Roche Denise: Parental Leave and Employment Protection (Six Months’ Paid Leave and Work Contact Hours) Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRoche Denise: Parental Leave and Employment Protection (Six Months’ Paid Leave and Work Contact Hours) Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 16 September 2015. Volume:708;Page:6741. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DENISE ROCHE (Green): I rise to take a call for the Greens on the Parental Leave and Employment Protection (Six Months’ Paid Leave and Work Contact Hours) Amendment Bill and it is my privilege to do so. We supported the previous iteration of this bill and we will be supporting this bill again. I would like to extend my congratulations to Sue Moroney for her luck of the gods or goddesses on getting her member’s bill drawn yet again. I would also like to congratulate her on the fact that her previous bill resulted in many of the shifts that were outlined by the National Party speaker who has just sat down. They are significant shifts and improvements in paid parental leave as it stands at the moment but they did come from the fact that there was a previous member’s bill in your name.We believe in family. We believe in the importance of allowing parents to spend as much time as they can with their kids. We know from the evidence that the first year of a child’s life is the most important in terms of the emotional and physical development and bonding with their parents. The World Health Organization has recommended 6 months’ breastfeeding as a way of improving and enhancing the physical and emotional health of children. We know that children with a parent at home in their first year have better cognition skills and fewer behavioural problems as they grow up.That is why we are supporting this policy because it is compatible with the Green Party policy which is for 13 months’ paid parental leave. Although this bill does not get there it is another step towards it. We would like to see paid parental leave for that amount of time to ensure that our kids are valued and our families are able to get by.We have heard the members from the Government benches and how they often boast about this investment approach to welfare but what could be more important than investing in children and their future? There are economic arguments for this. We know from the work of Nobel Laureate James Heckman that financial returns are greatest for the ages 0 years to 3 years. We know from the work done by the reliability availability and maintainability study that the economic net benefits the return to investment spending on our young children and the pay-offs per dollar invested go from between $1.80 to $17.07 per dollar investment. That is amazing.The Harvard University Center on the Developing Child has stated that investment will “generate substantial future returns through increased taxes paid by more productive adults and significant reductions in public expenditure on special education welfare assistance and incarceration further down the track.” This is significant because we know that the more we invest now the better our society will be now and in the future.We have a chronic under-investment in children and children’s education in this country. We acknowledge the recent initiatives but New Zealand spends roughly only more than 50 percent of the OECD average on kids. In terms of the OECD figures on paid parental leave we are well behind countries like Britain with 39 weeks’ paid parental leave Sweden with 16 months and Estonia and the Czech Republic which actually have 3 years’ paid parental leave. In fact we are behind virtually every other OECD country. We are 24th out of 25.Of the presentations that were given to the select committee last year on the previous bill there was something like over 3000 submissions and 99.6 percent of them were in favour of the bill. Twenty-six weeks is enough to support a struggling family who are dealing with the shocks that happen when a new arrival happens to them. It is that financial investment that they require in order to see them through that first crucial 6 months of a child’s life. We need to invest in those young people and in our families. We will certainly be supporting this bill.