Sepuloni Carmel: Home and Community Support (Payment for Travel Between Clients) Settlement Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSepuloni Carmel: Home and Community Support (Payment for Travel Between Clients) Settlement Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 13 October 2015. Volume:709;Page:7154. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CARMEL SEPULONI (Labour—Kelston): I am standing on behalf of Labour to express our support for the Home and Community Support (Payment for Travel Between Clients) Settlement Bill. I think I will start by just taking us through a little bit of a time line in respect of how we got to this point. In May 2012 the Caring Counts report came out. In November 2012 Tamara Baddeley bravely took a test case claim on behalf of hundreds of fellow home-care workers. She won that case and then in September 2014 Cabinet approved this change but it has taken quite some time for us to get to this point. Just reflecting on what the member Stuart Smith said earlier about the fact that we need to recognise the importance of the work that is done here that we do have an ageing population and that it is going to become increasingly important moving forward I have to question then why the Government has dragged its feet to a large extent. It has reluctantly bowed to pressure from the unions and adopted Labour’s fair and sensible policy to pay home support workers for the time they spend travelling between clients. It is only fair because these people are paid so poorly that at the very least they deserve to be paid for their entire time which is also that travel time in between clients.Before I got into Parliament in 2008 I had the privilege of managing a research project around the non-regulated Pacific health workforce. Many of the people whom we worked with and whom we interviewed were actually providing home and community support. As has been pointed out by a number of people here this afternoon that workforce is highly feminised. It is also very ethnically diverse. In places like Auckland we have a large number of women working in that sector who are from minority ethnic groups who are Pacific and the research also showed us that not only were those people working in those positions just to get a wage but their primary reason for being in that workface was that they genuinely cared about the people they were being given an opportunity to work with and yet they did recognise that they were poorly paid. So the workforce is highly feminised ethnically diverse and very underpaid.This bill does not go to the full extent in terms of recognising the work that these people do. It is just a minor change that in some way will help them in terms of remuneration but it goes only a very small part of the way. At some stage the Government or whoever is in Government is going to have to better recognise the value of the work that these people who are largely women undertake. I think one of the major factors here is the amount that they get paid and the fact that they need to be recognised through remuneration. But there are other things too such as the investment in workforce development for the people working in this sector. It is about the type of support to be put in place so that they are able to do their job as well as possible.We support this bill but we are disappointed that the Government has dragged its feet on this one. Moving forward as a whole Parliament I think we are going to have to think how we can better recognise this workforce and how we can afford as a country to recognise them through remuneration. I look forward to the day when we can debate some legislation that allows us to have that fuller conversation rather than—even though it is really important—just recognising the travel time in between clients which these people will now be paid for thank goodness.