Lees-Galloway Iain: New Zealand Public Health and Disability Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLees-Galloway Iain: New Zealand Public Health and Disability Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 16 May 2013. Volume:690;Page:10157. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North): It is a pleasure to follow the Hon Maryan Street. Age is a matter of fact and there is not much I can do about that but beauty is in the eye of the beholder—that is just the way it goes. Mr Chairperson you have deemed that this debate on clause 1 of the New Zealand Public Health and Disability Amendment Bill (No 2) ought to be a wide-ranging debate given the fact that this bill has not been to a select committee and that submitters have not had the opportunity to have their say. It is our duty as members of Parliament to do our best to represent the interests of those submitters.However clause 1 is of course the title clause and it is customary for the Opposition to suggest some amendments and possible alternatives to the title of a bill. The title of this bill actually does not tell us very much. Folks up in the gallery might have been told that we are debating the New Zealand Public Health and Disability Amendment Bill (No 2) and I bet they thought: “That tells me absolutely nothing. I’ve got no idea what that bill will be about.” So I have got a few suggestions for the Government. My first suggestion is the “Pulling the Wool Over the Eyes of People with Disabilities Bill” because that is essentially what it does. The Government was full of promises. It was going to fix the problem. Carers who were looking after family members who had a disability were now going to be able to be paid. That is what the Government said. That is what it told people in the disability sector that it was going to do and people out there believed it unfortunately.It is rather unfortunate that they chose to believe the Government because it is not the most trustworthy Government we have ever seen but people out there believed Tony Ryall when he said that the Government was going to comprehensively deal with the issues raised in that court case that was settled a year ago. In fact of course as we know that is not the case at all. That is absolutely not the case at all. The Government had three options—well actually it had nine options when as Maryan Street said you put the matrix together of the options of targeting and how the employment relationship will actually work. The Government chose the one that kind of just about does enough to appease people—just about does enough to maybe try to pull the wool over people’s eyes—but certainly does not go the whole way. It certainly does not answer the whole problem. So I would call this bill the “Pulling the Wool Over the Eyes of People with Disabilities Bill”.Another name for it is the “Doing Half the Job and Taking Away People’s Rights Bill” because as I said it does about half the job—actually I think that saying it is doing half the job is kind of generous. It does not really quite get to doing half the job. It does maybe about a third of the job because this will in fact affect about 1600 people with disabilities not the 5400 people whom it should cover. If the job was being done properly it would cover all those people. It is doing not even half the job but let us call it the “Doing Half the Job and Then Taking Away People’s Rights Bill”.I think that second part is possibly one of the most abysmal parts of this bill because even the Attorney-General Chris Finlayson says that this bill is not up to scratch. He points out in his report that new section 70E inserted by clause 4 “prevents the Human Rights Commission from taking any further action in relation to a complaint made after the 16 May 2013.” If members look up on the wall it says that it is 16 May. That is one of those weird things about Parliament; it is actually 17 May. But that means that anybody who lays a complaint from yesterday onwards—well they just do not have the right or the ability to lay a complaint. However of course any complaints made before 16 May can be proceeded. That creates an inequity. That is a discrimination and it is a discrimination that the Attorney-General says is not acceptable. He says that new section 70E “appears to limit the right to judicial review because it would prevent a person from challenging the lawfulness of a decision on the basis that it was inconsistent with s 19(1) of the Bill of Rights Act.” And there you have it right there. It contravenes the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act and therefore this legislation is wrong. It is discriminatory. As Catherine Delahunty said it is deeply ironic that a bill that the Minister of Health promoted to people as being something that would remove discrimination actually creates a new form of discrimination. So I would call this bill the “Doing Half the Job and Taking Away People’s Rights Bill”.I think the Minister would probably want to title it the “Gosh I Hope No One Looks At This Too Closely Bill” because when you get down to it you realise what it actually does and that is probably why the Minister did not want it to go to a select committee. [Bell rung] I was talking about why you would want to call this bill the “Gosh I Hope No One Looks At This Too Closely Bill”. The Minister did not want this to go to a select committee because he did not want people who are directly affected by this bill to get a chance to give it the proper scrutiny that it deserves. But we have already started hearing back from the sector. People are looking at this bill because they want to know what the impact will be on them and people are telling us that initially—initially—they thought the Minister was getting the job done just as the Minister wanted to happen. He wanted the politics to work out on this but then when they looked at it when they peeled the layers away from the onion and when they looked at it a bit more closely they realised what was wrong with this bill. They are outraged that this bill says that family members who care for people with disabilities will be paid less—