Stanford EricaERICA STANFORD (National—East Coast Bays): Thank you Madam Speaker. Very happy to take a call on the Employment Relations (Extended Time for Personal Grievance for Sexual Harassment) Amendment Bill. Other speakers before me have mentioned that today is the day we celebrated the 50:50 gender split in Parliament and a great day for celebration. I'd just like to take that a bit further and say isn't it a great day that that happened as well as a really good woman in Dr Deborah Russell—and I've had quite a lot to do with her in previous select committees; she was a great chair of the Environment Committee that I sat on—a great woman brought a really really good bill and it's worthy of thinking about not only Deborah Russell but other great women in this Parliament who have fought for women's rights and for the rights of women. I got to talking to Dame Jenny Shipley who was around today for the celebrations of the 50:50 split in Parliament. We got to chatting about her time in Parliament when she was in fact the Minister of Health and she passed through the national breast screening service for women in 1995 and then she did it again for cervical screening. So great women in this Parliament on both sides of the House doing great things for women and I have to commend Dr Deborah Russell tonight for bringing what is a great bill.I'm not going to take a long call because I actually think we should just get this bill passed. It's a great bill; we don't need to spend our whole speeches pontificating. I think we just need to say we commend the bill and sit down. But I just want to make a couple of comments. Firstly one of the submitters to this bill—and it was passed through my select committee the Education and Workforce Committee—was Mika Hurbuns and I want to acknowledge her because she is a student of my local high school Rangitoto College a year 13 student and she took the time to submit on this bill. So I just wanted to mention her name and to say to her we looked at your submission and I note that she like many other submitters wanted the time frame of 12 months pushed out indefinitely. We did consider that but decided on balance that 12 months was the right time frame. We did so in acknowledgment that sexual harassment in the workplace is different than other types of harassment in the workplace in the fact that it can bring with it some shame and difficulty for women to understand necessarily what's happened to them and to come to the realisation of what has happened and then take action and look at all of the potential outcomes. So we decided that on balance 12 months was a good time for that. So what I say to Mika: thank you very much for your submission we considered it and I thank you for being a brave year 13 Rangitoto College student in submitting to our select committee.We did make some tidy-ups in the bill in clause 6 where we weren't sure whether or not Dr Deborah Russell was intending on allowing the employer to—if the employer agreed to—extend the time past 12 months. That wasn't in her original draft. We clarified that with her and then added it back in. There were a couple of other minor amendments just to make things more clear and use better language especially when it came to individual employment contracts making sure that it was spelt out—the two different time frames: the 90 days for other personal grievances and the 12 months for sexual harassment—and that's reflected elsewhere in the bill as well.So with that I don't think I need to say much more. It's a great bill. I want to thank all the submitters because overwhelmingly they were in support of the bill. Like I say we did have a number of them who wanted it extended and also wanted some of the other personal grievances extended to 12 months as well but we did consider that sexual harassment is very different and with that we decided that 12 months just for sexual harassment was on balance the best thing to do. And we also did clarify with Dr Deborah Russell that this bill wasn't going to be retrospective and indeed it wasn't.So with that again Dr Deborah Russell well done. You are standing with many other great women in this House for bringing great bills that will affect the lives of many women as I say alongside people like Dame Jenny Shipley who should be acknowledged as well for her great work in women's health especially. So with that Madam Speaker I commend the bill to the House.