Disability Support Services Bill

Instruction to Select Committee Hon LOUISE UPSTON (Minister for Social Development and Employment) (15:47): I move, That the Disability Support Services Bill be reported to the House by 13 August 2026 and that the committee have authority to meet at any time while the House is sitting (except during oral questions), during any evening on a day in which there has been a sitting of the House, on a Friday in a week in which there has been a sitting of the House, and outside the Wellington area, despite Standing Orders 193, 195, and 196. Nearly every speaker in this debate has said how important it is that the disability community—disabled people, their families, and carers—have certainty and consistency. That is why passing this bill before the general election will avoid a long period of uncertainty and will give disabled people and their families clarity about the Disability Support Services (DSS) support and the DSS support system. I want to be very clear that this legislation builds on the 18 months of engagement with the disability support community where, on every occasion, they talk about the fact that transparency is critical—as is consistency, clarity, having a consistent needs assessment no matter where you are in the country as opposed to differing ones in a region. I’m concerned about some of the comments that the Opposition have made which are factually inaccurate. I encourage members of the community and of the public to come to the select committee, and if we don’t act promptly, this ongoing uncertainty about DSS will continue, and I do not—I repeat, I do not—want that to undermine confidence in the system. A shorter time frame will also, very importantly, enable us to do the work on the carer-support package, which addresses many of the concerns that family carers have raised for a very, very long time. By working closely with them on this carer-support package, I am very confident that we will be able to have a system that works far better—far better—for family carers and the disabled people they care for. I support this motion. DEPUTY SPEAKER: The question is that the motion be agreed to. Hon PRIYANCA RADHAKRISHNAN (Labour) (15:49): Thank you, Madam Speaker. Firstly, I will begin by acknowledging that there is a select committee process. There has been a previous process that this House underwent in 2013 in response to another court hearing where changes were passed under urgency, and so I will acknowledge that that is not happening this time and that people will be able to submit to the select committee. That is a good thing. It is disappointing, however, that it is shortened. The Minister for Social Development and Employment has laid out the reasons—her rationale—for the shortened report-back period, but it is under four months instead of the full six months that a select committee would generally get. Within that, I urge the Minister to ensure, through the select committee chair, that there will be the full six-week submission period for disabled people and organisations that represent them. I will also just touch on a point that the Minister made in her contribution to this referral debate when she said that there has been 18 months of engagement already with disability communities, but I will point to what many have emailed me to say, which is that that 18 months of consultation was not about this legislative framework. It was about disability support services in general. Those people did not know that the outcome of those engagement sessions was going to be used to develop this bill, and so it does not count and it is disingenuous in that sense to say that it does. The Minister has also said that the shortened time frame is so that the Government can work with disability communities and carers, particularly to develop a care and support package. I do support the development of a carer support package. However, we should have had the detail of that to be able to debate where this bill will land in terms of operational detail before we considered this very vague framework that this bill provides. I will leave my comments about the Minister’s contributions there. I do, however, want to make this point. I have been emailed by someone who doesn’t want to be named, but who has laid out very clearly why it is important that the select committee does take some additional steps to ensure that disability communities are supported to be able to submit to this process. She said this—and I’ll quote, and I’ll go into the detail that she lays out—“The overarching principle is this: the select committee should not treat accessibility as simply providing NZSL”—New Zealand Sign Language—“interpreters and easy-read formats, important as those are. True accessibility means actively going to the organisations and communities where the most marginalised people already are, rather than waiting for them to find their way to the process.” I want to just step out for the consideration of this Parliament some of those suggestions. I went back to her and asked if she could be a bit more specific in terms of what would be useful for the select committee to consider. She said, “For example, partner with trusted community connectors. Rather than the select committee writing to individual disabled people,”—which I’ve pointed out would be too onerous for the committee, given the size and the diversity of our disability communities—“they could write specifically to kaupapa Māori services, Pacific health providers, women’s refuges, and community social workers and ask them to actively share information about the submission process with the people that they support and to assist those people to make submissions, if needed.” These are the organisations that already have relationships with those who are often most marginalised, and who may not even hear