Williams PotoPOTO WILLIAMS (Labour—Christchurch East): Firstly I want to acknowledge Kristine Bartlett and her courage in taking the original case to court ably shepherded and supported by the unions. I want to thank the unions for continuing the battle behind the scenes for a couple of years which got us to the point where the Government was in a position to settle the unions were able to agree to that and we are at the point where 55000 workers will be paid what they actually deserve to be paid for their work. So congratulations to them.Thank you to the chair of the Health Committee and to the members of the select committee who were very collegial in their approach. We all want to get this bill across the line so that those workers actually get the pay as they deserve it from 1 July. I too want to acknowledge the officials and the advisers Parliamentary Counsel Office and the clerks who did work tirelessly to make sure we got the advice and the information that we required. We did ask them some difficult questions and we wanted to make sure that we examined this bill as thoroughly as we could despite the fact that we were given a truncated time in which to do that.But there are a couple of aspects that I do want to put on record if I may in the discussions that we had during the examination of this bill at select committee. The first point I want to talk about is we had fulsome discussions about what we were calling the extinguishing of future claims which we felt was potentially the extinguishing of rights to take claims in the future around breaches of the Equal Pay Act in terms of pay equity. We spoke about this quite a bit. We examined the advice that was given to the Minister particularly from the Attorney-General around the potential for breaches of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. The Attorney-General wrote and said that he felt the bill was consistent with section 14 which is around the freedom of expression and section 27(3) which is the right to bring civil proceedings. In our discussion on this bill we actually got to a point where we felt comfortable that rather than extinguishing rights what was happening in this case was that the unions had bargained for particular settlement agreements. But what we felt we got to was the point where you cannot extinguish rights to take claims—everyone can take claims—and other groups will still in the future be able to take claims under the Equal Pay Act. So we got to the point where we felt comfortable with that clause within the legislation.As my colleague Dr David Clark has said the submissions were quite wide ranging. They were from providers of services and also from groups that were interested in the pay equity aspects of the legislation. With regard to the providers many of them talked about the lack of provision within the funding mechanisms for what they were terming as oncosts. There was wording in the legislation that talked about funding in terms of being towards meeting the increase in costs. That was a point that we debated—whether the word towards" should be taken out of the legislation. The providers were given an assurance about the percentage of oncosts that they would be provided. As my colleague has said that originally was stated at 26 percent but was reduced to 20.9 percent during the course of the settlement negotiations. One of the providers actually in their submission suggested that the loss to the sector between what they were expecting and what was ultimately provided to them could be in the region of $25 million to $33 million. It is not insignificant in terms of the costs that providers feel that they will have to bear in order that this settlement will go ahead.One of the issues that they quote within the oncosts is around annual leave. They suggest there is a percentage of underfunding that they will have to cover themselves and also the issues of relativity and training. With regard to relativity in that case we are talking about other workers within particular organisations who may have a supervisorial role or maybe a whole role such as junior nurses who will be paid less than the care and support workers once care and support workers receive their pay increase. While that on the face of it has very little to do with this piece of legislation what it may do in fact is drive workers from one part of the sector into another part of the sector. That is seen as problematic by providers unless they are able to then pay those workers—supervisors and junior nurses—increased wages relative to the work that they do.The other issue that providers raised was about the cost to train and the numbers who would be training to level 4. They saw that as problematic. Personally I see that as actually a strength of this legislation—that we are encouraging people to train to a much higher level and we will have a highly trained workforce.The other issue of course that we had to resolve is what is a care and support worker. There was much discussion about that because some of the workers actually hold a range of posts within the workforce. It may be that care and support is part of what they do. They may be doing other activities as part of their wider job within a service so we had to think about how we were going to word the legislation in order to resolve who was actually eligible to be part of the legislation and part of the agreement. We decided on the word "primarily" and that is important because it shows that somebody who is eligible to receive the pay increase will primarily be a care and support worker and it shows how much of that work you have to do to actually qualify for the additional payment.The last aspect that I want to cover off in terms of our discussion is about the penal rate. During the first reading of the bill I discussed the fact that the penal rate was going from a percentage to a dollar rate. One of the things we needed to ensure was that the calculation of penal rates for a worker who may primarily be a care and support worker but who may actually have other duties that are outside care and support work—we ensured that the rate for the other work was actually at the percentage rate and the penal rate for the care and support work was at the dollar rate.Finally I want to say that this is not a pay equity bill. It is very clear that this is about addressing a settlement agreement to ensure that workers in the care and support industry are paid what they deserve to be paid. This is not about pay equity. We are yet to have that discussion fully.I am very keen to support this bill. I am keen to get this legislation to the next stage. I thank those who worked hard on getting it through the select committee process and I want to commend the bill to the House."