sound bite but giving facts. On that note, I commend this bill to the House.

Just before I call the next member, I understand that Te Pāti Māori has handed their call to the Greens. So can I clarify: is this going to be a 10-minute speech from the Greens? [Interruption] OK. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. I rise on behalf of the Green Party in strong opposition to the Social Security (Mandatory Reviews) Amendment Bill. This is yet another example of the Government using bureaucracy as a blunt instrument against those already doing it tough—another example of a Government more interested in policing poverty than solving it. It is a bill that will deepen the stress and surveillance of our welfare system, a system that should be rooted in care, dignity, and trust. I’m proud to live in a country that supports people in need, and I am ashamed to know that this Government is making decisions on behalf of our country that are cruel, greedy, and push more people into hardship.

This bill mandates that every person receiving the supported living payment, disability allowance, and other supports must go through a mandatory review every 52 weeks. It means that every year, tens of thousands of people, including disabled people, older New Zealanders, and our most vulnerable whānau will be dragged through a process that’s invasive, stressful, and unnecessary, punishing poor people for being poor. And not only that, the bill enables automated decision-making kitted to conduct these reviews. No guarantee of human oversight, no space for context, for compassion, or for complexity; just a machine deciding whether or not a person gets to keep their basic means of survival.

What this bill does not do is improve outcomes for the people it targets. It will not reduce poverty, it will not support whānau, and it will not create a more just or compassionate welfare system. Instead, it adds another layer of stress for people already battling to make ends meet. It creates more work for front-line case managers, not less, and for disabled people—many who rely on the supported living payment and disability allowance—it sends a cruel message that no matter how long-term or permanent their condition is, it must be continually proven that they are still disabled.

This must be taken in context of the broader barriers that disabled people face. It is dehumanising, it is unnecessary, and it is wrong. And it is happening at the exact same time that this Government is making brutal cuts to the incomes and supports that whānau rely on. The Budget’s Child Poverty Report 2025, released just days ago, confirmed what we already feared. This Government’s policies are child poverty and increasing the number of children living in material hardship. Further, it stated that this Budget will have no meaningful impact on child poverty rates and does nothing to meet our child poverty reduction targets—nothing. The decision to means test the Best Start payment will remove vital support from 62,000 parents, 55,000 of whom will now get nothing in their baby’s first year.

I want to talk about the use of urgency for these bills that are being passed. Usually, the second reading comes after the select committee process, a process that gives experts and people affected by the upcoming bill a chance to have their say and tell us, the decision makers, about how the bill will affect their lives, their children’s lives, and their whānau’s lives. It’s a chance for them to scrutinise this bill. It’s democratic and it’s fair, but this Government has decided to lock out the public and subject experts from scrutinising the bill.

The regulatory impact statement says that no public consultation was sought, and because no one could submit on the select committee process, my usual process of being able to take quotes and uplift the voices of the communities that this bill most affects, like disabled people, like Māori, like Pacific people, like our kaumātua, and like our young people, means that I have gathered some of these quotes myself.

The Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) says—and I quote—“The Government has put up a policy package knowing it will increase child poverty in Aotearoa. CPAG estimates the Budget will lock around an additional 20,000 children in poverty over the next three years.” I take a quote from Jacqui Southey, an advocacy director at Save the Children: “Recessions are a time when more resources should be extended to people who are struggling the most, not less.” She is worried that child poverty is going to be increasing because of the decisions that this Government is making.

A quote here from Bonnie Robinson from the Salvation Army, in their Social Policy and Parliamentary Unit: “Children in low-income households should not be the ones paying the highest price to meet Government goals of bringing the books back into order.” Bonnie is calling for immediate changes to the welfare system to lift children out of hardship. This bill and the previous bill are not what she meant by immediate changes.

As Alicia Sudden from the New Zealand Council of Christian Social Services put it: “this Budget will leave thousands of children in poverty.” This bill continues this trend and it will add new barriers to those already on the margins. It will deepen the stresses for families navigating disability, low incomes, and the rising cost of living. It is not care; this is about control and policing people in poverty.

I want to take the time to really appeal to the love that many of the members in this House have for Jesus—Jesus, who called his followers to care for the poor, not to burden them further. Jesus preferred the company of the poor, the marginalised, and the disabled. Jesus showed us that greed has no place in leadership. I ask the members on the other side: what would Jesus do? Jesus would choose compassion over greed and he would choose justice over profits for the greedy few.