about the opening of the submission period. “Critically, the select committee must be intentional about the types of organisations that it engages with.” Some of the more well-resourced disability sector organisations have already heard about this bill and the need to submit and have the capacity to participate in parliamentary processes, and will do so and should do so. But they don’t always represent the most marginalised. “The committee needs to also seek out organisations who work at the crisis end:”—and this is a good point—“those dealing with family harm, emergency housing, food poverty, acute mental health, and child protection.”, because those are the organisations who see what happens when support falls away entirely, and those are the voices that will not show up unless they’re specifically invited and supported to do so. “The committee should also consider whether there is capacity to be able to fund or resource more supported submission-making”—and that’s the third point that she made—“because many people in this group”—and I would point particularly to those with intellectual disabilities—“may not be able to write a submission by themselves and potentially will need some sort of support to be able to do this.”, whether it’s through the likes of the Citizens Advice Bureau or other organisations that already support them, as well. However, all of these organisations are under the pump and will need additional support to be able to undertake this. “The types of submissions that can be made.” I put this out there: I don’t know if this is possible, but I wonder if it’s possible for the select committee to accept other forms of submission other than written submissions, whether it’s through oral submissions via videos, for example, because not everyone can write. “Allowing voice recordings and video submissions of brief informal accounts, rather than long formal submissions should also be considered.” The final point that she makes that I would like to share with the House—because this is one that we often overlook—is that many people are of the opinion that a written submission has to be followed by an appearance in person at select committees. It would be good for the select committee to point out that this is not necessarily the case and that, firstly, written submissions can be made by anybody from anywhere across Aotearoa New Zealand and they don’t have to attend in person if they don’t choose to do so. Also Zoom and teleconferencing options are an option with our Parliament, and they can also provide accessibility through New Zealand Sign Language interpretation. There should also be some hearings that are held at times and in formats that are accessible to carers, because this particular piece of legislation will likely have a significant impact on family carers and on carers more broadly. Those with caring responsibilities have struggled over the last 18 months to show up to the various consultations and engagement sessions that have been undertaken, and so there should be some consideration for how this can be made accessible to them, as well. I will just end with the final point that she does make. I have also made it, and I will say it again: all of these organisations, all of these charitable support service provision organisations and disabled people’s organisations, disabled people, and carers have been put through huge amounts of consultation of late, and the organisations haven’t had additional funding to be able to lend their voice or their support to those who need to submit. So I will put it to the Government that there should be some additional support to do that. It is, once again, disappointing that there’s a shortened period. Within that, please ensure that there is a full, six-week period for people to submit. Thank you, Madam Speaker. DEPUTY SPEAKER: Just before I take the next call, I’m going to comment that that speech was an absolute benchmark for a shortened report-back referral debate, and I would expect the benchmark to be as high as that first speech was. RICARDO MENÉNDEZ MARCH (Green) (15:57): Thank you, Madam Speaker. I do want to comment on this referral motion because I wanted to first acknowledge the comments from the Minister around the election date. Now, look, I don’t think one’s just wanting to rush a bill at the end of a parliamentary terms genuinely justifies, in my view, having a shortened report-back date process, and I think that if the Government was genuinely confident that they would win the election, we wouldn’t have an issue with having a process carrying on after the election. But I think that particularly with this bill on disability support services, something that I want to acknowledge is that while the Minister may have said that some disabled people may have been consulted, disabled people are not monolithic, and what that means is that we need to acknowledge that within disabled people, there may be a range of political views and experiences. The initial canvassing of views that the Minister alluded to cannot replace the adequate submission processes that a proper duration of, say, four to six months would have allowed. Another point that I wanted to make in relation to the referral motion—particularly with the amount of sitting weeks that we have left, and well knowing that this Government has had a tendency to use extended sitting hours and urgency more often than not—is that I am concerned about, at least during the sitting days, the fact that a lot of these submission days will likely be occurring over extremely limited time frames. For example, the Social Services and Community Committee sits on an extended sitting day from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m., and from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. What that means is that, unlike, say, normal sitting hours, where