Newman Muriel: Parental Leave and Employment Protection Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Newman Muriel: Parental Leave and Employment Protection Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
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Dr MURIEL NEWMAN (Deputy Leader—ACT) 
: 
 I rise on behalf of the ACT party to speak on the third reading of the Parental Leave and Employment Protection Amendment Bill. As we have done all along in this debate we will be voting against this bill. The reason is that we believe it is unfair it is discriminatory and it increases the welfare burden so to speak on New Zealand. 
It is interesting that in a democracy we expect people and political parties in particular to stand up for their principles. In this debate we have seen two parties who support the Government: the United Future party and the Green Party. Both parties have explained to the House why they disagree with a large part of this bill—the fact that it discriminates against groups of workers in particular. I have to say that members of those parties on our select committee raised those issues all the time but it is a sad fact I believe that they are still supporting a bill that is very unfair. I think that the parties that have opposed this bill even though they may see some merit in it have done so on the grounds that they would rather not support bad law than go ahead and support bad law because of some other reason and privilege the major party may give them. 
This bill is essentially about the right of a woman who is having a baby to choose to stay at home while that baby is young to choose to leave her place of employment to have this parental leave benefit and then be free either to take the statutory 12 months’ leave a woman is entitled to when she has a baby or to stay at home permanently to look after that child. But I say to the Government that the better way to give that choice to working families is not through a welfare entitlement that favours a group of women in New Zealand while discriminating against probably the majority of working women. 
In fact the better way to do it would simply be to lower the tax burden on working families to let them keep more of what they earn so that they can make those choices themselves as to whether they keep mum at home for 3 months or whether they can afford to keep her home on a longer-term basis which is obviously the way that New Zealand used to be. I think all of us can look back to our own childhoods and we can say that many of our mothers stayed at home while their kids were little and it is a really sad indictment I think on New Zealand’s high tax burden that so many working families no longer have that choice. 
Darren Hughes 
: Oh! 
Dr MURIEL NEWMAN 
: If the member who keeps grunting over there would like to take a call maybe he can explain to the House why that logic is wrong. Why is the logic wrong when we know that the average family now has to pay 46 percent of its income in taxes? That includes not just income tax but the 34 stealth taxes brought in by Labour in its short reign. In 5 years it has brought in 34 additional taxes levies fees and other types of tariff which have taken the tax burden up so that almost half of the income of working families now goes in tax. 
I say that that is too high and I remind the member that a Treasury paper published earlier this year explained to the Government that if it simply took the surplus and gave most of it back—not even the whole lot—taxes in this country could be lowered to 20 cents in the dollar. We can just imagine what that would mean to working families and it would not be touching any spending that the Government had already promised. 
So this is a debate about whether we have more welfare in this country which means those working families will have an even greater tax burden as a result of the changes we are passing through the House today or whether we should give those working families a break so that they can make the choice themselves and take responsibility for mum staying at home or not staying at home—whatever they choose. I say that that is the better way to go and that is essentially why the ACT party does not support this legislation. 
We have heard about the discrimination against many working women that this bill now brings into our law—that it discriminates against the self-employed and it discriminates against the casual worker whose work makes up a full-time job but with different employers. We have heard that this bill makes exceptions for teachers who we know have a strong union to back them. We understand it does the same for doctors. What about nurses who make up a huge proportion of our workforce? What about those nurses who have different employers because they are employed by different district health boards? What about cleaners? What about women who supplement their income by going out and doing the tough jobs but with a number of different employers? 
This Government does not care about those people yet I would say that many of their voters are in that category: unskilled workers who have a number of different employers. They make up a 40-hour week by grafting hard and this Government does not care about giving them the right to this new welfare benefit that it is now promoting and providing through this House. I say that smacks of double standards. It smacks of the sorts of double standards that we in the Opposition have become accustomed to from Labour. 
A third reason why the ACT party does not support this bill is that it is yet another election bribe. We see that the next phase of the 14-week entitlement which is the change from 13 weeks to 14 weeks comes into force in December 2005. Is that not great? It means that anybody who wants to look forward to the 14-weeks’ entitlement will realise they had better vote for Labour. I think that that is despicable and that we will see a lot of that as time goes by. We will see Labour putting out more and more legislation that comes into force after the election. In my mind that is not the honourable way to pass legislation. 
We then go on to the fact that this is anti-business legislation. 
Hon Members 
: Oh! 
Dr MURIEL NEWMAN 
: Labour members groan but I can tell them that if any one of them had run a small business they would know how difficult it is if a staff member takes either 3 months or a year off work—and they do not know which it is. Any woman who has had a baby and who intends to take a year off work will end up taking the 3 months’ paid parental leave and who could say anything against her for doing so? But she will no longer signal to the employer that she will be away for a year. That will come after the 3 months is up. It puts a huge burden on to the small-business person who does not know whether to hire somebody part-time through an agency for 3 months or whether to go out and get a longer-term commitment from an employee to work for a year. 
There are unintended consequences in this legislation. What small business will hire a woman who it is thought might be pregnant? Now that we have brought the time limit for the entitlement down to 6 months an employee can work for somebody for 6 months and then be entitled to the paid parental leave provisions. The limit used to be a year so when an employer took somebody on at least that employee would work for a year before the provisions came in. Now it is only 6 months. If an employer has a choice between a woman who may be pregnant and a man the employer will take the man so the unintended consequence is that this bill will discriminate against women of childbearing age. 
I finish by asking this Government why it is so keen to keep in the workforce working mums who have had new babies when we have over 110000 women on the domestic purposes benefit—50000 of them with children of school age—who do not share that enthusiasm for getting into the workforce? I say that this legislation to my mind again smacks of a double standard.