Lubeck MarjaMARJA LUBECK (Labour): Thank you Madam Speaker. It's a pleasure to take a call on this Holidays (Increasing Sick Leave) Amendment Bill. Now the previous speaker talked to us about urgency and the callously carried-out process of urgency when this bill actually came to the select committee that I chair on 1 December which was five months ago. Now that's not the kind of urgency that the National Government used many many times when they were in Government many times on all sorts of occasions and notably when they were riding roughshod over employment rights like for example internationally recognised workers' rights taking away collective bargaining from workers under the Hobbit bill" overnight without any select committee process at all without any opportunity for public input at all. The same with 90-day trials—so that full outrage about this urgency is a little bit misplaced.But let me talk about the nearly 400 submissions that we received from businesses NGOs not-for-profits individuals all across the country and as well as that we had time to do the 34 oral submissions that were requested. Of course it won't be lost on anyone in the House here how important it is to look at workers' rights for our New Zealand workers and especially on the back of what has been a very unprecedented COVID period where people had to be very careful in how they were treating their sick leave and making sure they didn't bring that to their workplaces and spread any of their germs.A little word on unintended consequences that the previous speaker was talking so much about. Now that must be like the unintended consequences that we hear about every time we put the minimum wage up. Apparently it would result in massive job losses every time we put this up. But what happened? What did we hear today? Unemployment in fact is down to 4.7 percent. I think it's the lowest that it was since September 2019. So so much for those unintended consequences.Now I also picked a couple of submissions at random like the previous speaker did. I picked one from Together and the one I want to talk about is a hairdresser who came to us and talked about the times that she said she would just make do if she wasn't 100 percent. Of course you know you can imagine in that kind of a job that definitely has a flow-on effect. But that particular person said to us that she had learnt from the COVID-19 pandemic and that she actually realised that she needed to be more aware of—and I quote—"taking care of her own health and thereby of everyone around her". That same organisation Together also conducted a survey of working people and they had about 700 or 711 something like that people get back to them about their current entitlements to sick leave and their experience with the five-day sick leave and also what they felt they needed to in fact have a safer use of sick leave for themselves. It basically reinforced what we already know: that as we have at the moment the minimum of five days is absolutely inadequate.That brings me to one of the overarching themes that our select committee really saw through all of those submissions and that's that there's a stark choice that workers face when they get sick. That is either they need to choose between taking unpaid leave and perhaps not being able to pay the bills or they have to choose to come to work sick not look after their own health not look after the health of the people around them and potentially spread their germs in the workplace. That of course has a flow-on effect resulting in perhaps many more people being sick.But anyway for many workers taking unpaid sick leave isn't even an option. We heard from one of our E tū members Marina—she is a cleaner. She talked to us about how she had to take unpaid sick leave and was worried about how to put bread on the table for her children. That's how dire it gets for some of those workers out there. And the pressure of a toughing-it-out culture and risking infecting others E tū mentioned has created a culture of heroism. That really isn't on in these days.Workers and families need flexibility to make sure that people take sick leave when they need it have a proper opportunity to rest and recover and as a result being happier and healthier in the workplace will also mean that they are more productive. So that's exactly what this bill does. It supports workers to take the sick leave when they need it look after themselves look after the people around them look after their families and produce a happier and healthier New Zealand. I commend this bill to the House."