Williams PotoPOTO WILLIAMS (Labour—Christchurch East): Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker. Today is a day of celebration and I want to acknowledge as the speakers before me have done Kristine Bartlett the servos the Public Service Association and the New Zealand Nurses Organisation. It is your day. Congratulations. Ā tēnā koe mihi mahana ki a koutou.[Thank you and a warm acknowledgment to you collectively.]Thank you so much for all the hard work that you have done to bring this bill to the House to bring this to a conclusion.I have one word for the Government and its role in this and that is Whatever." This is actually not about your hard work; this hard work belongs to those workers who work very hard every single day caring for our elderly and our most vulnerable and to the unions that support them which have fought for them long and hard.Why I say that is because on reviewing the regulatory impact statement this afternoon I am reminded of a couple of things. The first thing I am reminded of is that actually one of the first principles of pay equity is this: because the work is predominantly performed by women care and support workers are paid less than a man performing work involving similar skills responsibility conditions and degrees of effort would be paid. Where in this discussion is the comparator? That has been an issue that we have wanted resolved because until we can decide on a comparator not within the same sector but outside the sector we are going to continue to have these arguments going down the line.This Government has been kicking and screaming not only about this piece of legislation but about the legislation on the travel time between work and about the sleepover conditions which have been hard fought for and won by this sector and by the workers and their unions. So I say to this Government whatever. Whatever. Nearly 2 years it took of discussion behind the scenes because it could not stomach what the court would eventually settle.I go back to the regulatory impact statement. When we look in the regulatory impact statement at "Court determines pay rates for care and support workers" "With any of the options the resulting change in pay rates to address pay equity for these workers …" "One of the key outcomes being sought is to achieve a sustainable equitable pay structure …" and "A court determined solution as in Option 4 …" what do we find? It is redacted—all redacted. So the Government knew what the cost would be if it was actually going to put in place what is actually deserved by the workers who work in the care and support industry in this country. It knows. The only information that we get on pay rates is actually the schedule that appears in the legislation and here it is—the schedule that was fought for and won by our workers. That is the only information we have. All the rest of the information has been redacted.However I do want to be constructive because I am on the Health Committee so there are four clauses in this legislation that I want us to examine. I have had a chance to look at the legislation and there are four clauses that I think require further examination.The first one is about weekend and penal rates—clause 9—where we no longer have a penal rate as a percentage of an hourly rate. What will happen for some workers is that the penal rate will be the dollar value as it occurs in their current agreement before the new legislation is put in place. For example for somebody who is currently on $18 the penal rate for time and a half—or whatever the half-rate is—is $9. So if they go to the new pay rates and they get an increase to $21 their penal rate will continue to be $9. I want to see whether we can actually examine the fairness of that proposition.The other thing I think we need to look at is clause 7 which looks at extinguishing the existing claims and bars potential future claims. I think we should examine whether this is actually fair because there may be in future negotiations something that comes up that we have not anticipated and this clause extinguishes the right to any future claims under that.Clause 10 is about any agreements that might have been made in previous agreements so any hard-fought-for conditions that might potentially have transferred over into new agreements are now also not going to be enforced. There may have been some conditions that have been grandparented over in the past and they are no longer actually going to be available to workers so I think we need to examine that and the fairness of that.The last thing is the definition that occurs in clause 4 of "continuous employment". "Continuous employment" in this legislation appears to be only employment with the same employer or when that staff member transfers to a new employer that I presume has purchased that business. So the potential for that I guess is that if you change employers you could be working in the industry for several years or several decades and still achieve only the first two pay rates on this scale. So I think as a select committee we have the opportunity to examine that. A truncated period—yes it is—but I think we will actually be able to tease that out and ensure we get those clauses right in the legislation.In the few minutes I have got left I actually want to tell a story about a caregiver whom I knew because I used to work in this area myself a few years ago. A caregiver whom I knew worked in an elder-care facility that had a dementia unit where many of the clients had Alzheimer's. This staff member turned up for work walked through the door and she still had her handbag wrapped around her arm as she walked through the door and she saw a client of hers walking towards her—an elderly lady. She walked up to that elderly lady and grabbed her by the hands. She held her hands within hers and she rubbed them and she looked into her eyes and she talked to her for a good couple of minutes. It was a really lovely exchange because it actually showed how much she cared for that person.Afterwards after she had put her bag down and got herself ready for her day I asked her why she did that. She said to me that a lot of people in our rest homes and in our care facilities often do not have families visit. This particular lady probably would not remember her tomorrow but she felt like she had to provide some care and love to her.I think the story of that woman says exactly what we want to acknowledge and support and value which is that what they do every single day is provide a little bit of love and a lot of care to people who ordinarily might not get it otherwise. I think every member in this House when we are a little bit older and we might be dribbling into our soup would want care workers who like that woman take the time to just share a little bit of love with their clients.Today is about unions. This is what good strong unions can achieve. Unionisation is about supporting our best workers and supporting those who do the difficult jobs and who actually deserve to be paid the most. This is also about women and for me it is really important to acknowledge that this is about Pacific women—Pacific women who have worked for many years in this industry. Today they get a little bit more of what they deserve which is going some way to their getting a living wage and a decent wage.So I am really proud to support this bill. I hope that in the future the Government will really acknowledge that what it has done is that it has perhaps negotiated away some of those rights that the women in this industry do deserve but in the interests of their sector they have decided to forgo them. We support this bill. We support those workers. We celebrate the unions. Thank you very much.Bill read a first time. Bill referred to the Health Committee."