Beaumont Carol: New Zealand Public Health and Disability Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeBeaumont Carol: New Zealand Public Health and Disability Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 16 May 2013. Volume:690;Page:10211. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CAROL BEAUMONT (Labour): I rise to make a final contribution on the New Zealand Public Health and Disability Amendment Bill (No 2). This bill is a response to the Court of Appeal decision onMinistry of Health v Atkinson which was essentially about family carers of disabled adults. I think something that we probably would agree across the House is that caring is a critical issue in our country and that increasing numbers of us are caring for other New Zealanders.I want to acknowledge tonight all the carers paid and unpaid in this country who do an amazing job in looking after somebody else. Caring is work; whether it is paid or unpaid it is work and often very difficult work. It is often undertaken by women in addition to everything else that they are doing. But I also want to acknowledge tonight the families who have worked so hard to get justice and to challenge discrimination. That has led to this bill but sadly this response is flawed and limited.It is a limited response because it limits who can access payment as a family carer. It talks about “very high need” and “high need”—the definitions are still unclear and apparently to be further worked on. Looking at the bit of the regulatory impact statement that does have some information in it it would seem that at least 3800 families are excluded because of those definitions.The extra cost of including those people as my colleague the Hon Maryan Street indicated this morning could be as little as $16 million. It is about priorities. It is about priorities. Do we want to put more money into private education or do we want to fund people who care for their family members? It is also about the Government having the resources to do important social measures like this one. I recall—as do many others I am sure—that this National Government deliberately reduced the ability of the Government to pay for initiatives like this by cutting tax rates for the wealthiest NewZealanders and reducing Government income as a consequence. So it is a limited response.It is also limited because the payment that family members will get is potentially lower than that provided to comparable support service workers. I would acknowledge—one positive thing in this bill—that those workers have been deemed to be employees versus a possibility of them being given an allowance or being employed under a section 88 notice under the New Zealand Public Health and Disability Act. But these family employees can still be discriminated against. They can be paid less than other carers who are not family members and who are doing a comparable job.People on this side of the House believe in equal pay for equal work and this includes the situation we are talking about tonight. We know across the House that that concept is not one that the Government believes in. We have just recently seen youth rates introduced which clearly indicates that it does not believe in equal pay for equal work. Why is work done by family members of less value? Why should it be paid less? If we had had a select committee process that is one of the sorts of issues that could have been discussed and that the people doing the work could have had their say on.The bill is a limited response but it will also extinguish the right to challenge discrimination under the Human Rights Act and that is a very serious loss indeed. There are many questions that this bill raises. We have tried to raise those questions today in this House but the process is fundamentally flawed. Instead of a collaborative process as was offered by Opposition parties the Government has rammed this through urgency without full information. Everybody I think who is listening to Parliament now knows just how inadequate the regulatory impact statement is—it is full of pages like this with no information. That is disgusting. This should have gone to a select committee where those questions could have been answered. We should have had the information. This has been rushed through under urgency without full disclosure. We got the regulatory impact statement only today so it is not a surprise that people are questioning the Government’s motives.