In a speech in parliament yesterday during the Estimates Debate for Vote Social Development Kevin Hague called for a cross party, cross sectional approach to child outcomes.

Hon PAULA BENNETT (Minister for Social Development):

Certainly, what you see coming out of submissions is the debate around targeting. You have universal services that cross across health, education, and, of course, social development, but, equally, you then need to look at whom you are targeting.

So if there is anything in that work that you are doing within Child, Youth and Family to prevent some of these children from being abused and neglected, it is looking at who they are and where they are, and then working it out and making sure we have got the absolute right service delivery from the right professionals around them. This is a substantial portfoli so what it needs is that concerted vision and approach to it from all directions—

Jacinda Ardern:

I again extend the offer that Labour extended under Annette King when she was the spokesperson for social development, and that I again extend as Labour’s spokesperson—that we are happy to work with this Government on issues relating to children’s well-being. But I do so with the one disclaimer: we think the bar needs to be raised.

The green paper highlighted the issues that the National Government wanted to focus on when it comes to what it perceives to be vulnerable children: information sharing, mandatory reporting, and the way the agencies are engaging with families.

Our contention has been that we need to take a much broader approach when it comes to the well-being of children. We need to look at issues like income adequacy, poverty, housing, health, and education.

Kevin Hague:

…while we have had this consultation with the public around the Green Paper for Vulnerable Children, we have also had the Māori Affairs Committee considering what needs to be done for Māori children, and I sit on the Health Committee, which is engaged in an inquiry into practical steps for improving child health outcomes and reducing child abuse. Many of the submitters to those three processes have been expressing some degree of bewilderment and, sometimes, frustration about the fact that there are three processes.

I think what this amounts to is that actually for people in the community, their lives are being lived in an entirely unsiloed way, whereas our response as a Parliament, and the State’s response to people’s needs, is instead fragmented and broken into silos. I guess those three inquiries are emblematic of exactly that issue.

What we have is a situation where the challenges that people face are not well-met by that fragmented response by the State. What we need to do is to find ways of working across silos, working in a cross-sectoral way, to address the needs that people have.

It is no surprise to anyone working in any of those three areas, including the area that we are looking at now of social development, that the families and the communities who have the greatest needs in the social development area are the very same ones who have the greatest needs in health, or, indeed, in housing or in education.

Problems in one area can contributeb to and escalate problems in another. For example poor housing leads to poorer health, poorer education and inevitably poorer social outcomes for the children.

I believe that if there is an opportunity that arises from having these parallel inquiries and these parallel processes going on, it must be this: to, again, find a way of making cross-sectoral collaboration actually happen on the ground.

I acknowledge the Minister’s recognition of the value of cross-party collaboration.

I recognise Jacinda Ardern’s call for that same thing.

I suggest to the Government that here is a great opportunity to make something of these inquiries, and to call on other parties to collaborate.

The cross party will seems to already be there. So they should just do it.

 

InTheHouse.co.nz video:

• Paula Bennett
• Jacinda Ardern part 1 and part 2
• Kevin Hague

ESTIMATES DEBATE
In Committee
Draft transcript

Hon PAULA BENNETT (Minister for Social Development): Thank you for the opportunity to take a call on the estimates for Vote Social Development. There is no doubt about it that this is a big year for social development. If you look across what we are doing as far as the progression and the work in this portfolio, you cannot go further than, I think, three main areas of work, and probably counting from there.

The main areas would certainly be in welfare reform. We have already seen a welfare reform one go through. They would certainly be around the white paper and the changes within Child, Youth and Family and the developments there, and also investing in services for outcomes, which relates to changes in how we are contracting with NGOs, in particular, but also, I think, wider than that, in the work that we are doing in communities.

Added to that, of course, is the work that we are doing with youth, which has been a huge focus for us, and, along with the Associate Ministers in this portfolio, we have made a substantial difference. I know that Minister Borrows, with his Associate Minister hat on, would take the opportunity to talk a lot about youth offending and the progress that we have seen there in the changes to not just sentencing, I think, but, more, the preventative work that is being done in community organisations and with the police as well.

[Continuation line: That investment, which we made years ago]

That investment, which we made years ago, is certainly paying off, but I will leave that to him. I thought it was opportune, because we have certainly had questions around it today.

Today we released the summary of the green paper and the submissions that were made on that in the writing of the white paper. So it is an opportune time to sort of look at where we are at and what we are doing when it comes to Child, Youth and Family and the notifications there.