you have a greater flexibility for people to submit, you’re pushing people to a very, very narrow time slot that they can actually be accommodated into. Now, if we look at the demographics most impacted by this bill, which are carers and disabled people, what this means is that we’re putting in additional barriers for participation, and I am concerned that the voices of submitters and their variety of experiences would not be adequately canvassed and that the democratic process that we would expect from a proper select committee process would be, therefore, undermined. I would hope that no matter our views on this bill, we would want to come out of the select committee process, genuinely hand on heart, having said that we’d adequately heard from a big range of disabled people and carers. I just do not have confidence that this will happen. The previous speaker Priyanca Radhakrishnan noted that she hoped that we would have at least a six-week submission period, but that would already be a really long duration in the total amount that we have. Now, a subsequent point I want to make and a concern I want to raise that has not yet been raised by the previous speaker is the fact that when you have a referral motion with a shortened report-back date, what you also prevent is the back and forth you have with Government officials. Often, in the select committee process, when we hear from submitters, questions may arise from Government or Opposition members to officials. Sometimes, these questions may be complex, and officials may not always have the ability to present answers to the fulsome degree that we deserve by the next meeting date. I think, sometimes, what I’m concerned about is that we’re creating a condition where we’re not getting the satisfactory and detailed answers to complex questions through a shortened process that I think our constituent submitters and our parliamentarians deserve. This is not through officials’ fault, but through the timeline that has been afforded to us. The other concern that I have is that we already saw this week how the Government, for example, didn’t seek leave to pause the vote during a 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. period, which could, indeed, even further undermine the ability for submitters to be heard on bills. We already saw how submitters were affected by this just yesterday, for example—who were unable to present. That’s something that I am concerned about. While the Minister may have, in her referral motion contributions, talked about the scope of when we can sit outside of sitting dates, etc., I think, let’s make it real: we’ve got Budget week, we’ve got scrutiny week, then we’ve got probably a bunch of extended sitting hours and urgency that will in and of itself limit the ability to actually canvass submitters adequately during those non-sitting days. On a bill like this one, where accessibility and participation is paramount, I would have expected that we would have had a longer period to, for example, explore actually going to where people are—because, yep, people are able to make oral submissions by phone or by Zoom or in person, if they’re lucky; I doubt that many carers or disabled people affected by this bill will have the means or the time to travel all the way to Wellington, so their ability to participate will be limited by, say, Zoom contributions or by phone. I think the problem that I have with this referral motion is that it massively limits the ability for the select committee to explore travelling to areas to hear directly face to face with carers and disabled people from across the country in some of our main urban centres, or, for example, to explore going to a rural community where, perhaps, the experiences of carers and disabled people—for example, when it comes to transport needs, etc., or healthcare—may be different. I think that does a disservice to the attempt to genuinely canvass and hear disabled people’s views. So that’s the other component that I want to touch on. Finally, one of the key issues that I also have with this referral motion is that it actually, in my view, undermines the ability for us to work in a cross-partisan manner to find points of agreement. For example, sometimes in the select committee process, submitters—organisations or otherwise—may bring forward recommended amendments. Sometimes it’s really hard to know whether there’s agreement amongst political parties on some of these proposed amendments, whether they come from submitters or from members of the Opposition, or Government backbenchers. The timelines that we often are working with is working in a cross-partisan way to, for example, suggest that these amendments get taken to their respective caucus meetings. When a shortened report-back date is given to us, it limits the number of caucus meetings the political parties can have to actually seek agreement on the amendments that may be presented by other political parties. What this leads to in this process is one where collaboration is less likely to happen, and, instead, amendments may end up just being presented as an opportunity to make a point, as opposed to genuinely trying to find common ground. I have yet to see incidents in which, for example, an amendment—no matter how worthwhile—is presented on the floor that political parties that haven’t had a chance to actually have a full caucus meeting to discuss it are actually able to get behind those amendments. I think, in my view, that leads to a poorer democratic process. Now, we’re talking about a bill that has received a huge amount of public attention. A great proportion of our population is disabled, and that means that we have to actually take the process of this bill extremely seriously. I am particularly concerned that—also with the shortage that we have across the country on interpretation