White HelenHELEN WHITE (Labour): This is a bill that's interesting in terms of our changing attitudes to things like sexual harassment. So I take issue with the last speaker Chris Baillie with regard to what's going on here.I want to talk about my experience as an employment lawyer. Over time that changed. When I first started I was quite young myself and I remember I had a woman as a client who had been quite severely sexually harassed. She was very beautiful actually. When we went to court it was something of an amusement to the man who had harassed her that she was taking the case and he continued to consider it a joke.I had a friend who worked at one of the big firms—and actually many of you would know the lawyer involved and I'm not going to name him but he invited my friend out to lunch. She thought she was going to a lunch with everybody else and actually she was going to lunch with him alone. He was a lot older than her and he was in a position of power. What do you think it does to a woman like that who's just starting her career when she thinks that all the value that she holds in the firm all the sway that she holds comes from what she looks like and comes from somebody who is actually predatory? That kind of behaviour was tolerated in my profession and it was a major impetus for our re-examination as a profession—that kind of behaviour—when it came out after the Me Too movement.I have said earlier in another speech on this bill that I also suffered from those kinds of confusions as to what things were. I went along to something where somebody accused another lawyer of sexual harassment and my first thoughts were Damn it why is she raising that?" because I saw it as a harder case to plead than other ways of getting a hold of the situation. I'm ashamed of that because she was right: it was sexual harassment that was going on. It was things like getting her to bend over in a short skirt to sign a piece of wood when she was out as a lawyer. It was things like writing condescending notes about how the other lawyer's wife had a better car than she did. It was absolutely sexually based discrimination and I wanted to shut it down and go on another pathway because I was also subject to a system where that was too hard to do.Now I can tell the member who spoke about us missing the point that I don't miss the point but I can tell him that actually as we go through this journey we will have to examine some of the damage that we do to people when we do things we think are innocent but are not. They hurt people. These are actually quite light-hearted examples in comparison to the trauma that I have seen while I was acting as a lawyer. These are at the light end of the scale because there are a lot of darker things that have happened to people and they are traumatised. As a result of the kind of trauma that they go through they don't necessarily identify those things in the way that you might if you had a bit of perspective a bit of time and time helps get that perspective.So I'm supportive of moving the date in a case like this but I'm also supportive of it because it's a signal. It says "We know you get traumatised. We know our society's confused about these things. We know there are mixed signals and you need time to work through this process and be able to take a case."—and that's a really important point and it balances the other things about time limitations.I'd also remind the member who spoke that there have been issues on time limitations on sexual matters for a very long time. If you look at the movie Spotlight—which I watched recently—one of the problems with the exposure of sexual assault in the Catholic Church was that in America they had a time limitation on those cases. It was a very short amount of time; it was something like five years. So you've got to be very very careful in this area when you're dealing with such great trauma that you don't actually limit the time if you possibly can and that you give as much time as is possible. So I'd say this is a mild form of that approach and I'd just consider those issues of time limitation—definitely as my friend Vanushi Walters said something that we should really re-examine in these areas. I wanted to talk for a minute about the work of a woman called Mary Koss because Mary Koss did some work in 1987—she was in America and she was a researcher and what she did was she revolutionised the way that we identified sexual assault and sexual harassment by asking women about those experiences without attaching those words because if they were asked directly at that point whether they had been harassed or sexually assaulted they said "No". But if you asked them about their actual experiences the experiences they had were sexual harassment and sexual assault and rape—and they were not identifying them as such because they didn't have the language because they didn't see it as such.The horrifying thing about the work of Mary Koss—which actually did have ramifications for lots of us thinking about what these things are—is that she says even as late as last year we haven't changed the stats: we still have the same alarming amount of sexual harassment in our society. So we have to change something else. We're identifying the problem better than we were but we actually are going to have to work on this; this is a work in progress because many people suffer this kind of sexual assault. Now I did employment law as the first 25 years of my career for a really good reason. I'm really proud of it. I did that work because I knew that in our lives employment is such a big deal. It's so important to our wellbeing; it's the way we earn a living and it's the way that we actually manage our lives independently of others. I know that even my friend in ACT agrees with doing that. He thinks that people should stand on their own two feet—well work is actually a really important platform for doing that and so work has to be something that we take really seriously. People are entitled to work without harassment they're entitled to decent work and they're entitled to well-paid work. Those are all really important things because they drive wellbeing and they're at the heart of why I am in the Labour Party. So that is what I'd like considered here: that we aren't tinkering here. We're talking about one of the very important platforms that we have in our lives to make sure that we can pay for our kids that we can do things on our own that we can make reasonable choices and that we can house and clothe ourselves. That's how important work is. So I think that's something that actually the Labour Party and the ACT Party should have in common: that absolute commitment to decent work in our society. But the thing that that is going to require is a recognition that work is also a vulnerable space and that these kinds of powers—of going and holding an employer to account if an employee is abused by something as serious as sexual abuse—are really important fundamentals in building a decent society. So I commend this bill to the House."