Woodhouse MichaelHon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National): Thank you Madam Deputy Speaker. I want to begin by congratulating for the first time publicly Kristine Bartlett on her award of being made Kiwibank New Zealander of the Year—I think very well deserved. I also want for the second time to acknowledge and thank the officials who worked with me on the crafting of this bill. I can tell the House that it was literally thousands of hours that went into the framing of this legislation that has—once again we are debating this for the second time and while I congratulate Denise Lee for her initiative and her good luck what we should be doing this week is debating this bill in its second reading as a Government bill picked up by the Labour-led Government and amended as they saw fit because of the shortcomings that they perceived. But they did not do that and the sad thing is that the actions of the Government in throwing this bill away and starting again have set back the progress of equity for women in this country by months if not years.I want to just reject a couple of the main claims that have been made by the opponents of the bill: firstly that the previous Government was led kicking and screaming into the TerraNova settlement. That was not true. The Government wasn't even a party to those negotiations. The Employment Court's ruling under section 9 of the Equal Pay Act was that the Equal Pay Act applied to work of equal value. That was it. All it did was get E tū and Kristine Bartlett to the start line and had the Government and Cabinet not taken this issue so terribly seriously they could have been tied up in knots for years and years. But the previous Government decided that this was worth it for women and got those parties together took it out of the courts and settled to the tune of $2.3 billion.The second claim that I just simply reject is that the TerraNova settlement couldn't have been achieved had this bill been in law prior to the claim being made. It's just not true. Indeed the process that the parties to the TerraNova settlement followed mirrored the bill. It mirrored the bill in respect of establishing the merit of the claim and working towards what was an appropriate settlement using comparators that started within the industry. Indeed this opposition to starting within an industry is completely irrational when one thinks about for example the health industry which is by definition dominated by women. One of the criteria that even the Government when it brings its bill back—whenever that might be—will have is that if there is no comparator occupation because they too are dominated by women then they will have to go outside the industry and that was the provision that was made in the bill in Denise Lee's name.Now I note that the officials provided me with advice about comparisons with other jurisdictions around the world and I can inform the House again that this bill if it is passed would make New Zealand by far the most progressive country against any that we compare ourselves to. The EU Australia the UK the US Canada the Netherlands Norway Sweden Belgium Ireland and Finland all have less progressive frameworks than this bill has and I note that New Zealand actually starts in that comparison with the lowest gender pay gap amongst those countries.But I think I better understand now why those people who are opposed to this bill do so. My goal and the previous Government's goal was to create a framework that keeps the Crown and the courts out of bargaining and leaves it to the parties who are best placed to negotiate in good faith and I realise now that the opponents to this bill want completely the opposite. They want the Crown involved. They want the courts involved as the place of first resort not last resort.We are going back to bargaining the way it used to be in the 1960s and 1970s and that will be bad for employment relations. It will certainly be bad for women. That's a setback for women because this is a really good bill and it is a shame on the Government who won't even tell us when they're going to bring an alternative piece of legislation before this House. The women of New Zealand deserve much much better.