On average, at the moment we are getting around 150,000 to 155,000 notifications, of which around 55,000 are deemed to need follow-up. And from there we have about 22,000 substantiated cases of abuse or neglect. When you look at the figures on the areas of physical abuse and sexual abuse, they are not actually increasing. They have been fairly stable, if you like, over a long period of time in this country.

Where you see a huge increase is in emotional abuse and how that is categorised. So in one respect you can sort of say that it is horrific that any level of abuse is going up, but I think if you looked at it from a different angle you would say that at least we are identifying it now as what it is and, in many cases, taking it a bit more seriously. That was under Labour, quite frankly, so I am not standing here to say that that has particularly changed there. What we have seen is most certainly an increase, and then changes in how we approach it.

Differential response within Child, Youth and Family is making a big difference. You see that in the estimates as to where we put that kind of funding. That is where we have community organisations dealing with the lower levels of abuse and neglect for these children, and that makes a difference.

Community organisations are, at times, able to get into people’s homes differently from, quite frankly, how social workers or police can. They can work with them in a different way and, at times, get different results from perhaps that social worker who is seen as being statutory.

That does not mean, of course, that social workers are not stepping in and, unfortunately, doing far too much of their share of this work—hence why we have put 96 more social workers in: 16 supervisors, with 80 more. Fifty-seven have now been appointed, which I am absolutely thrilled about. They are in positions, training up, and getting to know the system. What we also need to do is look carefully at whom Child, Youth and Family is working with.

I know that the Opposition has expressed interest in this, and I think it really is an area that we are constantly looking at—whether there is any filtering done by police, for example, who make up something like, from memory, 76 percent of the notifications that are coming through. At the moment, if there is a child in the house—they do not even need to witness violence or anything else—the police pass that notification directly on to Child, Youth and Family.

We need to actually have that discussion and that debate as to whether or not there should be a little more filtering done at the police end, because, at the end of the day, you have social workers then spreading themselves across the board, and perhaps working on cases that they do not need to, and, as a consequence, you get a number of false positives.

Certainly, what you see coming out of submissions is the debate around targeting. You have universal services that cross across health, education, and, of course, social development, but, equally, you then need to look at whom you are targeting. So if there is anything in that work that you are doing within Child, Youth and Family to prevent some of these children from being abused and neglected, it is looking at who they are and where they are, and then working it out and making sure we have got the absolute right service delivery from the right professionals around them.

This is a substantial portfolio—you could say with a substantial Minister, I suppose, if you had a sense of humour—so what it needs is that concerted vision and approach to it from all directions—

[Continuation line: Jacinda Ardern]

ESTIMATES DEBATE

In Committee

JACINDA ARDERN (Labour): I appreciate the Minister for Social Development outlining for us some of the reasons behind the dramatic increase in child protection notifications that we have seen in recent times—and they are dramatic. I know she acknowledges that and the different reasons for that, but I still have grave concerns over the workload that our Child, Youth and Family and our front-line social workers currently have and whether or not, in essence, 50 new social workers is enough to deal with the massive demand that we have.

It is timely that we are here in this Chamber discussing the state of children, given that the submission on vulnerable children was released today. I look forward to responding to that in further detail…

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

The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson): Kia ora tātou, nō reira, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa. Honourable members, the House is in Committee on the Appropriation (2012/2013 Estimates) Bill , and it is resumed. Before the dinner break, the honourable member Jacinda Ardern was speaking and addressing the Committee. She was debating Vote Social Development and she has 4 minutes remaining if she wishes to seek the call.

JACINDA ARDERN: I was indeed addressing the Committee before the dinner break, and I do want to come back to the issue I was touching on, which was introduced by the Minister in the chair , the Hon Paula Bennett, and that was the issue of vulnerable children and the release today of the summary of submissions on the green paper on vulnerable children.

There has been an overwhelming response, I think it is fair to say, to the green paper on vulnerable children. Thousands of people have responded to the call on what it is that the Government should do in response to the issue of children’s well-being in New Zealand.

I applaud all those who took the time to be a part of that discussion. But, from what I saw, contained in those submissions were themes that I want to touch on.

One was the issue of universalism. It was the Minister herself who said: “Should we start targeting services in a more concentrated fashion towards those children whom we, the State, consider to be at risk?”. An overwhelming message from submitters was that we need to exercise caution in doing so, because, in fact, even the notion of vulnerability is very fraught.

All children, by default almost, are vulnerable by their very nature. So narrowing the targeting of services is a fraught business and we need to exercise caution there. They also raised the issue of bipartisanship; they wanted parties to work together. The primary reason for that, I think, was to see enduring solutions around child poverty and children’s well-being generally.