The Green Party believes in a welfare system built on trust, not suspicion. That is the country that I am proud to live in, one that cares for our disabled people, that cares for our elderly, that cares for our children, and a system that lifts people up, not grinds them down. A system that recognises that people who need support the most should not have to fight the hardest to get it or to keep it.

Poverty is a political choice. Instead of bringing it to an end, the coalition has prioritised lining the pockets of the wealthy. We want a system where income support is simple, fair, and sufficient, where people aren’t forced to justify their existence to a faceless algorithm. The algorithm doesn’t have compassion. The algorithm can’t understand the complexities that are faced by people who need our support, where compassion, not compliance, is a guiding principle.

We will be voting against this bill, and we urge others in the House to do the same. I implore the other side of the House to reach into your compassion for our children, and I ask you: what would Jesus do?

Thank you, Madam Speaker. This Government is going to bring in structured literacy, which will, hopefully, help people, like the Opposition, actually get some reading comprehension and actually read the bills and understand what they’re about, because they don’t.

This bill makes sure that the Ministry of Social Development will check that beneficiaries are getting the right rate of assistance once a year. It doesn’t change the rules around eligibility. These Luddites over here don’t understand what this automated decision-making will be. This will just trigger a review, process a review, and suspend or cancel a client’s benefit if they don’t respond within a specified time period. It keeps the human in the system to make sure people get the right amount that they need.

This is not a laughing matter; this is a serious matter, but we are laughing at the Opposition because they don’t even read policy. I commend this bill to the House.

Oh, what a curious speech that I’m going to respond to a little bit. Some interesting words in there like “Luddite” and an accusation that the Opposition doesn’t read the bills or the policy.

Well, the member will be very happy to know that I spent considerable time reading this bill. I’ve even—[Interruption]—been looking at the—

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: OK, we’ll just listen to one speaker at the moment. Interjections are fine but not arguments across the House from both sides.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’ve spent some time this morning looking at the regulatory impact statement (RIS), and what a surprise. In an urgency debate from this Government, there is actually a RIS, so well done on that, and even a departmental disclosure document. And I will be referring to those.

Now, the member who just resumed his seat said this is just about reviews, and we’ve heard that from a number of members. If it is simply about reviews, why is it here in Budget urgency? Might that be because the RIS, on page 12, says that the cost of the IT for this will be $5.339 million and the fulltime-equivalent costs associated with that is $7.559 million. Is it also because in that RIS it talks about the expected $238.302 million in benefits or related expenses savings over five years? This is about money.

Now, if the Government wants to recoup money from reviews, then that is their choice. But do not come and tell the Opposition that it isn’t about money; it’s about simply doing a review. It is about money. We are in a Budget debate. It is that simple.

Now, a word that I’ve been using a little bit is “dystopian”, because this is dystopian and it’s not what I was expecting to be talking about on a Saturday morning. So what we know and what we’ve heard from the other speakers is that there is automated decision-making (ADM). I want to acknowledge that in the Social Security Act, and the change that appears to be made in 2023, there is already an ability for some automated decision-making. So that already exists. But what we have in this bill at clause 5 is, in addition to that—and I want Mr Mooney, the member for Southland, to note the use of the word “sanctions”, because this is a new word introduced into section 363A(3), Mr Mooney.

I mention that because we’ve heard from Government benches that this has nothing to do about sanctions. But here is the word in the bill that perhaps the Government members might want to read. Perhaps the Government members would have taken more time to consider this had they been through a select committee process.

So there we go. We have section 363A, which already existed, but the addition is—so there was already the specified provisions about sharing child support payment information. But then there is a new paragraph (b) about sanctions; and then there is also a paragraph (c), which is very pertinent to this piece of legislation, obviously, because it’s about mandatory reviews by the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) of specified benefits; there’s a new paragraph (d) as well. So it is interesting that there are those changes, and I think the members opposite should reflect on those.

We have this expansion of what the automated decision-making can do. And, of course, we on this side are worried, genuine concerns about scope creep of automated decision-making. So it doesn’t appear that there are any additional safeguards about that automated decision-making in this bill, despite the expansion of the use of that automated decision-making. That is a very important point.

