Newman Muriel: Parental Leave and Employment Protection mendment Bill — Second Reading 
Newman Muriel: Parental Leave and Employment Protection mendment Bill — Second Reading 
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Dr MURIEL NEWMAN (Deputy Leader—ACT) 
: 
 I rise on behalf of the ACT party to speak on the Parental Leave and Employment Protection Amendment Bill. I begin by acknowledging the important role women have in New Zealand when they decide it is time to have a family. Every mother will be able to testify to the fact that bringing up children is not an easy task and to the consequences of having a child stay with her for the rest of her life. Children do not go away. So we are talking about something that is very important to New Zealand—the whole business of raising our next generation. 
But the ACT party opposes this legislation. The key reason is that it is just another example of Labour progressing its socialist agenda. Here we see in a very clear way that the Government plans to try to make more and more New Zealanders dependent on the State. In this particular instance with this bill it is also taking steps to penalise small business. I will come back to that. If this Government really wanted to help new parents then the best thing it could do would be to lower taxes to give new parents more disposable income. If parents had more disposable income they could choose whether mum or dad would stay at home and raise the child or that two incomes were needed to keep their family ticking over. 
 The reality is that in New Zealand today in spite of the wonderfully booming economy we appear to have working families are probably struggling harder than in the past. The benefits of this booming economy are not flowing through to working families. Part of the reason is that with all the regulations and compliance costs that Labour has imposed out there a lot of the extra productivity generated is not flowing through in increased profitability and therefore in wage growth in the way we would hope and it is not flowing through to give people a rise in their standard of living which would enable them to choose to stay at home. If the Government really wanted to help young families get ahead why does it not lower taxes? For goodness’ sake we have a $6 billion surplus! All working families could benefit from that if this Government wanted them to. Instead it chooses to increase the dependency of New Zealand families. 
I would like to quote from the Federated Farmers’ submission to the select committee. Federated Farmers which obviously represents rural New Zealand to a large extent believes that the best long-term solution lies with empowering individuals and families to plan and prepare for the future themselves. Increasing the disposable income of working families by lowering taxes is a key mechanism available to Government to achieve that objective. 
Darren Hughes 
: 1 percent! 
Dr MURIEL NEWMAN 
: Mr Hughes sits there muttering and mumbling but it would be very interesting for Opposition members if he as junior whip and on behalf of his Government could take a call and explain why his Government which is overtaxing New Zealand workers to the level of $6 billion to 7 billion a year will not even consider decreasing the tax burden when he and every Government member knows that New Zealand is one of the most overtaxed countries in the Western World. I would really enjoy hearing a member of that Government tell families who are planning to have children why this Government will not decrease the tax burden on families so that mothers can choose to stay at home and raise their families instead of having to go out to work. That is the real question. 
This bill is simply hiding the fact that this Government does not care about giving families the choices that should rightfully be theirs. Instead we have here a scheme that essentially provides welfare benefits to families but it penalises employers in the process. That is the problem. We have already heard in this debate how the bill does not even look after women in the workforce equally. It discriminates against self-employed women women who are in part-time or job-sharing employment and women who are in casual employment. Those groups of women make up a substantial part of the workforce but Labour has simply turned its back on them. We have heard members of the Government say that they will fix it. Why on earth have they not fixed it in this bill? The only reason is that the Government has not had the political will to do so. It does not care about those groups of women and that is a disgrace. I do not support the bill but in particular I do not support the Government discriminating against groups of women who for some reason it has decided are not on its side. 
A very important reason not to support this bill though is the fact that it increases compliance costs on small businesses. I refer to the submission of Business New Zealand and the explanatory note of the bill when it first came out which stated: “The proposals do not impose any material increment in compliance cost to business.” That tells me that there must be almost nobody in the Labour Government who has actually hired people because if any of them had any experience of being an employer he or she would know that women deciding to take paid parental leave after having their babies or the 52 weeks’ leave available to them creates mayhem in a small business. The situation arises where one of an employer’s extremely valuable employees decides to take leave but the employer does not know whether that leave is for just over 3 months or for a year. The difference between trying to get somebody to fill in for 3 months or to fill in for a year is huge as any member of the House would testify. Even members who have not employed anybody will know there is a big difference between those two situations. 
Darren Hughes 
: That happens now. 
Dr MURIEL NEWMAN 
: I ask Mr Hughes to imagine today right now up and down New Zealand that businesses cannot hire staff. There are no workers—no skilled workers no unskilled workers—largely because of the policies of this Government. 
This Government has not managed the workforce properly. It panicked on its immigration rules and the result is that it has halved immigration into New Zealand. It has failed to deal with many of the worker groups that could give this Government solutions to its problems. It has failed to listen. So we have a situation where the small employer is faced with hiring somebody part-time for 3 months—in which case the employer can go to a temp agency knowing that one has to pay a premium for somebody to come in—or hiring somebody for a year in which case he or she cannot afford to go the temp agency because it is too expensive. But the employer is not told until after 14 weeks that the employee will not be coming back. 
This bill has put a huge burden of compliance cost on small business. It has made it so that many small businesses today do not want to hire women of childbearing age. That is called “unintended consequence” which this Government is great at creating. So in its own way it ends up discriminating against every woman of childbearing age.