Rich Katherine: Parental Leave and Employment Protection Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Rich Katherine: Parental Leave and Employment Protection Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:617;Page:13355] 
KATHERINE RICH (National) 
: 
 I think that when discussing this bill we will quite clearly see a marked difference between Labour and National. One party thinks the future direction of this country comes from making the middle classes dependent on welfare. The other party thinks it is better to create a situation whereby people can be independent and make their own spending decisions. We are not going to pretend that life’s complex problems can be fixed by legislation or by the Government. We will leave it to the other side of the House to think that that can be achieved. 
It takes 9 months to produce a baby and that is 9 months in which to prepare for and think about the time that the parents will have away from work to care for their child. Certainly during the first few months of any child’s life it is absolutely vital that a parent is there to look after and care for the baby and bond with it. But I think what we have here is just a method of making mothers dependent on another form of welfare. It is a very small amount of funding and for many people it is quite unnecessary. A lot of quite wealthy women who have taken advantage of paid parental leave have not needed the cash handout from the Government because they have made their own arrangements with their employers. 
We do not think the welfare State needs to be expanded into this area. Extending the welfare State to middle-income New Zealanders really is no vision for New Zealand at all. Over the next couple of days what we will see from Labour’s big spend-up is at best income tuning or at worst a cruel hoax. Most of these women—and the recipients will mainly be women—will be receiving back what they paid in tax in the first place. The Government wants these women to be incredibly grateful for this handout but it is money they earned in the first place. If they had retained that income they would have been able to provide for themselves and continue to lead an independent life. 
I am not trying to play down the huge impact that having a child has on anybody’s life but I think we are not naive enough to suggest that some Government programme will make a lot of difference. The first few months with a new baby are incredibly stressful for any new parent and money is not really the major obstacle faced by a lot of parents. One of the questions I have is what happens to those women who are left out of this programme. The Minister talks about wanting to encourage women to bond with their babies and wanting women to stay at home and those are worthy ideals but she has made no comment about what happens with self-employed women such as the contract hairdresser the taxi-driver the real estate agent the sharemilker. Surely if the Minister is true to her word her worthy intentions would apply to other New Zealand parents as well. This bill is discriminatory and that is why the National Party has not supported it in any of its forms. When a Government tries to provide these sorts of benefits providing them to just a certain number of women really is not fair. There has been huge feedback on this bill and the programme but some of the feedback I have had is from the mothers who have been left out of the programme. They cannot quite understand why they are not able to take advantage of it. That is why this programme has ended up being a cruel hoax. Most mothers-to-be thought they would be able to take advantage of this programme but so many thousands of women found that they were not eligible. The Minister has said that thousands have enjoyed the scheme but equally thousands have not. 
One of the things that concerns me is that if the Government creeps into various parts of people’s lives thinking that it can solve a lot of complex problems faced by families the long-term scenario is that the Government starts to crowd out things that New Zealanders do for themselves every day. I do not think that the Government can minimise the stress or the enjoyment that a new baby can bring to any family’s life. For that to happen we need a lot of community change and for a lot of families to get alongside some of these new babies when they are born. This bill in my view continues to make a larger number of New Zealand women welfare beneficiaries. It continues to put some women in the position of not having to think about preparing for what their life will be like when their baby arrives. 
 Our party believes that the real way to solve societal problems is to encourage people to be independent—to plan for things to take personal responsibility and to put in place things in their lives that allow them to look after themselves. No one feels good about receiving Government handouts but most people feel good about providing for themselves which they can do if they are able to keep a larger proportion of their own pay. One of the things that make this bill a cruel hoax is that the Government is really just giving back what many of those parents had earned and paid in tax in the first place. Over the next couple of days we will see greater examples of income churning where the Government expects the country to be wildly enthusiastic and thankful for its handing back of what was really New Zealanders’ money in the first place. Rather than put people in a position where they are independent and providing for themselves the Government will continue the creeping of the welfare State into areas of their lives where the Government was not present before. 
A lot of people think the Government introduced paid parental leave. In fact that was not the case. For many women it was something they were already negotiating and providing for themselves. There were already a lot of enlightened employers who were ensuring that in order to keep female employees they provided terms and conditions that made it easier for mothers to stay in the workplace. But once again this Government here thinks it has to get in and intervene and basically start to change some of those employment relationships between staff and employers. I feel sorry for some employers who are now going to have to provide parental leave for some staff who have been working for them for only 6 months or so. I think of the small dairy owner who has someone working 10 hours a week. Somebody might relieve on a Sunday so that the dairy owner can have that day off. That worker will now be eligible for both paid parental leave and parental leave and that was not the case before. That employer has to keep that job open for someone who was just a casual staff member in the first place. What concerns me is a growing problem of the cost of keeping positions open of compliance costs and of a lot of other things that small-business owners try to deal with all the time. 
I believe that all new parents should be able to spend the first wee while with their new babies as they bond with them but that is not something in which the State needs to continue to intervene. In terms of future directions for this country if people want to see a difference between National and Labour they can see in this legislation the stark contrast between the two. National is a party that believes that people should take personal responsibility and plan. Jeepers! Parents-to-be have 9 months to do that. Nobody has ever said that a baby was a total surprise when it arrived 9 months after the event so people cannot argue that it is something that creeps up on them that they cannot prepare for. 
I think that what we have here is some goodwill legislation designed to buy a few more votes—as we will see within the next couple of days with this massive spend-up. If we are talking about future directions I believe that this bill leads New Zealand down a future direction where there is a creeping welfare State and where the Government continues to get more and more involved in New Zealanders’ lives. I think we need to start to establish what the things are that we want to provide for one another as a community and what the things are that we want the Government to be able to do. In terms of what this bill tries to achieve I think that while it does not provide a service for everybody it will continue to be discriminatory particularly for the self-employed.