Moroney Sue: Employment Standards Legislation Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMoroney Sue: Employment Standards Legislation Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 03 March 2016. Volume:711;Page:9398. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]SUE MORONEY (Labour): It is a pleasure to rise and speak on the Employment Standards Legislation Bill finding ourselves at this stage supporting the bill—at this point and Iain Lees-Galloway has stressed that. We have got some discussions to go. But it is interesting to note that in this piece of legislation I think the Government almost got too clever for itself. At the outset it put paid parental leave—positive changes to paid parental leave—in this bill and some changes that it knew that the Labour Party would find difficult to support which actually continued to have zero-hour contracts in our landscape. The Government put them together thinking: “Hah! That’ll corner the Labour Party won’t it?”. Well actually what has ended up happening is it has ended up being a real problem for the Government because it has now got paid parental leave changes that it wants to get in before 1 April this year and suddenly it found itself without the numbers to be able to do that because—Hon Michael Woodhouse: Not true.SUE MORONEY: —of the shambles that it has created over zero-hour contracts. So I think Mr Woodhouse that is what is called being too clever for yourself and being hoist with one’s own petard. I think that is one of the things that has occurred during this process.I do want to briefly speak about the zero-hour contracts issue because it is important that we get that right. If we do not get that right then people’s lives suffer. Their family lives suffer; their ability to be involved with their community suffers; even their ability to be able to get a loan or a mortgage or anything of that nature suffers if they cannot show that they have constant work and what the value of that work is and therefore they are not even able to take out a mortgage.I particularly want to thank the excellent submissions that we had on this particular issue around zero-hour contracts because I think it was the submitters—and I think the fine work from the Labour Party as well—who really showed the stupidity of the way that the law was drafted as it had been put into the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee. There were many many submitters who came in on this issue and the ones who really stick in my mind were the employers—the employers who one would have imagined were the ones who probably wanted zero-hour contracts so those operating in the home-care sector for example where sometimes the scheduling of work can be a little problematic. It can be a little difficult to anticipate who is going to need home care when and who is going to go to hospital and maybe not need someone to come to their home—those sorts of issues.But it was those very employers who actually told the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee that they did not need or want zero-hour contracts. And that had the National Party looking pretty grim I have got to say because its reason for keeping some ability to have zero-hour contracts in the law was slipping away before its eyes at the select committee. But still it refused to believe it. Employer group after employer group after employer group came in and under questioning from the Labour Party told the committee that all they needed for flexibility in the sort of labour market they needed to deliver the goods and services that they were involved in was a permanent part-time workforce who they knew were there on particular days of the week; they needed the ability to have fixed-term contracts which are in the law already—the ability to bring people in on fixed-term contracts for when they had particular projects on that were unusual or particularly high demands for their product or services—and the only other thing they needed was a genuine ability to employ people on a casual basis. They did not need zero-hour contracts. And so it was the employers and the employees who came along and told us that this is a nonsense it is creating havoc on people’s lives and employers did not need it.It was right there and then that National should have addressed this but it did not. It got all the way through the select committee and the bill has been reported back still with zero-hour contract provisions in there. And if it had listened to the Labour Party from the outset we would have had a bill that made sense that actually improved people’s lives and that took people out of that vulnerable situation sitting in front of this House right here right now. We do not and I think that is very sad because National had every opportunity to fix it at an earlier opportunity.I now want to move on to the paid parental leave provisions of this bill because this is the part that Labour can almost wholeheartedly support without any amendments although we do have one to propose and I will talk to that a little later. But the provisions of the paid parental leave are generally very good in this bill. It importantly extends paid parental leave to seasonal and casual workers and that has not been available to them before. That provision will be available from 1 April. That will make a big difference to the lives of young children born into probably some of our most vulnerable working families where the income is not regular and where the needs are generally quite high.So I applaud the Government for that. But I do want to put on record the real story behind what I think is one of the best achievements of this bill which I am personally very proud of and that is the extension of additional paid parental leave to the families who have prematurely born babies. I want to place on record the real story behind that because the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety thanked David Seymour and yes David Seymour does deserve a little bit of thanking over that but the Minister should really have been thanking Donnelle Belanger-Taylor. And if he was not so churlish he might have even thanked my good self for my role in this because here is the story about how this evolved.My bill to extend paid parental leave to 26 weeks was in danger of not progressing any further just after the last election. In an attempt to salvage that and to do the best that I could and that the Labour Party could for families I amended the bill in the hopes that the Government members might find some compassion in their souls to support it. And I amended it in the following way. I amended it so that the 26 weeks’ paid parental leave would apply to families who had a baby born with a disability who had a baby born prematurely or who had the joy of a multiple birth in their family. Those seemed to me if I was going to amend the bill at all the most pressing needs and so I did that. That miserable Government still did not support that; it still did not support even those families having extended paid parental leave.However I decided that I needed just one more vote to get that through. I could not look those families in the eye and say that I had not done every single thing possible to try to help their situations if I did not go and talk to every member of Parliament I could about securing that one vote. The person who listened to that plea was David Seymour so thank you Mr Seymour. You listened with an open mind about those amendments. You told me that you would support the bill Mr Seymour and I was delighted about that. However I believe that when Mr Seymour went and talked to his coalition partner the Government it threw its arms up in horror and said: “Whatever you do do not support her bill. You cannot support the Labour Party bill.” But it promised instead that it would do exactly those amendments in a bill in the Government’s own name. So it seemed like in a round about way we were going to get what we had asked for anyway.However that is not the end of the story because when the bill was brought forward—the Employment Standards Legislation Bill—it did not have that change in it at all. So in the first reading of this bill there was no additional measure for pre-term babies babies born with disabilities or babies born in multiple births. So I had another conversation with David Seymour he had another conversation with the Government and during the select committee process one of those measures was brought forward. It is an important measure but I do want to say to the Government that you reneged on your promise to Mr Seymour to bring in those three measures. This measure however will be very well received by those families—that babies born before the end of the 36th week of gestation will have additional paid parental leave and I feel very proud of that achievement. That will make a big different to those families.But I particularly want to say thank you to Donnelle Belanger-Taylor. It was her submission on my bill that kept me awake at night thinking about the circumstances of families when the birth had been different to what they had expected and the pressures on their families. That is an example of where someone actually brings a submission forward to Parliament and it makes a big difference. In this case Donnelle you are a hero for all those families who will benefit from this change.