SpeechJAN LOGIE (Green): Thank you Mr Speaker. It's a pleasure to rise and take what I expect will be a fairly short call on the Employment Relations (Extended Time for Personal Grievance for Sexual Harassment) Amendment Bill which was initially in the name of the Hon Dr Deborah Russell and now I understand it is in the name of Marja Lubeck. We've had quite a lot of discussion about the importance of this and I do just want to start off by referencing the research done by the Human Rights Commission in the last year around the prevalence of sexual harassment in order to give us a bit of a sense of the scale of the problem. We've had trouble with that in the past because actually part of the problem that's being recognised by this bill is the difficulty people have in talking about this. But in Aotearoa last year the research shows that 30 percent of working people have experienced sexual harassment in the last five years. That's a pretty significant problem right across all of our workplaces. The people most impacted were young people—54 percent of young people—and bisexual and disabled workers where 67 percent of them have been experiencing sexual harassment in their workplaces. This is a really challenging issue for us as a country and it's been referenced by other speakers that we need to acknowledge the impact of these offences in our workplaces. They cause mental and physical health impacts—anxiety depression—and people have trouble sleeping and trouble eating and they're questioning themselves. That's a result of the abuse but also it's a result of the stigma and the difficulty of talking about these issues and—I would say as well—the difficulty of a pathway to resolution. We're not very good at providing pathways to resolution for this and I want to pick up where the previous speaker Vanushi Walters was saying that we have two systems that were mentioned. So there's the Human Rights Commission pathway which has had traditionally that 12-month time frame for reporting and then we've had the employment process—the personal grievance process—where previously you had to get your complaint in in 90 days. Now that's been evened up to be consistent across those two areas. We also have the criminal court—and this House I'm hoping now is very very aware of the problems and the huge barriers for people to enter into that process and get a good outcome with an outcome being satisfaction in terms of a hope of resolution and recognition—and then we also have WorkSafe as another avenue for addressing sexual harassment. This bill—and I want to acknowledge Zoё Lawton who kind of initiated this in her conversations with Dr Russell I think and her advocacy and part of that advocacy was recognised in a consultation that was initiated by the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment (MBIE) in 2020. This was an idea that came out of that consultation that was initiated in 2020 and can be seen I think in the summary of submissions. The submissions closed in March 2021. I was part of the conversations in initiating this consultation through MBIE around our processes for addressing sexual harassment harassment and bullying. The reason we initiated that inquiry was because the feedback was just overwhelming—in the wake of the Me Too movement and the stories from our law firms that were all over the media at the time—that we did not have a functioning system that people had confidence in to be able to address the harm in their workplaces let alone prevent the harm in their workplace. So that consultation was initiated and submissions closed in March 2021. I'm pleased—at least I guess—that today in May 2023 we are passing a member's bill that delivers on one of the issues that was raised in that consultation.There is work to do. I think as Ms Walters said What's next? What's next?" We have initiated work to work out what's next and we just need to make sure that we don't keep doing what—and this is not specific to this Government; this is a pattern right through our history about things coming up in the media people spilling their guts to try and get recognition of our system failure and make change for themselves and for others and we start work because we are affected and impacted by those stories. Then those stories go out of the media and the attention shifts and we don't make the fundamental changes that we need to make. And there are many in terms of the conflicting systems that we have.I do want to point out the points that Vanushi Walters again made that quite a lot of submissions raised: that actually 39 percent of New Zealand workers who have been surveyed had experienced racial harassment in the last five years—so it's even more than sexual harassment—and that we had levels of bullying that were 20 percent of workers who had experienced bullying frequently in the last 12 months. That is happening right now.One in five people in our workplaces are experiencing bullying and we have not extended the periods for them to come forward even though we know the dynamics and the impacts of those forms of abuse and the processes that people need to go through in their thinking and understanding of it themselves—let alone talking it through with others—and finding a pathway are very similar to sexual harassment. I definitely believe we need to be doing that work. Enough said. The Greens are happy to be supporting this bill."