Moroney Sue: Employment Standards Legislation Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMoroney Sue: Employment Standards Legislation Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 08 March 2016. Volume:711;Page:9466. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]SUE MORONEY (Labour): I did want to take the opportunity to speak to the second of my amendments which I did not get around to in my last call. It is in fact the amendment that Chris Hipkins has just addressed and he has done so very well.It is the view of the Labour Party that it is financially affordable and in fact a financial necessity for this country to extend paid parental leave to 26 weeks. As Chris Hipkins has pointed out my typescript amendment does not attempt to do it all in one hit but takes a fiscally responsible way of staggering the implementation so that we know that it is affordable.Yes on this side of the House I think we do have agreement that 26 weeks’ paid parental leave is the least that we should be doing. For the Labour Party we do see the sense in extending paid parental leave beyond the 26 weeks but what we know is that 26 weeks is what is affordable right now. We know that. We know that because yes the Prime Minister has confirmed that in Budget 2016 there will be an additional $1.5 billion of new spending. What better provision on which to spend a tiny proportion of that $1.5 billion of new spending—which National has already committed itself to—than getting it right in these early months of a child’s life.You know this is where the Kiwi Dream starts. It starts when these children are born. If we get it right then not only is it the correct thing to do but it is actually the economically smart thing to do: investing in families and taking that financial pressure off those families by allowing them to focus on the needs of baby and not have to think about getting back to work before they are ready to making sure that they do not suffer financial stress as a result of that and making sure that they can focus on building that attachment that the Brainwave Trust has done some excellent work on informing us about.When I had my children there was no availability of paid parental leave. My children are just 18 and 16—that is how recently it is that this country started to understand about the importance of paid parental leave. So it is a relatively new phenomenon for us but we cannot pretend and we cannot un-know what we now know. Back in the day we did not necessarily have the research that told us exactly how important this is but the Government knows because it too has had the presentations from the Brainwave Trust and other very good organisations that have done research in this area that states that the brain development that is occurring in those early months is the most critically important brain development. That is what is going to give that child our fellow citizen the resilience that he or she needs for whatever may come at them in life. That is the way that we make sure that we do not continue to spend money on bad outcomes as we are as a country at the moment.So I want to fully recommend that the amendment in my name that extends paid parental leave in two tranches to 26 weeks be accepted across the board. I hope that the Government will not continue to play political games over paid parental leave and actually does the right thing when it comes to this amendment coming up for voting. It does so in two tranches. It does so by increasing paid parental leave next year on 1 April to 22 weeks and then finally in 2018 to 26 weeks. It is done deliberately that way because we want to ensure that it is affordable for the country. And I take the lead from a country like Ireland because Ireland already has 6 months’ paid parental leave. But you know that country came out of the global financial crisis in much worse shape than New Zealand. What was the first thing it said it wanted to do? It made a commitment to extend paid parental leave to 12 months over the course of the next decade. So that is the sort of thing that progressive countries do.I like to think that New Zealand is progressive although at the moment we sit 26th equal in the OECD when it comes to duration of paid parental leave. That is not acceptable in my view. We can do a lot better than that. And you know for goodness’ sake we have only just caught up with Australia. We used to be ahead of Australia in this field—we used to have 14 weeks’ paid parental leave when it had none. Now we are dragging our heels a couple of years behind them by getting to 18 weeks.I am pleased that this bill does get us to 18 weeks on 1 April. But we can do an awful lot better and we should and we have the opportunity to do that.