Henderson EmilyDr EMILY HENDERSON (Labour—Whangārei): I rise to speak to this bill as a mum of four children and as someone who chose with my husband that I would do the main parenting role while they were little. So I know very well the strains of being a young mum at home with young babies. Rightly or wrongly we had three of ours within 3½ years and boy that was tough. So I do want to acknowledge Ms Willis for bringing this issue before us. It is a really heartfelt and important one; we need to talk about it. I am going to talk to my experience for a few minutes if I may in the context of this bill. So when I was a young mum I had my small amount of parental leave under the previous regime because my last baby was born in 2007 but my husband took his parental two weeks because what we recognised was just how hard it is for young mamas to be alone with newborns—particularly to be alone may I say with a two-year-and-one-week-old a 3½-year-old as well as a six-week-old; can I just put that out there. Yeah it is really tough to do that. Tom took his two weeks. I was lucky: my mum took in a week as well and they balanced those. I was so darn lucky to have that opportunity. You can look at this and say Isn't this great for parents? It gives them the opportunity to do that shared parenting time and to cut that 26 weeks."—as my colleague Ms Belich put it those hard-won 26 weeks that we had to fight for in 2017. You can say that it increases fairness for those parents to be able to take those 26 weeks but I think it's short-sighted. What it isn't looking at is that the reason we want that parental leave is not actually for the adults in the equation; it is for the babies. I have absolutely no compunction in saying it is our duty to take care of those who cannot care for themselves—I say that as a parent but I also say that as an MP—and infants are the prime example of that. They need at least that 26 weeks of one-on-one intensive care and I am concerned that while it sounds really nice to say "Let's enable the parents to cut this pie any way they want." what you're really doing is creating an either/or not an and/and.I do invite Ms Willis to live up to the much-vaunting beginning of her speech where she talked about the need for cross-party collaboration on the issues that matter and to really engage with the Government—whatever Government is in next time; I hope it's us—who will continue to do the policy work that really isn't in this bill at this point. We do not need an either/or that effectively cuts the 26 weeks that our vulnerable infants get at this point and that creates a half-situation where we are back to possibly worse than the 18 weeks the National Government fought so damn hard to keep us at. We need to not do an either/or. It is a false fairness. It is a false economy. It does not create equity. We need to be looking wider and more ambitiously. We need to be looking for an and/and. As someone who had a partner who took six months and swapped I know how rich and valuable it is to be able to co-parent with another parent who has actually been there in the trenches with you on a full-time basis. It's vital. But Ms Willis—Hon Louise Upston: Yeah together at the same time. Dr EMILY HENDERSON: No I would just say to the member opposite let's have more ambition for our children and our families. Let's go beyond either/or cut the pie keep the pie smaller. Let's actually take this half-baked idea and turn it into something really magnificent and an and/and."