Now, we can go to the RIS, which is, you know, good that we have a RIS. So, on page 3, there is mention of an assumption around the social licence. There is an assumption that MSD has a social licence for machines to make decisions. It is assumed that the widespread use of ADM outside of MSD may mean the public would expect and even support its use within the welfare system. However, the public sentiment on this matter has not been explicitly tested.

And how would you explicitly test that? Well, you’d have a select committee process. But we don’t have that. So we’ve heard from Government members, “Well, why don’t you refer to the ADM standard?” And if you look further in the—well, if you look to the original provision in the Social Security Act, section 363A, it does require that there be a standard and that this standard needs to be gazetted. That’s in subpart 5A of that piece of legislation. And we can see that in the Appendix 1 of the RIS.

But this goes against some of the things we’ve heard from speeches already. So the standard says that a decision may be discretionary or non-discretionary. Now, we heard, in her first reading speech, the Minister for Social Development and Employment saying that these decisions would only be made about non-discretionary decisions. But where is the safeguard about that? I cannot see it in the bill, and then when I look to this piece of secondary legislation that Government members are relying on, it does not provide the safeguards that I would expect. So this document has a lot of internal sort of requirements about it and says that there must be as much transparency as possible.

And it says under “Compliance and assurance”, “Compliance with this standard must be verified for all new uses … through the existing”—the existing—“Security, Privacy, Human Rights and Ethics Certification and Accreditation process.” I don’t know how they will change for this new use and if there is anything that will require this standard, that is very generalised, to be changed for the specific changes that we have now in front of us, which are about these annual reviews—annual reviews that this Government is anticipating to make a lot of money from.

💬 Carl Bates: Make money, or just make sure people only get what they should get.

So it is very important that when someone is going to have money cancelled—oh, someone’s saying it’s money—

💬 Carl Bates: Just making sure they get what they should get.

They’re making sure that it’s money that they should get. Well, if that member is so sure about that, then the Government members will want to talk about these algorithms, because we also have seen in the documents in front of us an acknowledgment that the algorithms that go into the sort of machine—these are automated decision-making—we know that they can have a bias, and that bias is the problem that we are concerned about, that there is a bias that may lead to the wrong decision being made. If the wrong decision is made, then somebody will lose their money, and it takes a long time to go through the review processes and get that money back.

This legislation is very complicated. I am particularly lucky to have in my electorate office wonderful staff, who do understand a lot about the supported living payment, the emergency benefit, the accommodation supplement, disability allowances, and New Zealand Superannuation with a non-qualified partner—all the things that this bill applies to. But it’s very complicated and a lot of people need help with it. So if a computer which has a biased algorithm decides to cancel their payment, that could lead to very real, terrible consequences, and this Government and those members who have been heckling throughout this should take some note on that and be prepared for a lot of questions on these issues in the committee stage.

But it should not be passed today. This needs proper consideration by a select committee about what those safeguards should be on this new technology. So I appeal to the Government members and the Leader of the House to do just that.

The bill establishes a time-bound, structured approach to updating beneficiaries’ circumstances every 52 weeks. This ensures that the beneficiaries receive the support they genuinely need. I commend this bill to the House.

This is a split call.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I would just like to talk through what I think is a really problematic piece of lawmaking, for a number of reasons. I’ve caught the tail end of the contribution from my colleague the Hon Rachel Brooking and she has talked about some of the process issues and the impacts of the automation.

In fact, the whole bill is—and credit to the officials for working, obviously, under great speed, but it is like the opposite of a treasure hunt, trying to find the proper parts of the legislation in a clear way that lead us to understand what’s happening, and I have drawn the conclusion, having gone through it very carefully in the last few hours, that the accommodation supplement conversation and debate we had yesterday is a red herring. It’s a distraction because the real issue at stake here is that the Social Security (Mandatory Reviews) Amendment Bill is far broader, and the supplementary analysis report that was looked at yesterday does not really relate to this. In fact, there is only a tiny footnote that says that the changes to the boarding allowances are dealt with in that supplementary paper.

So I’d like this House to note that the actual regulatory impact statement (RIS) which responds to this legislation has not even really been interrogated, and we have a whole stack of questions. I’ll give you some examples of them. When it comes to the Ministry of Social Development (MSD), for example, the RIS has said that MSD is already using artificial intelligence for discretionary payments, but it also says, on page 3, that “it is possible for the use of ADM to entrench existing inequities in the welfare system as these can be built into the collection data.”