services, for example—it may also be hard to genuinely accommodate the needs of deaf people and people who may need additional support to be genuinely accommodated in this bill. Now, in other bills that we have had in select committees prior that predominantly affect disabled people, sometimes we afford a little bit more than the usual five minutes for individuals to submit to recognise that people may just need a bit of additional time. Now, that is easy to do when you do have a full six months to actually, for example, have a report-back date, because then you’re able to have longer hearing sessions where individuals are able to be heard for, say, six minutes, seven minutes, as opposed to the usual five. That additional minute may be the difference between someone being able to articulate exactly what they need to say, if their disability may just require them to take a little bit more time, and someone feeling like their dignity and their contributions weren’t fully taken on board. I think the referral motion as we have it right now does not leave me with the confidence that that level of flexibility will genuinely be afforded to submitters, because with they really tight time frames that we have, with the use of urgency and extended hours that I’ve already mentioned, I just simply do not see how we could arrive to this. It would be good if the Minister could, for example, give us some assurances, or, perhaps, if the chair of the committee was able to give us some assurances that that was the intent, it would give us a bit more confidence on the genuine intent of hearing disabled people as part of this process. All in all, the Green Party is lacking confidence on this referral motion. I know my colleagues will be hoping to present some constructive alternatives to this, but I’ll leave it there for now. Thank you. Hon Dr DEBORAH RUSSELL (Labour) (16:06): Thank you, Madam Speaker. I want to speak to this referral motion. The Minister gave two reasons in her speech as to why a shortened report-back time was appropriate with the select committee. The first was around certainty and, in particular, certainty before the general election; the second was around the need for this work to be done so that she, her team, and her officials could do some work on the carer support package. I want to speak, mostly, to the first reason, around the certainty, but I do note there is that other aspect to discuss, as well. I have just one brief note to add on the select committee process. With a three-month, short report-back period, which is what we’ve got, typically submissions will be open for three weeks. It’s a very short time for submissions to be made and to come into this House. It’s even more problematic in this case because, as my colleague Priyanca Radhakrishnan has pointed out, the disability community was not aware that this particular measure was coming. This caught them by surprise. It was not what they were working on with the Minister—or so we’ve been told. That does mean, for people in the disability community, if people are listening, it’s three weeks to get your submission in—or it’s likely to be; the chair of the committee, or the select committee will determine that date, but I would anticipate it would be a maximum of three weeks. Please get those submissions written now, start writing them now, and make sure they get in. For those of you who feel able to do so, do ask to speak to the committee, as well; though that is not necessary—but if you do feel able to do it, that would be a good thing to do. I want to move on from that because people have canvassed the shortened report-back period quite well. I want to talk, in particular, about the certainty reason and the reason the Minister gave for it, which was with respect to needing certainty around the general election. Now, that’s puzzling. Let me take the House through why that is puzzling. As my colleague Ricardo Menéndez March pointed out, it does rather imply that the Minister doesn’t think she’s going to be in office after the election; I don’t think that’s what she was really thinking of in that respect. The difficulty is that when it comes to allocating funding—and this bill is about allocating funding—the way that we allocate funding in our parliamentary system is through the annual Budget. That’s the primary vehicle for allocating funding. Sometimes, things can be done outside of that through various measures, but we would anticipate that the funding that is to be allocated to Disability Support Services would be allocated in this year’s Budget, which is due on 28 May, or it would be allocated in next year’s Budget, which is not due until May 2027. Those are two quite different dates, but they are substantially different from the election date—the election is currently forecast to happen on 7 November. When the Minister says that certainty is needed before the general election, that is, at least, puzzling, given the way we allocate funding in our system of Government. I think the Minister needs to explain why it is that the general election creates uncertainty. The uncertainty, I don’t think, is created by the general election; I think it is created by the fact that funding is allocated in the Budgets, and this piece of legislation, as it tracks through the House, if it is thought to be needed to be in place before the election, well, that just doesn’t seem to create a reason. But perhaps there’s something that we’re going to see in the Budget itself around this—who knows?