Woodhouse Michael: Parental Leave and Employment Protection (Six Months’ Paid Leave) Amendment Bill — Recommittal Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWoodhouse Michael: Parental Leave and Employment Protection (Six Months’ Paid Leave) Amendment Bill — Recommittal Third Reading[Sitting date: 25 February 2015. Volume:703;Page:1932. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety): I do appreciate the opportunity to take a call on the third reading of the Parental Leave and Employment Protection (Six Months’ Paid Leave) Amendment Bill. As it is a members’ day it is customary that members of the executive do not tend to speak on members’ bills and I do appreciate that I have been given the opportunity to do so.Firstly I want to talk a little bit about what we have heard from the person sponsoring this bill Sue Moroney and also as the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety to lay out what the Government does intend to do by way of improving and extending paid parental leave to parents over the next year or two. I will say this about Sue Moroney: she is certainly passionate about this issue. I have no doubt about the authenticity with which she has championed the issue of paid parental leave but I do worry that she has mixed the politics and the passion to such a degree that it is impossible to work out which is which. Nevertheless I do want to touch on a couple of elements of what she said.I heard her say that it was her Labour colleagues who have in her words “had the guts to support this bill” and that is perhaps true except that what she did not say was that that was not the case when they were in Government. When money was sloshing around and Labour was spending money like drunken sailors locking in structural costs that this Government has had to deal with the very canny Dr Michael Cullen—of all of the things that they could have done of all of the passionate things that they could have supported increasing paid parental leave to 26 weeks at a cost of who knows what but several hundred million dollars is the best estimate was not part of the Labour Government’s agenda. It is very interesting that as this is a member’s bill—and knowing that it is not possible for members’ bills to have that kind of financial impact—Ms Moroney would say: “Right now we are in Opposition it is time to increase paid parental leave”.When we are in the most straitened times that this country has seen in 80 years suddenly it is a priority for Labour when in previous years they did not see raising the length of paid parental leave to 26 weeks as a priority. Lions in Opposition—lions with other people’s money when it does not have the fiscal costs of the decisions that it wants this Parliament to make—but lambs in Government.Indeed there are some other statements that have been made by Ms Moroney about what the Government did or did not say about paid parental leave and I want to make it very clear that the Government always said it was prepared to extend paid parental leave as and when fiscal conditions allowed. It is really important to understand that the fiscal conditions did not allow that. What did the Government do? An amount of $500 million has been bounced around as a possible cost but I think that overly exaggerates the cost of Ms Moroney’s existing bill. Let us remember we are not debating the original bill. This is not a matter of principle and passion because Ms Moroney herself has watered down her own bill. Why? Because the goal is no longer to extend paid parental leave to 26 weeks; the goal is to embarrass the Government. The goal is to expose the Government and that is the politics of this. That is the politics that is interfering with the passion.The Government in these straitened times the toughest conditions in 80 years—which was left with the legacy of structural deficits for 10 years which we have seen halved despite the impact of the Canterbury earthquakes—has come up with around half a billion dollars of measures to support children and their families. We have seen that in the free general practitioner visits for under-13s. We have seen that with the breakfast in schools programme.Do you know what the most disappointing thing about the Labour Party in Opposition was? It campaigned in 2008 on the fact that this Government should we have the privilege of taking the Treasury benches would gut Working for Families and would gut interest-free student loans. Do you know what made it most angry in the 49th Parliament? We did no such thing. Through those vulnerable periods we made sure that the supports that were locked in place stayed for our most vulnerable.The Government does intend to increase paid parental leave. Not only is it prepared to do that but it has already locked in through Budget 2014 the fiscal appropriation to do just that. It is necessary now to change the legislation to give effect to that and it is my intention to bring a Government bill to the House in about June of this year and have it passed this year for effect on 1 April 2016 as we have already appropriated. It will increase the duration of paid parental leave for those parents who are already eligible for it. It will go to 16 weeks in the first year and then to 18 weeks thereafter. But it is going to do more than that. It is going to broaden the range of people who are eligible for paid parental leave. At the moment the legislation provides I think for a very one-dimensional view of employment and a one-dimensional view of employees. I think what we know now is that employment relationships but also parenting arrangements have changed significantly in the last generation or two. Firstly people work in more than one role. They work in different ways: they may be self-employed they may be contractors they may have multiple employers and they may have moved recently before expecting a child.None of those conditions are currently met by the existing legislation or by the bill that Ms Moroney has introduced. The Government will change that. The Government will extend the range of parents who will be eligible for paid parental leave to include those different working arrangements to include multiple employers and to include those who have been working for their employer for only 6 months which would actually rule them out under the current regime.It is also going to recognise the fact that parenting arrangements can be different as well. I take for example—and I acknowledge the Māori Party intervention into this particular part of the policy that is being developed—the concept of whāngai or traditional Māori adoption which is not recognised presently in the law and will be when the Government introduces the bill into the House in the middle of the year. That will be very important and I want to acknowledge the Hon Te Ururoa Flavell for his intervention to ensure that that very longstanding traditional means of bringing up children will be met in this scenario.What we have is a passionate member who has no concern for fiscal impact introducing a bill that I believe she introduced with the best of intentions—although it is a little hard to untangle the politics from the passion—who then watered it down when she realised that she would not have the numbers and actually that the Government was coming up with a better arrangement to support families by increasing the duration of the support and broadening the nature of the relationships and the number of employment relationships that would be covered by it. I do acknowledge her.But the Government takes this very seriously. Support for parents and enabling mothers in particular to re-enter the workforce is a very important part of growing this economy and ensuring that people stay connected with the workforce. I should also add actually that the bill being introduced in June will allow parents to keep in touch if they are on paid parental leave. At the moment if you go back for a single day you lose your entitlement to paid parental leave but that is often not practical for people who are in highly skilled jobs who want to keep in touch with training and development or who need to cover for leave. There will be sensible provisions in the bill that will enable that to occur.The National Party will not be supporting Ms Moroney’s bill. It will be introducing a very sensible range of measures that will deliver a better outcome for parents. I look forward to Labour’s support when that bill is introduced.