Reti ShaneDr SHANE RETI (National—Whangarei): Thank you Madam Speaker. It's a pleasure to speak to this bill tonight the Support Workers (Pay Equity) Settlements Amendment Bill which as has been described by others in the House fundamentally brings the mental health and addiction support workers and the vocational disability workers into the principal Act. Now I had the privilege—I'd like to acknowledge the chair Louisa Wall who has just sat down—to work on the Terranova legislation in the previous Parliament led by Simon O'Connor as I recall. That was a really important piece of work that we did in quite a short time frame. I recall Jan Logie from the Greens had a significant contribution and helped us shepherd that legislation through.I'll come back to some of the learnings now two or three years later from that settlement but if we just talk here in the second reading I've already described the purpose of the bill. As the previous speaker said we had 12 submissions—one was joint so 13 submissions if we like. They were useful. I found one that was particularly useful. We need to remember here that the departmental report was done on 9 September 2019. That's a long time between drinks from here to now. If we look at that departmental report and to the submission from Alicia Scroggins Meek it's interesting that officials respond to her concerns around peer support workers and training by saying that the industry training organisation (ITO) Careerforce specifically includes peer support workers on the list. Well what's kind of interesting is here now nearly nine months later it's an ITO. ITOs are gone. That is no longer a departmental option on that list. They have now been dissolved as transitional and will disappear into the great mega-polytechnic in the sky. So it's kind of interesting that this far afterwards if you like it's no longer valid advice. It seemed to be then; I contend it still should be but that's a different bill a different piece of work.Also what officials pointed out to us was the cost of this—$173.5 million allocated to support the mental health and addiction settlement through an increase in Vote Health. Now after the Terranova bill passed I think others noticed the same as well but within about a year or two—and it had been brought up at select committee; it'll be interesting to see if we see the same here and if there's anything different we can do—there were two things that stood out. The first was relativity. We were told that if we did this for care and support workers because their pay would be elevated so high we would get a movement of people from one service industry to another to a better pay bracket. There was some movement of workers across the health spectrum.We're also told that we could have the difficult situation of a relatively junior worker now being paid at a higher level than maybe a supervising worker and that would be complex also. I haven't seen so much of that. I did see some movement. I think what also stuck out was we were reassured that there would be passed through to the employer the funding to take this pay equity settlement into account to take Terranova into account. Well we needed to watch really closely to make sure that happened. We had multiple explanations that Don't worry employer. This will be covered by Government. The pass through will happen." And certainly on a number of accounts that did not happen and it created other holes in the system.So we're happy to support this bill. I think that's part of what we can learn from the Terranova settlement. It was a good piece of work from the select committee. I remember in the previous select committee when we excluded mental health and addiction workers that almost became a fall over point. I think for expediency and just the urgency to get that settlement under way we reluctantly agreed to exclude them on the basis that this legislation would be following close behind and here it is. So we're happy to see this continue to progress through the House and it has our support."