—but that’s the uncertainty point, not the general election. If the Minister—and the Minister has given the uncertainty created by the general election as a reason for having a shortened report-back date, but, actually, that reason doesn’t really stack up. It’s not a particularly good reason. I think it’s a reason we should be setting aside because it simply doesn’t work. Although, perhaps the Minister might like to clarify that because she did talk in terms of that uncertainty. There’s another thing that could happen with this bill, as we lead into the general election—the bill is due to be reported back to this House by 13 August, the general election is on 7 November, my guess is—I don’t think we have a date for the House to rise yet— Hon James Meager: 24 September. Hon Dr DEBORAH RUSSELL: —24 September, thank you colleagues. I hadn’t taken as much notice as you; I’m not as concerned about my job as you might be. What it does mean is there’s limited time available in the House for sitting days, so even if the bill is reported back from the select committee on 13 August, from there it still needs a second reading, a committee stage—and we’ve had a bit of experience as to just how long committee stages can go—and a third reading before it becomes law. The interesting bit about this—sitting in here—is that this law enables quite a lot of ministerial discretion. That’s sort of sitting in clauses 10 and 11 of this bill, and some of the factors around that. The thing is, again, in the lead up to the election, the Government is still the Government, and it still governs, but the convention is that serious policy decisions are not really taken in the lead-up to the election itself. Those are the sorts of things that should be the matter of political parties’ campaign promises, and so on, but, in actual fact, from a month or two, a couple of months before the election, we move into a “steady as she goes” sort of state, rather than trying to make significant policy decisions. Again, if the Minister was giving the general election as a reason to get this bill through the House early, that reason doesn’t stack up either because Ministers should not be making major decisions in the month or so, a couple of months before, the election, especially once the House has risen, ahead of the election. Now, as I said, the Government gets to continue governing. We would expect, you know, our foreign affairs Minister to keep on making foreign affairs statements; we would expect the Prime Minister to continue to be prime ministerial and so on, but not those major decisions. I’m pointing out, again, that the Minister’s reasoning for citing the general election date actually doesn’t stack up. I think we need a better explanation from the Minister about that. Moving on— Rima Nakhle: Really clutching on straws here. Hon Dr DEBORAH RUSSELL: Take a call, Rima. Moving on from that, I think, in terms of something else that the Minister mentioned, she said that we needed to have this in place in order to get her overall framework—to get to one of the building blocks in place, I think, for the carer support package that she was working on. Now, again, I don’t think that quite stacks up either. When is that carer support package going to be announced? Now, if it is going to be pre the election, there’s precious little time for that to happen between this bill being, presumably, passed through the process, and the election. I’ve already talked about the difficulties with those major decisions around the election date. There is no reason, actually, not to have a longer select committee process. Now, perhaps it could have been a select committee process that left this bill. It might have popped out of select committee—so maybe a four- or five-month process might have done the trick—before the general election, so that it was available for its second reading and committee stage and third reading after the election. That would have fitted in quite nicely with Budget processes. Then, it seems that that overall carer support package might have been part of Budget 2027. So these are all just not quite adding up as to what is going on here. I want to point out—and as Ricardo Menéndez March said—one of the important parts of a select committee process is the opportunity for members of the committee to have a real back and forth with officials. Well, there’s an issue that the members of that select committee are going to want to dig into. Why does the Minister think that this is critical to have it in place before the carer support package can be out? What’s going on in that carer support package? We need to know that before we can talk sensible about that bill in the select committee. For those reasons, I do not think that this truncated select committee process is appropriate. The Minister hasn’t given adequate reasons for it and there really is no reason not to have a six-month process. HELEN WHITE (Labour—Mt Albert) (16:16): Thank you, Madam Speaker. I lead this committee for Labour, and we have a National Party chair who does a very good job in his role. But I think this is going to be really hard for us, because we had an earlier referral that is a shortened time frame, too, earlier this week, and that was already a concern to me because of the workload that we’ve got and the fact that we do have scrutiny week and it is a little bit unusual in our committee because we have a lot more Ministers in front of us than most committees, because of the nature of that committee. It’s going to be really tough to do a good job on this, and I am concerned about whether we will get to hear from the people we need to hear from. I wanted to talk about an aspect of this bill, which is actually the cost of it. It’s going to be really important that we dig down into the costs associated with this and to look at that in terms of the costs that would be faced anyway. If we’re going to talk about contributions for caregivers in the home who are family members, if those people were not doing that role, then, actually, the State picks up costs in an entirely different way and they’re likely to be more expensive. That kind of analysis, that’s real and it’s going to take