Then we have the fact that there are two options considered by MSD. The third one is redacted, and we don’t even see why. It’s under legal privilege, on page 8, using section 9(2)(h) of the Official Information Act, and then it just says, “For this reason, we have discounted this option.” Well, we’d really like to know what that’s about, because, presumably, if it’s legal advice, it’s about the rights and entitlements of people, and it probably has New Zealand Bill of Rights Act (BORA) implications. So I’m wondering if the other option that they did land on is right on the cusp, and whether there has been a BORA report done and what they’ve got to say about it.

Also, it just seems crazy that 332,000 reviews would be done each year, and the RIS says very openly, on page 12, that would cost—it adds up to about $13 million, and there’s no way they could make this happen with the current staff and that’s why they need the technology. Well, did they consider maybe keeping the current staff or employing some more people into the Public Service for this stupid rule, because it’s awfully inefficient. Instead, they are looking at bringing in this very dodgy technology which is dehumanising and which doesn’t have appeal rights. It’s only going to be reviewed—according to the RIS, on page 14—every three years, so in the first few months, at least, one would expect there would be some review of the technology. It could be going completely wrong, and they do not need to review it till then.

We see limitations and constraints on analysis, and we can go into that in the committee stage. They, basically, admit they “have not explored other possible wider policy changes or improvements due to operational and funding constraints.”

Then we have all these population groups under these much broader benefits—more than just the accommodation supplement—which are impacted. So we’ve got child disability allowance, orphan’s benefit, unsupported child’s benefit, youth payment, young parent payment, childcare assistance, New Zealand Superannuation, veteran’s pension, and childcare assistance programme payments. Now, that is finally explicit in new section 310C(6) in clause 4, but before that it is an absolute rabbit warren of trying to go through the legislation to determine whether things are being made by regulation or whether they’re actually being made in primary legislation—and we’ll be asking about that.

Then, when we look at the populations that have been impacted, very clearly around Māori, it says, on page 6, that it “may have a greater impact on Māori given they are overrepresented in the benefit population.” It has real issues about dealing with the Treaty clauses, which we’ll interrogate. It talks about Pacific peoples and says that the changes may have disproportionate impact. It talks about older people, and it says that “It may create confusion for these clients”. Disabled people: mandatory reviews will now include reviewing approximately 100,000 supported living payments and 125,000 people previously—so lots to interrogate.

I commend the bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I don’t know what was going on out there, but I would like to pick up on the comments of my colleague Ingrid Leary, who’s just spoken.

If you have a look at the regulatory impact statement (RIS) in this bill, there are large parts blanked out. I haven’t seen before a problem definition with a part of the problem definition blanked out. So it’s actually very unsettling as to what the problem is that has been put to the people who have prepared this RIS. I can’t tell.

I can tell what part of the problem is and so I’d like to focus on the bits that I can tell you about. I can look at the problem definition as far as it relates to the boarder payments, but the Opposition will be asking questions and interrogating on the bits of this document that are blanked out. Particularly because there is a use in this legislation of automated decision-making, and some of the blanked-out pieces are in parts where that’s an issue. So, for example, there is a part on page 4 of the regulatory impact statement which talks about “What is the policy problem or opportunity?” We hear about the boarders’ initiative and getting money off people and finding out whether they have boarders. But then in paragraph 6, we have nothing. We have a blank out. And then we talk about the use of automated decision-making as necessary to collect information and review people’s specific benefits to implement the boarders’ contribution. So we’re allowed to know that; we’re just not allowed to know what else is in there.

I’d like to focus on the part I am concerned about, because I know about it at this point. This is a piece of legislation that is not as Paulo Garcia suggested it was. It is not for those purposes. What we know about the purpose is it’s to gather information, to take note of it, and to stop people being able to claim a benefit to a certain extent if they have a boarder.

So I go back to the example I used in the last bill where a woman, a solo mother in the 1990s, was able to claim for that boarder. Now that solo mother—who may be working, and I want to concentrate on someone who’s working because they’re one of the groups captured—if that person is working, if they’re a caregiver and they’re working now but their pay is so low that it is not possible for them to make ends meet, a decision we’ve taken is to allow people to take in a boarder. That’s being changed today. As a result, the Government wants to implement this and they’re bringing in this legislation to do that, to implement it. So they are bringing in a very wide net of people, including that woman I’m talking about. She wouldn’t have had to go in to see the Ministry of Social Development before. She now will have to go in every 12 months and she will have to disclose whether she has a boarder. And if she does, next year she will lose $98, if she’s got one boarder, from her payments every week; it will make that much of a difference to her. That’s what this is to do.

