Logie Jan: Parental Leave and Employment Protection (Six Months’ Paid Leave) Amendment Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLogie Jan: Parental Leave and Employment Protection (Six Months’ Paid Leave) Amendment Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 28 May 2014. Volume:699;Page:18444. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAN LOGIE (Green): Talofa lava Mr Assistant Speaker. I rise to again offer the Green Party’s support for SueMoroney’s member’s bill the Parental Leave and Employment Protection (Six Months’ Paid Leave) Amendment Bill to extend parental leave to 26 weeks. I would like to acknowledge that we believe that this is a perfectly reasonable and affordable initiative alongside the changes that this Government hassignalled in terms of extending the entitlement as well as the amounts that are coming from this.I would like to firstly address some of the comments made by the previous speaker Chris Auchinvole and his comment that this bill is unfortunately before its time. I would like to ask him what he thinks the suffragists would have said to that when they were fighting for the equality of women and for this Parliament to recognise the role of women in society. Now well over a hundred years later would they be saying that a measly 6 months’ leave is before its time? I do not think they would.New Zealand has the second-lowest provision of paid parental leave in the OECD. Denmark Italy and the UK can afford between 9 and 15 months. Those powerhouse economies of Estonia Finland and the Czech Republic can somehow afford up to 3 years and yet this country—the country that led the world in providing the vote for women—is saying that we cannot afford 26 weeks’ leave for our families. That is just blatantly ridiculous particularly on the same day that we have heard in this House that the Government is throwing away hundreds of millions of dollars to polluters without even reporting to the public on who is getting that money. The fact that we would suggest that women’s employment conditions are unaffordable is ridiculous.Hon Hekia Parata: Well since you’re against every growth opportunity it’s not really.JAN LOGIE: Against every growth opportunity is what we are hearing—well I would say that supporting our children is probably one of the greatest growth opportunities that this country has in terms of investing in our families and women and employment conditions.I would like to remind this House that there were 3809 submissions made on this bill and 3795 of those—a resounding 99.6 percent—supported 26 weeks’ leave. The benefits that they identified as their reasons for supporting it included that 26 weeks’ leave facilitates bonding and attachment between parent and the baby. It improves health outcomes for mothers babies and children. It reaches the World Health Organization’s guidelines of exclusive breastfeeding for up to 6 months. It supports families and ensures the stability of family incomes. It allows choice for women and maintains workplace attachment. It updates our employment conditions to recognise women’s participation. It improves employment retention and assists employers to manage leave and workflows. They are some of the benefits that were listed in the submissions that we heard on this bill. For the Government to say that those benefits are unaffordable to us as a society shows a very very narrow view of investment and value.This bill would have also offered us a chance to improve our really poor ranking in the OECD. The only country at the moment that is worse than us is the US. The Government’s recent legislation will admittedly take us up a little bit further on that scale but not to a level that gives honour and credit to our foremothers. This bill would also have given a chance to deliver on something towards our international human rights obligations and documents that we have signed that have obliged us to review and where possible extend paid parental leave. It would have created more job opportunities. As employers told us quite clearly in the shorter length of time they are just covering the work whereas if it was 6 months they would actually employ somebody to fill in that time and that space. This would have created opportunities but the Government’s provisions probably will not tragically.I do want to just itemise the costs of the 26 weeks which were worked out to be $138 million a year by 2016-17 when it would be fully implemented. That would have been offset by potential short-term savings which is not even taking into account the long-term savings and benefits to society. The short-term savings would have been $28 million per annum so it would be only $110 million a year. Remember theGovernment is currently throwing away hundreds of millions of dollars to polluters without even looking twice. Some of that $28 million of savings that would have happened would have been from a reduction in early childhood education subsidies an additional $8 million in tax from recipients of paid parental leave an additional $5 million in tax from temporary employees filling in for those on paid parental leave and benefit payments being reduced by $2.4 million per annum as a result of beneficiaries replacing paid parental leave participants.For a Government that is saying that it is absolutely committed to getting people into paid work and off benefits this is a lost opportunity and that is a shame. I really do want to also challenge the Government a little bit more specifically around saying that it is unaffordable because the Government has gone beyond this bill and come up with its own options but it has done it in a very very limited sense and has not looked at all at the options.There was a presentation to the Government Administration Committee around looking at paid parental leave as a basic employment right. It recognised that basically annual leave sick leave and bereavement leave are currently all funded at 100 percent in this country. Even ACC is funded at 80 percent. Yet paid parental leave is funded really at only about 26 percent of the allowed time for 1 year and then that payment is up to only about 48 percent of the average wage. So we have a very gendered outline of employment conditions.Our employment laws and employment protections are based on the old-school idea that there was one earner and somebody at home looking after the children. Paid parental leave offers us the opportunity to update our laws to recognise that actually we have parents and women in the workplace—just like annual leave protects and recognises that people deserve holidays. It is kind of basically the same thing.ACC and paid parental leave also have a lot in common which I think is worth noting. They are both contributed to universally but used only by a small percentage of people for limited periods of time. And it is worth noting that ACC has a marked gender bias in payouts with $641 million more per annum being paid to men than to women through ACC. Actually we could have looked at an employer contribution for paid parental leave which would not have cost the Government’s fiscal outlook anything. When the Government was supposedly looking outside of the square to provide the best option it did not even look at the option that would have cost its books nothing. So I really think that to use a financial veto when it has had such a failure of imagination or has not even actually listened to the submitters is disingenuous and it does seem to me to be letting down New Zealanders.Finally I just want to finish on a lived story from one of the submitters because at the heart of it this is about people and about families. It is of a woman with twins who had to go back to work when her twins were 5 months old. She had to leave work every 2½ hours to breastfeed all while her babies were both still waking at different times every night to breastfeed. Unsurprisingly this was not sustainable. She could not cope and she quit the job to look after her babies. Her family lost that income she lost that attachment to her job and her family is worse off for it. This bill gives a chance to redress that.Debate interrupted.