Woodhouse MichaelHon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National): Thank you Madam Chairwoman. I will take a call on clauses 1 to 4 of the legislation and in particular the commencement of the various improvements to parental leave and employment protection and now to keeping-in-touch days. I note that Part 1 will come into force on 1 July next year in 7½ months' time which without wanting to belabour the point really does beg the question of why the public didn't get the chance to have its say on that.I will accept that the Green Party's rather unusual reason for putting aside their noble commitment to open and fair democracy was that the bill had already been considered by a select committee a couple of years ago and there were a number of submissions. However I add to that that it was very clear from the Minister of Finance at the time that the bill would not pass—that the best estimates of the costs of the legislation when it was a member's bill in Sue Moroney's name were in the region of $240 million over 4 years. In fact it was probably twice that—not however what the Minister of Finance at the time said; $250 million per annum. It was not quite that much but certainly what we now know—and this is relevant to the commencement—is that it is effectively around $60 million per annum per increase. So there were a number of submitters and David Seymour mentioned this in his intervention in the first reading debate who were absent from the bill submission process and who did not submit to select committee simply because they knew the bill would not pass. So it is not appropriate to say that it doesn't matter that we didn't put it to a select committee which we had time to do. We still have time to do that—we have another 7½ months before the straightforward increase from 18 to 22 weeks comes into effect on 1 July next year—but we simply did not take that opportunity.The other purpose of the scrutiny of that legislation was actually the costs and the timing of the implementation of the legislation no doubt influences the Crown costs. I accept—in fact we haven't made too much of this—that while the reason for vetoing this as a member's bill was because the fiscal impacts were more than minor it is entirely now the Government's prerogative to decide amongst the other priorities that it has within its gambit of policies and laws that it wants to pass that it sees this as affordable. That's understood. But I remain concerned that the amount of financial scrutiny that is influenced by the commencement dates of this legislation is still poor. It has a disclosure statement—that's not a regulatory impact statement—which goes through I think a woefully inadequate assessment of the fiscal costs of this change.Again it's entirely appropriate that the Government's able to pass the legislation but we are doing it without the normal scrutiny. It hasn't even gone to a Cabinet committee much less a select committee. I would advise the Ministers—who are relatively new and they will know this soon enough—that the Cabinet committees are the dragon's den of Government policy. Before they even get to the select committee they will be scrutinised they will be worked over by officials they will be challenged by Ministers of other parties and that is an appropriate thing to do. None of this has happened and yet the timing of the implementation of this bill would certainly enable that to have occurred.It's very disappointing that the first bill that the Government will pass—because it has the support of the overwhelming majority of the members of this House—is done so in a manner and in a time frame that really is the antithesis of good democracy. We had the time. The commencement dates are here. They do not come into force at first blush until 1 July 2018—the second stanza four years later.