So that is something on which I again extend the offer that Labour extended under Annette King when she was the spokesperson for social development, and that I again extend as Labour’s spokesperson—that we are happy to work with this Government on issues relating to children’s well-being.

But I do so with the one disclaimer: we think the bar needs to be raised. The green paper highlighted the issues that the National Government wanted to focus on when it comes to what it perceives to be vulnerable children: information sharing, mandatory reporting, and the way the agencies are engaging with families. Our contention has been that we need to take a much broader approach when it comes to the well-being of children.

We need to look at issues like income adequacy, poverty, housing, health, and education. These are all things that we know have an impact on children’s well-being or otherwise, and to ignore those and simply hone in, in the way that this Government has, is at our peril and to the detriment of our children; in fact, we pay for it down the track.

If I were to pick out one issue in particular that the Labour Party, as part of its core fundamental values on fairness and social justice is concerned about, it is the issue of child poverty.

I asked the Minister in question time today a very simple question: “How many children in New Zealand are living in poverty?”. The answer was: “We don’t have an official measure in New Zealand.” My question would be, if Unicef is able to produce a scorecard by which it measures every OECD nation on what it considers to be a fair and reasonable measure of child poverty, surely this Government—if it claims that poverty is a priority issue—would have at least an interest in knowing how many children in this country are living in poverty.

But the message that we got back from the Minister today was that knowing how many children are in poverty is not a priority. I really question, if the Minister does not want to know how many children are there, how is she possibly concerned with even getting them out of that situation? Forgive my cynicism, but if this Government is unwilling to at least put a figure on this issue, or even try, we are never going to at least see a target around the 270,000 children living in poverty.

KEVIN HAGUE (Green): It is a pleasure to take a call in this debate. I think my contribution will mesh nicely with that of the Minister for Social Development and of Ms Ardern; I am not so sure that it will mesh all that nicely with Sam Lotu-Iiga’s contribution.

The Minister referred to the publication today of the summary of submissions on the green paper.

I want to take that as my starting point, because while we have had this consultation with the public around the Green Paper for Vulnerable Children, we have also had the Māori Affairs Committee considering what needs to be done for Māori children, and I sit on the Health Committee, which is engaged in an inquiry into practical steps for improving child health outcomes and reducing child abuse. Many of the submitters to those three processes have been expressing some degree of bewilderment and, sometimes, frustration about the fact that there are three processes.

I think what this amounts to is that actually for people in the community, their lives are being lived in an entirely unsiloed way, whereas our response as a Parliament, and the State’s response to people’s needs, is instead fragmented and broken into silos. I guess those three inquiries are emblematic of exactly that issue.

What we have is a situation where the challenges that people face are not well-met by that fragmented response by the State.

What we need to do is to find ways of working across silos, working in a cross-sectoral way, to address the needs that people have.

It is no surprise to anyone working in any of those three areas, including the area that we are looking at now of social development, that the families and the communities who have the greatest needs in the social development area are the very same ones who have the greatest needs in health, or, indeed, in housing or in education.

We need to find a way of addressing problems that addresses those heart problems, because those communities are typically Māori communities, Pasifika communities, poor communities, or communities marginalised in some other way. So those issues are the ones that we need to address.

In the area that I know best, health, that problem that we are facing in social development and in those other sectors is an increasing problem. These problems of the gaps, the inequalities in outcomes, and the way in which inequalities drive worse outcomes—so both in the causes and the effects—are becoming worse. We are seeing worse health outcomes for the poorest and the most marginalised, and the same is the case in those other sectors. It is an increasing problem, and one that we need to deal with.

In years gone by, I worked across sectors trying to get cross-sectoral collaboration. Although there was generally agreement that this was a good thing to do, it was typically a very hard thing to have happen, because nobody had the resources to make it happen.

If I can now just give some praise to the last Labour Government, because in its very last term of Government, it actually changed that. The Ministry of Social Development had, for the first time, the mandate to facilitate and fund cross-sectoral collaboration.

I believe that if there is an opportunity that arises from having these parallel inquiries and these parallel processes going on, it must be this: to, again, find a way of making cross-sectoral collaboration actually happen on the ground.

I acknowledge the Minister’s recognition of the value of cross-party collaboration.

I recognise Jacinda Ardern’s call for that same thing.

I suggest to the Government that here is a great opportunity to make something of these inquiries, and to call on other parties to collaborate.