Moroney Sue: Parental Leave and Employment Protection (Six Months’ Paid Leave) Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMoroney Sue: Parental Leave and Employment Protection (Six Months’ Paid Leave) Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 03 December 2014. Volume:702;Page:1099. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]SUE MORONEY (Labour):Well they say that timing is everything. With the timing of the debate on new clause 7 which we are now debating being on disability awareness day who would have thought the last time we were debating these amendments that I have put forward was during Multiple Birth Awareness Week. So it seems that all the way through the debate on this bill the stars have been aligning and begging us to do the thing that new clause 7 asks us to do. But it is not the first time with this bill.I think it is pretty clear that I am not going to get a third reading speech on this bill. That I think is a great shame and it is the shame of the National Government that I will not ever get to talk about the journey of this bill. Indeed with new clause 7 that is part of the journey of this bill because we are talking about it only in Supplementary Order Papers 15 and 472—in fact two different parts of the Supplementary Order Papers—because of I guess the politics that have been played with the bill all the way along. So at the Government Administration Committee we sadly were not able to report back a bill that the select committee could report back with amendment. It could report it back only without amendment because we could not get agreement so new clause 7 is one of those.Bringing this as a member’s bill—we used to call them private members’ bills; I think we call them only members’ bills these days—what it effectively means is that you do not have access to the Government advice and the Government officials to be able to make sure that when you draft your bill it is going to be entirely in order for what is going to be needed to be making the law change. So new clause 7 is an example of exactly that.These are the regulations that I had not even thought about as a member—an ordinary old member looking at wanting to extend paid parental leave to 26 weeks. I thought that on two pages you could actually do this by saying: “Let’s have 26 weeks. We are going to amend the part that says what the duration is of paid parental leave and that will do it.” Well new clause 7 is the part that would actually make it if it had been accepted by this Parliament a complete piece of law that would make some sense when the people who administer the law were required to actually grant people their paid parental leave of 22 weeks on 1 July next year and 26 weeks’ paid parental leave in July 2017 because that is how those regulations would be changed.Some of those regulations in new clause 7 are the form that people would fill in—the actual form that people who have had a child born prematurely the people who have had a child born with a disability the people who have had the joy of a multiple birth would fill in. They would be filling in that form and new clause 7 is attempting to amend that form.People have asked questions around the disability part in particular and I think it is right and proper that I do traverse that on disability awareness day. It is simply a definition to use. One way of defining what a disability was going to be would be to refer to disabilities that were already accepted for Government support. We know that those are contentious. We know that does not cover everything that we would want it to do. But here is the other complication when talking about children born with disabilities and paid parental leave. As members quite rightly said many of these disabilities we do not know about until the child is older. We do not know that the child has got a hearing difficulty or a lack of hearing for example until much later on in their life.As a member I had to think about what that means. If you find out when your child is 2 that they actually have had a disability since birth can you go back and have your 6 months’ paid parental leave? I had to come to the crushing conclusion that no you could not. The point of paid parental leave was actually having it at that time at that critical time in those first 6 months when the bonding and attachment were going to aid and abet that child’s recovery or that child’s ability to get on in their life with their disability which of course as we know actually often makes people that very very special person that they are.So these were the things that were quite complex to think about in bringing forward this particular range of amendments in new clause 7. Paid parental leave is critically important at that time.