a bit of time, and truncating that could be actually really dodgy. We could come up with a completely unintended consequence if we get that wrong. I take my job in that committee absolutely seriously. It’s a very important job. I’d also like to dig down into the logic of this, that there is a philosophical and moral aspect to this, and I’d like to hear from people about that. It is a time of great change. This work I see as fundamental. It’s caregiving. It’s so important in our society. I’d like to hear from those people. I would like to talk about those international obligations, and there needs to be time to do that, because they are serious international obligations. I think that one of the things that I heard the Minister talk about was that the election was coming up. It reminded me of some of the work I did before I got here, where we had redundancy processes that just suddenly turned up before the end of the year. People psychologically have this issue where they want to tidy things up, change things, restructure just before the New Year. It’s not necessarily the best idea. It’s not logical. It’s not the way that we should be making decisions about what gets rushed here. Christmas Day is only a day, New Year is only a day, and election day is only a day. We should be making decisions which allow people to be involved in this process, and we should not rush just because it’s a date that might be important to us in here, because it doesn’t stop the process of things going through legislation, and it’s often good for them to take time. I am concerned that the rush is actually based on something irrational, rather than substantively important, because it isn’t going anywhere—this is a problem that has been around for a while. I take the point made by Dr Deborah Russell that the care package isn’t something that needs to be held up. I’d quite like to know what that looks like when I’m looking at this piece of legislation. There is no reason why it needs to not happen until this has gone through. In fact, I think I’ll be flying a bit blind in that circumstance if I don’t see that work and what is going on. I am keen to see that work and look at that care package of support, alongside this, because ultimately, we are making pretty important decisions. I just wanted to talk about a couple of other unintended consequences I am worried about, and I’ll definitely be asking questions about these. Time would be my friend on this. One is the impact on women of something like this, because we have already had the attack on pay equity and now we’ve got a situation where women—women often do the care-giving and are economically disadvantaged because of their care-giving role. That is one of the things I’d like to look at, because we’re talking about people who we’ve had the traditional issue over children, but this is not children; this is disabled family members, and yet I suspect there are applications of this that actually disadvantage women financially, and I’d really like to look at that aspect of it. There are issues around savings. We already know women’s savings are much lower because of the care-giving roles they have, and this is one of them. I appreciate that that is not data that is easily available or extractable, and I’ve already had experience on this committee of a rushed process where we simply couldn’t have the discussion that we needed to have before we came back to this House. In fact, we then had one of the critical discussions straight after the matter had come to the House, because we talked to people after because we just simply didn’t have time in the time frame. So please be realistic about the work we can do. Yes, we can meet in the times when the House is not sitting, etc., but there is only so much you can fit into the day. I also know that we have two members’ bills going through at the moment. We’re trying to expedite them. We’ve got the Deepfake Digital Harm and Exploitation Bill coming to our committee. I’d love to see that one progress right through before we are finished. Again, it’s quite important to me because an election is coming up. It’ll be nice to do it—same thing—and I’m not going to get any sympathy for wanting that through because of that, but these are all important bills that are in train and pushing this date to 13 August is asking something that actually might do harm to the result we end up with, so that is my concern. I know that my friend Rachel Boyack had something she very much wants to add, which is quite unique and different, and I don’t want to steal her thunder, so I’ll end my call in the hope that she’ll get the next. DEPUTY SPEAKER: I’m going to take one more call on this, from Rachel Boyack, just because I want to see what is interesting and different that she is about to say. However, I do now feel like the conversation has been well traversed, so this really needs to be different. RACHEL BOYACK (Labour—Nelson) (16:24): Madam Speaker, what I can certainly say is that what is not different from this Government is this tendency to introduce bills and only put them through a truncated select committee process. It is becoming a pattern of behaviour from this Government, and it seems to be a pattern of behaviour from a Government that knows it’s about to get turfed out of office, the first time that a National Government will— Dan Bidois: Stick to the narrow bill. RACHEL BOYACK: Madam Speaker, it’s interesting that we’ve got heckling. It was the Minister’s referral motion itself that actually raised the matter of the election, so the Minister who introduced the referral motion brought that into the debate and so it is appropriate to respond to that. What I did want to point out—two points I wish to make. I don’t need to use the full 10 minutes to make these two points, although I’ll see how I go. DEPUTY SPEAKER: If you don’t