Kuriger BarbaraBARBARA KURIGER (National—Taranaki - King Country): Thank you Mr Speaker. It's a pleasure to take a call on this bill today and it's a pleasure to commit National caucus's support for this piece of legislation.It's kind of impressing on me today that we've spent a lot of time in this House over the last few weeks doing urgency on bills where we don't necessarily agree with the consequences of what's going to happen with these bills. This is one of those times where we come together in the House and we acknowledge that for the good of all families for all women and for men this is a really good bill to do. And I commend the member Ginny Andersen for picking up the bill on behalf of Clare Curran and also want to pay some acknowledgment for Kathryn for being the inspiration for this bill as it found its genesis. And just looking at it now seeing how it's taken from 2018 until now and sometimes legislation does take a long time to pass through this House I think it's really fitting that we move with it today and get it in action so that it can happen for the benefit of everyone that's going through this bereavement scenario.I was lucky enough to be the spokesperson for women at the stage that this bill was going through select committee and I really do want to commend the Education and Workforce Committee from the 52nd Parliament for the work and effort that everyone on that committee did to bring the parts of this bill together where there was a little bit of doubt around what certain parts of the bill meant and actually lining up all the pieces so that we know that we've got everything in place because miscarriage sadly affects around 20000 New Zealand women each year. So we're not talking about an issue that's insignificant. This is not occasional; this is something that many women would be going through every day.And so we also believe in National that most employers operate in good faith when it comes to leave applications and we believe that most employers would be of the view that they would give their employees leave; but sadly in this situation there will be a few that probably would have been unlikely to and for that reason we support this bill going through the House to be sure that those women and those families who are going through this situation have the opportunity and have the time for their bereavement that they need.So the time in the select committee was spent clarifying that this bill applies to both known and unknown pregnancies—so the fact that a woman wasn't aware that she was pregnant when she miscarries doesn't preclude a woman from having this bereavement leave under this bill—and clarifying that a proof of pregnancy is not required for the employee to claim the bereavement leave. But I think that one of the key things in here is clarifying that a miscarriage can occur at any time during a pregnancy no matter how far along that pregnancy is. So there's no time frames; it's not time bound. If a pregnancy ends due to miscarriage then bereavement leave is on offer.I think it's very important to state in the House given that we have done abortion legislation over the last period of time that parents who experience the end of a pregnancy due to an abortion would not be eligible for the bereavement leave and that was a very important piece of the legislation to make sure we were very clear on. And one of the most important parts I believe of the select committee's work was expanding that definition to talk about the relationships to an unborn child and so it's expanded the bill to include surrogate parents. So if you were expecting a child even if you're not the person who's actually going to be giving birth to it there is a bereavement process for those people that happens at the time when that unborn baby is lost. Any parents that were planning to adopt—same thing. And I just want to mention men because often we think about woman when we do bills like this but actually there are husbands there are fathers and there are also former spouses. So there's a lot of people in this grieving process who are likely to be affected with a miscarriage.So I'm not going to take the full time to do this speech today because I think it's more important that we acknowledge where we've been that we're acknowledging where we're going and that we get this bill passed and start working on getting this legislation into action. Thank you Madam Speaker.