It was such a big amount of people that were covered, and the amount of people is—I was looking at the figures before. I’ll give them in the next speech, but I think it’s 87,000 people who are on accommodation supplements—just low-paid New Zealanders who are just getting that are 87,000 people. They will now have to do that. So because it was so hard, automated decision-making was seen as the most efficient tool. Now, that means it still costs money. It’s about $6 million to bring that in. It’s an expansion of a scheme that was supposed to be really just connected with parental child support, because there needed to be a connection between information. So that is what is going on.

What the RIS says about that—the regulatory impact statement—is that people are really suspicious of automated systems. There is a good reason for that. We’re going through a time of change, and it was interesting that the woman who’s against vaccines in the New Zealand First Party told us we have to move with the times and we shouldn’t be suspicious of these things. Actually, I agree; we shouldn’t be totally suspicious of these things. Where necessary, we should look at automation. But this automation is something where we need to bring the public with us. If we’d wanted to bring the public with us, we would have put this to a select committee so that it could be discussed, so people could bring their fears and concerns, and we have not heard from those people today. We don’t know. In a normal second reading speech, I would be giving that speech with the submissions of the people who came to the select committee. I can’t offer the views of many of those people that would come, including the ones who would have been concerned about an automated decision-making system.

Those processes that we have in this House are so valuable, because we’re one of the few democracies where people can actually touch and affect us in the way that is most appropriate. We have other democracies struggling because they’re so giant that people can never get near the actual impact in the Parliament. It doesn’t make any difference. But here, one of the things I’m absolutely proudest of is that we have select committees where if someone—if an 11-year-old or a solo mother or the people who are helping on the front line have a problem with the legislation, they come and they tell us. I have been there when we have listened to them and we’ve gone, “Yeah, fair enough point. You’ve got it right.” And it’s meant that people haven’t been cycling into conspiracy theories in the same way because they’re not disconnected. It’s really, really important.

So when we bring in things like automated decision-making and when the RIS itself talks about people not necessarily—“we are assuming social licence” is what it says. There’s an assumption of social licence. There has been no public consultation. That’s an alarm bell we should be listening to. We should be listening to the people who are impacted by this and who are worried about it, because we are expanding the net. We are saying that there are a whole lot more people we’re going to gather that information from, and then we’re going to automate our decisions in response—that we’re doing it because it saves money, because it’s more efficient. It’s easy to tell ourselves a fairytale about it being good for them. It’s really important we put that up to the test of what people think, of what we actually say our rationalisation is. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do these things, but we have to bring people with us or we get terribly reactive results.

So my suggestion is that this actually go before a select committee. That’s my suggestion. My suggestion is this is not the kind of thing that you put through urgency.

💬 Stuart Smith: This is the second reading.

I want to finally talk—it is the second reading. I want to talk about some of the groups who would have made submissions at the select committee. We would have heard from people who are part of the elderly. The elderly in this situation: 125,000 people are on not only on the super but on disability or on accommodation supplements. They would have been able to tell us what they thought today, and we would’ve been able to reflect that back, but that’s been cut from our capacity. We would have heard from the disabled. We would have heard from a group of the 100,000 people who are on supported living. They are not people you need to review because they’re going to suddenly change their circumstances. They’re actually in a pretty stable situation. We’ve recognised they need support and it’s being given to them, but they’re going to be in there. We would have heard from them, but we don’t get to.

One of the groups that I have tried to emphasise in this debate is the low paid. We would have heard from the low paid, the ones who are paying taxes, who are on the minimum wages, who did the jobs that we needed done when we were locked down, when we were facing a pandemic. They did pretty scary jobs sometimes. Those are the people who we would have heard from because they are the people on accommodation supplements. They are the people who need that support because we have failed to provide high-paying work. That’s actually the reality.

I commend the bill to the House.

This bill is set down for committee stage immediately. As the time has come for me to leave the Chair, I declare that when House sitting resumes, the House will go into committee for consideration of the Social Security (Mandatory Reviews) Amendment Bill. The sitting is suspended until 2 p.m.

Sitting suspended from 1.03 p.m. to 2 p.m.

In Committee

Part 1 Amendments to principal Act