Bidois DanDAN BIDOIS (National—Northcote): Madam Assistant Speaker talofa lava happy Samoan Language Week to you and—let me just get this right—magandang tanghali and a very special welcome to everybody who has come to see my colleague—oh I may have butchered that and my apologies—Paulo Garcia's maiden speech. It's going to be a historic occasion for New Zealand and I welcome you to the gallery today.I'd also like to just start by acknowledging the health Minister for bringing this bill and continuing this good work that the National-led Government started. Also I'd like to pay and acknowledge the thousands and thousands of mental health workers in our community and these addiction support workers—you do very important work for our communities. The challenges that these people deal with are tough and I just want to commend these workers and the value that they give to our society.So it's a pleasure to rise in support of the Support Workers (Pay Equity) Settlements Amendment Bill. Of course this bill aims to extend the rights of the previous Act that was brought into force in 2017 to extend the same rights that the other health workers and care and support workers have under that bill to mental health workers and to those that work in addiction support services as well.Now the previous speakers have talked about the Terranova case and I just want to reinforce some of the learnings from that Terranova case a very important case that is over $2 billion that was settled. It covered about 33000 workers which were women. What did we learn from that case? We learnt that women deserve equal pay for work of equal value and essentially that is what this bill is about extending those same rights and activities to those that work in mental health and addiction support services. So it is a pleasure to rise in support of this bill.Just going through some of the specifics of the bill this bill covers mental health and addiction support workers and gives them the same pay and training coverage that the previous bill in 2017 also gave. It gives the same level of enforcement mechanisms if there are disputes in the sector and also gives employers compensation for any type of extra costs that will be incurred by the pay differentials in this bill. It applies to most importantly union and non-union workers so regardless of whether you're a union worker or not this law applies to you. It also gives specific funding for those that apply to the Ministry of Health the district health board and ACC.So we are here at the first reading and we are supporting this bill because National believes in valuing equal work of equal pay. Certainly it's a core value in our party that you're paid what you're worth and we're absolutely happy to support this bill. This bill covers important people in the mental health sector and those that work with many of our most vulnerable.Can I just talk a little bit about those most vulnerable in the area that I represent of Northcote and a special shout-out to the many different mental health workers that are working in a whole range of services—Hearts & Minds being one of them that I can think of—that do a tremendous amount for our community that work very hard. All they want is to be paid the same level of pay because it's the same level of value as other professions. So it is a pleasure to support this bill in its first reading.I just want to say one final acknowledgment. It's a very important occasion and I'm looking forward to hearing my colleague Paolo Garcia's inspiring speech. Thank you very much Madam Assistant Speaker.