Lees-Galloway Iain: Home and Community Support (Payment for Travel Between Clients) Settlement Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLees-Galloway Iain: Home and Community Support (Payment for Travel Between Clients) Settlement Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 13 October 2015. Volume:709;Page:7146. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North): I want to start my contribution today by acknowledging some of the people who have been involved in the campaign to ensure that home support workers do get paid for their travel time. They are people like Tamara Baddeley who is a member of what was formerly the Service and Food Workers Union now the E tū union after its amalgamation with the Amalgamated Engineering Printing and Manufacturing Union.Hon Member: Is that the Latin?IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY: Definitely Māori. And I want to recognise Jenny Goodman as well—a member of the Public Service Association (PSA) who also took a case. So I want to acknowledge those individuals and other individuals like them—other care workers like them—who have stood up and over years campaigned through a variety of methods to get the Government to finally recognise their situation and to finally do something about it. They were able to do that with the support of their unions—unions like the Service and Food Workers Union unions like the PSA.If anybody seriously believes that unions are somehow irrelevant today then I would point them to this settlement because this simply would not have happened if these workers had not been part of organisations that were prepared to support them to take their legal cases to negotiate with the district health boards with their employers and with the Government and to actually facilitate everything that needed to happen for the settlement to be reached and for this piece of legislation to be brought before the House. If those caregivers did not have the support of the other workers around them who are also part of that union this simply would not have happened. I think that is important for us to reflect on because unions play a really important role in ensuring that workers are able to negotiate with the Government—they do that by working together—and workers’ voices simply would not be heard here in Wellington if it was not for those organisations that they are part of.So this legislation essentially enacts a settlement that was reached between the Government and those unions representing those caregivers the district health boards and the employers to ensure that the time caregivers have to use travelling from one client to the next is actually recognised as work time. As Annette King said it is not some sort of break time. It is not their tea break although it might be the closest that you are allowed to get to a tea break these days under this Government. It is not downtime for them; it is part of their working day. And given that their wages are already abysmally low for the time that they spend actually in the home with their clients in effect it meant that a lot of these caregivers were working for less than the minimum wage. When their entire working day was put together they were essentially being paid under the minimum wage and that was part of the thrust of the case that was taken to the Employment Relations Authority and as Annette King said Judy McGregor had already secured a legal opinion indicating that it was more than likely that they had a good case under the Minimum Wage Act that their remuneration was insufficient to meet the minimum standards of that legislation.So as a result of that the Government entered into negotiations and we have this settlement which it is fair to say is the result of negotiation. It is the result of some compromise. It is not gold standard which is a term that has been thrown around a bit today. It is not gold standard but it is certainly a very significant step forward from the situation that those care workers were in. I think that we here in Parliament need to appreciate—the Government certainly needs to appreciate—that those workers came to the table prepared to negotiate and prepared to settle at a rate that was financially sustainable for the Government.But that is just one aspect of chronic underfunding of the wider caregiving sector. Certainly we know that in aged residential care the people who provide care—whether they be caregivers whether they be nurses or whether they be part of the broader health workforce—are desperately underpaid for the work that they do. The most obvious signal of that is the differentiation between what someone in the caring professions can earn in the aged-care sector as opposed to what they can earn if they are working directly for a district health board. There is no good reason for why that gap should exist and the only reason that gap exists is that the Government refuses to fund that sector to a level that is actually able to support reasonable wages in that sector. As I say those wages are so poor that when these caregivers were not paid for their travel time then effectively they ended up on less than the minimum wage.So although we are addressing that there is also a range of other matters we need to address. We need to look at aged care. We need to look at what we pay these home support workers for the time that they are in their homes because it is a policy of I think most parties in this Parliament that more people will be supported to stay in their homes for longer especially into old age. That is a good policy. A lot of people like that policy—people want to age in their own home. They want to be supported to be able to stay in their own home for as long as possible and there are myriad benefits from supporting that policy both for the person themselves and for the State. But we cannot do it on the back of slave wages. We cannot expect these care workers to subsidise that policy.If we are expecting more people to stay in their homes and we are expecting more of these caregivers to do more work—doing the excellent wonderful and sensitive work that they do—then we need to actually support them with wage rates that encourage them to take up the job encourage them to stay in the sector and encourage them to undertake the training that will make them better able to provide the level of care that we ought to be providing as a State. If we are expecting people to live a dignified life in their homes with home support then we need to ensure that we have a qualified and well-supported workforce and we need to make it a career that people actually want to stay in and invest themselves in. It should not be the kind of job that becomes a sort of a job of last resort. Thankfully we have thousands of people who are prepared to work in this sector because they feel as though they are making a contribution to their society but we should not rely on that. We should not take advantage of that. We should actually pay rates that are fair for the work that they are doing and this is one step in that direction.I want to again congratulate everyone who has been involved in getting to this point. I will be interested to see—not that I will be on the select committee—what the submissions are and whether any of the submitters believe that the deal can be improved in any way although I acknowledge that this is the direct result of a matter that has already been settled. But it will be interesting to see whether there is any room for improvement or whether there is any way in which we can work with the Government to make this settlement any more generous and more appropriate for these workers.With those thoughts I just want to reiterate what Annette King said which was that we support this legislation and we look forward to hearing the submissions.