van Velden BrookeHon BROOKE VAN VELDEN (Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety): Thank you Madam Speaker. I'm pleased to take a call on these bills today. Firstly I just wanted to congratulate the Minister the Hon Melissa Lee for bringing these bills to the House today. It's very good work.This Regulatory Systems (Immigration and Workforce) Amendment Bill is going to lift the quality of regulation in the immigration workplace relations and safety and energy portfolios. The bill will be improving four pieces of workplace relations and safety legislation that I'm responsible for the Employment Relations Act 2000 the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 the Mines Rescue Act 2013 and the Parental Leave and Employment Protection Act 1987.While these may not be the most exciting changes that this Government will make cleaning up existing regulation is a necessary activity to ensure efficient regulatory systems. Collectively the small changes in these bills will make it easier for Kiwis to understand the law and comply with Government requirements. The bills also fix problems with legislation clarify unclear provisions and ensure provisions are fit for purpose.Now there are quite a few amendments in the range of Acts in this bill today so I'd like to touch on just a few and how they affect my portfolios and what effect that they will have. So I'm very pleased that this bill will improve parental leave provisions to allow people who are not biological parents leave provisions so that there is more flexibility when they stop work to care for a child and ensure that they remain eligible for parental leave payments. This change will help people who have taken on the care of a child unexpectedly once long-term care is confirmed.So currently under the law it requires someone to stop work when they become a primary carer in order to access parental leave payments but due to the legal obligations to their employer to work out their notice if they continue working they will not be eligible for parental leave payments. Section 7 of the Parental Leave and Employment Protection Act sets out the definition of a primary carer for someone who is not the biological parent; that is a person other than the biological mother or her spouse or partner who takes permanent primary responsibility for the care development and upbringing of a child who is under the age of 6 years".Now I'm aware of a number of cases where this change would have been beneficial. For example a man and his partner were informally looking after a child when final parenting orders were made. He resigned from his job to look after this child and be the primary caregiver and he gave his employer six weeks' notice. This man was then declined parental leave payments because he did not take parental leave or stop work from the date that he became the child's primary carer.In the second case a woman was given the care of her niece following a whānau hui and she continued working. Later when it became clear that she needed to stop working in order to care for this child she applied for parental leave payments and her application was declined because she continued to work after the child had come into her care.In both cases if these proposed amendments existed the primary carers could be eligible for parental leave payments because they stopped work within a reasonable period of becoming the primary carer of the child and I think that is a very good move that this bill sets out.The immigration and workforce bill will also make some other changes too. It's really important that employers and workers meet their legal workplace obligations and that's hard to do when the law is unclear. One area that does need clarifying is the Health and Safety at Work Act. New Zealanders expect and deserve their family members to return home safe and well. At the start and end of every work day people should know that the law is there to keep them safe. As the Minister I want to make sure that the law is clearer which is why we will be doing a wide-ranging public consultation on health and safety law but in the meantime this bill will clear up some of the existing regulations in health and safety.It will clarify that in situations where safety-critical equipment or processes fail they must be a notifiable incident even if no one was directly imminently exposed to danger. The bill will minimise the risk of unjustified delays before parties receive notice and become able to file private prosecutions. It does this now by only requiring that the regulator make reasonable efforts to establish whether a relevant regulator or regulatory agency is taking or intends to act regarding a situation rather than having to contact over 100 entities which it currently does and it will assist in reducing the number of invoices for ACC CoverPlus Extra customers. I commend this bill to the House."