Collins JudithIn CommitteeDebate resumed from 14 November.Clauses 1 to 4 (continued)Hon JUDITH COLLINS (National—Papakura): This is a bill that the National Party has a tremendous amount of interest in because it is actually entirely within our own policy for the last election with one exception and that is the exception around Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 3 which Amy Adams put in that was allowing parents to have the right to decide for themselves whether or not they shared their parental leave time together or they had it both together so that they could in fact have two parents at home. That is something that the Government could choose to support but it has not. So we think that the Parental Leave and Employment Protection Amendment Bill is actually quite—we could say it is a selective Parental Leave and Employment Protection Amendment Bill because what it doesn't do is it doesn't actually empower parents.We have seen a lot of opportunities in the House over this week for the Government and its allies to front up to the fact that it takes two people to be parents. It takes two parents to have a child and in some cases parenthood is not what I'd say—or another generation would say; obviously not mine—all beer and skittles. It is really hard work and particularly as a new parent a new mother at home dealing with breastfeeding mastitis abscesses all those sorts of things post-natal depression—not particularly unusual not at all unusual; that just goes with the territory—and to say to those mothers Well you can't have your partner at home with you on paid parental leave even though we believe you're adult enough to decide to have babies all by yourselves we think you're adult enough to bring up your children all by yourselves but we don't think you're adult enough to make some decisions about whether or not you can do something with your paid parental leave because it might suit you and not suit some sort of Government directive around motherhood."I would have thought that the Government parties—Government parties in coalition and whatever else they have; some other form of support—would actually want to empower parents they would want to empower mothers and they would want to empower fathers. Why wouldn't we want to do that? So we think that the name of the bill is really a bit amiss. I personally think it should be something around "Selective Parental Leave if it Suits the Labour Government Protection Amendment Bill". But I think it's the sort of issue where a Government that actually wanted to listen to people would not worry that the idea came from this side of the House. A Government that wanted to listen to people would actually think "Gosh that's a really good idea from my colleague whose SOP it was." and a Government that was thinking would think "Well this is an opportunity for us to take an excellent National Party policy call it our own and tell everybody it only got passed because of us." And they'd be very clever if they did that but they're obviously not clever enough.The bill as it is is set to commence only in July next year so there's no particular rush for it. There's no particular need for this to be thrown through in urgency to make sure it all happens. There won't be many couples out there deciding that they're suddenly going to have a baby because of this bill. There certainly will be some couples who will think "Oh I wish when Parliament was changing this Act that they would have actually made some provision for adults to make some decisions around how they use their paid parental leave."I saw on the television tonight a woman from UNICEF who are obviously clearly experts in parenting telling us that mothers should not be allowed to make these decisions all by themselves. I actually thought that was the sort of idea that was really prevalent in the 1960s and 1970s where there were still a lot of people who didn't think women should be allowed to work once they were mothers. I would have thought that we had moved on and I would have thought that a Labour-led Government with the Greens and New Zealand First—or maybe not with that last party; anyway the Labour-led Government along with the Greens and their friends—would have put some belief in parents given them some choices and understood that parenthood the first time in particular is really tough and particularly if you've got twins or any child with special needs it's really tough. Why can't they put some faith in parents because this side does?"