need to, you shouldn’t. RACHEL BOYACK: The first is around the Minister’s comments around certainty, and I’m going to comment on that, and the second is some elements around the process that actually my colleagues haven’t traversed yet. The first is that the Minister talked about the need for this community to have certainty. We agree with that; however, this is not the approach to take. This community has also asked for consultation. Now, a truncated select committee process of three months, instead of the usual six, does not meet a threshold for consultation for this community. If, as my colleague pointed out, it is a shortened time frame for submissions—three weeks for people with disabilities to put submissions in—it is not enough time for genuine consultation for this community. This community—and the reason I make this point—is some of New Zealand’s most vulnerable people, and the people who support some of New Zealand’s most vulnerable people. Having heard from members of this community, they are exhausted. We have exhausted people with disabilities, we have exhausted members of their families supporting them, and now we are going to ask these people who are literally exhausted from caring for their family members under this Government to only have three weeks in order to be a submission in. That is not robust, thorough, appropriate consultation from this Minister. So that is my point in relation to her point around certainty. The next point I want to make is around the select committee process. My colleagues all sit on select committees, we all know how these processes work, but there are a couple of specific elements I wanted to raise. One was around the nature of how people put submissions into this Parliament We are all hearing as MPs that the Parliament website is difficult to navigate for people to be able to put submissions in. It is difficult to navigate. There are a lot of fields that you have to complete. You have to get it right otherwise the submission does not go through. Parliament does not accept email submissions. I don’t believe Parliament accepts an email with a voice-type submission. There are a whole series of barriers for people to actually submit to our Parliament. Our Office of the Clerk are under-resourced. They don’t have the tools to develop the website further to enable for that to happen. We are talking about a particular community with particular needs, so the select committee, in my view, needs to work with their clerk to come up with alternative methods. They should accept an email submission from a disabled person or a member of their family. They should accept, perhaps, a video submission from someone with a disability, because for people who have disabilities, submitting through a parliamentary website is not an easy feat. The second part I wanted to specifically talk about is the process which my colleague the Hon Dr Deborah Russell touched on. Actually, Helen White did also, but I want to take it just a little bit further. Today, in a select committee I sat on, we talked about the importance of—what the members of the public might not understand in this process is that you receive what’s called a departmental report, which is the analysis that comes through from the officials on all the submissions and all of the analysis that has been heard by the committee. Then those officials will go and produce what’s called an “RT”, a revision-tracked version of the bill, so it’s the changes that the committee is recommending to the bill. They need at least two weeks to do that, and if it’s more complex legislation, they need even more. How do we fit all these time frames for what will actually be quite a complex piece of legislation into a three-month period? I do want to finish, so I’ll only use half of the time allocated, but, as I said, this Government has a pattern of behaviour. They are repeatedly putting these types of truncated processes in place, and then what happens is the committee goes, “Oh look, we don’t have enough time to do this.” Funny that! Maybe they should have listened to the Opposition when we had these debates. Then the request is made to the Business Committee to extend the time, and those requests keep coming and coming, because this Government keeps putting legislation through far too fast and trying to undermine what is the democratic process of this House. That six-month process is a fundamental element of the democratic process of this House. This is the people’s House; it is not our House, and a significant part of the process that is followed is that consultation phase through the select committee process. This Government does not want to hear properly from the voices of the people who are affected by this bill. We will not be supporting the referral motion from this Government. SUZE REDMAYNE (Junior Whip—National) (16:30): I move, That debate on this question now close. A party vote was called for on the question, That debate on this question now close. Ayes 67 New Zealand National 48; ACT New Zealand 11; New Zealand First 8. Noes 55 New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand 15; Te Pāti Māori 4; Ferris; Kapa-Kingi. Motion agreed to. A party vote was called for on the question, That the Disability Support Services Bill be reported to the House by 13 August 2026 and that the committee have authority to meet at any time while the House is sitting (except during oral questions), during any evening on a day in which there has been a sitting of the House, on a Friday in a week in which there has been a sitting of the House, and outside the Wellington area, despite Standing Orders 193, 195, and 196. Ayes 67 New Zealand National 48; ACT New Zealand 11; New Zealand First 8. Noes 55 New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand 15; Te Pāti Māori 4; Ferris; Kapa-Kingi. Motion agreed to.