Adams AmyHon AMY ADAMS (National—Selwyn): Thank you very much for the call Mr Speaker and as other members have done can I begin by congratulating you sir on your election as the Speaker of the House. I know you will do the role well and I look forward to working with you. Can I also congratulate the Deputy Speaker Anne Tolley who will do an outstanding job and our two new Assistant Speakers from the Labour benches.It is my first opportunity to speak of course on this first day in the 52nd Parliament and it is a pleasure to be back. I can tell you that on this side we're relishing the opportunity to be a strong and effective Her Majesty's loyal Opposition and I can assure this House that we will be fulfilling that role with some vigour as we hold the Government to account every day of this term.The point on the reinstatement motion that I particularly did want to speak on and spend some time addressing because I think it is a critical issue that deserves the debate of the House is the removal of one of the pieces of legislation in particular and that is the Employment (Pay Equity and Equal Pay) Bill. I find it quite staggering in the face of all of the multitudes of pieces of legislation on the Order Paper that Labour have spent many years opposing and the New Zealand First Party have spent many years opposing and the Green Party have spent many years opposing—so many pieces of legislation that they clearly oppose—that they would reinstate all of those but the one bill that sets out to eliminate and prevent discrimination on the basis of sex and help women get a fair deal in the workplace. That is the piece of legislation they want wiped. That is the one piece of legislation of all of the bills they opposed that they want wiped off the Order Paper in this House.I do think it is important that the Government explain to the people of New Zealand why it is that they think that returning women to having no process to address their grievances—no clear structure to work their way through—and throwing them back into the morass the uncertainty the cost and the delay of having to go through the courts as the TerraNova case did before they can make any progress at all is a good idea. There's been no word from them on that. Nothing in the Speech from the Throne talked about how they would replace it. Nothing sent any signal to the women in New Zealand about why throwing them into the uncertainties of the 1972 legislation is a good thing.I think that the Government needs to tell the people of New Zealand and the Leader of the House needs to address why this piece of legislation is being wiped—not amended not changed not adjusted to fit the Government's programme; they have that ability if they want to. This is a piece of legislation that was introduced in August of this year. It has been to a select committee. It is back before the House and the Government has every opportunity to amend it if they are not happy with the crafting of it. That would give women a giant step forward in knowing how to address these pay claims with some certainty.I do think we need to reflect to understand the context of the point I am making. This came from of course the TerraNova case. The TerraNova case spent 3½ years in the courts just to get to the point to decide that section 9 of the Equal Pay Act applied not only to equal pay for equal work—which is how it had been broadly understood to work for many many years. After 3½ years the court was able to reach the one determination that not only did that Act apply to equal pay for equal work but also—and quite newly in the way most people understood it—that it applied to pay equity claims. After 3½ years the court hadn't even been able to get to the process of understanding whether that claim in particular had merit; if it did have merit how you'd go about addressing it; how on earth you'd even start to understand which industries were comparable for the purposes of pay equity; how you would work through that process; and how the rights of the applicants would be protected. This legislation is all about setting up those frameworks so that women who aren't getting fair pay and aren't getting appropriate pay and pay equity can address that without having to go through years and years in court to try to get that resolved. Again let me just remind this House—because this is a critical decision we're making here on the rights of women—that after the decision on the TerraNova case came out in 2014 the previous National-led Government did two critical things. The first was that we settled with the workers through a long process of discussion and agreement—a $2 billion settlement that benefited 55000 workers—but critically we also set up a joint working group to understand and to work on an agreed basis chaired by now Governor-General Dame Patsy Reddy to look at how these questions should be addressed. We understood that if it took 3½ years just to know that that Act applied trying to get all of this resolved through court processes was an incredibly unfair burden to put on applicants so the Government set up the joint working group. That working group worked right across all stakeholders to come up with a framework that made sense so that actually rather than having to approach each of these cases through a grievance methodology it could be a normal employment bargaining approach where any worker group of workers or organisation representing workers who felt aggrieved could go straight to the employer and start from a bargaining position and not have to rush off to court. Why would you not want to start in the first instance with the employees and the employers talking and seeing if they can resolve it? Why wouldn't you start there? What the Government is doing with this motion is compelling every hard-done-by woman every underpaid woman to go to court—get a lawyer and go to court—because we have removed the one piece of legislation that gave them the chance to actually have a process where they could work through this in a fair and reasonable way.And this is from a Government that is quite happy to reinstate any number of pieces of legislation they don't agree with but when it comes to giving women the right to resolve their cases—why wouldn't they just amend what is already there? If they don't like it amend it. But no no they're going to wipe it. They're going to start again with no indication whatsoever how that's going to work how they're going to deliver it and nothing at all in the Speech from the Throne to give women any indication of how that's going to work.I just can't understand why a Government would do that and we've heard nothing from them. I think the public of New Zealand deserve to know. If you're getting rid of this legislation why do you think it's acceptable—you're not doing it any time soon—to take this issue back years and not give people an opportunity and a process and a clear framework for making these decisions? We've heard nothing. We've heard absolutely nothing and I think the Government and the Leader of the House need to tell those women why suddenly they're not going to be able to progress the claims that actually a lot of work went into through workers groups through unions through employers' representatives through that joint working group.This was not a decision of the National Government; this was us accepting every recommendation of that joint working group because lots of people put hundreds of hours into making this work and the Labour Government just want to scrap it. Now I appreciate that they're not going to agree with everything we did; that's perfectly appropriate. But they could change it. Why would you go to square one? Why wouldn't they simply use a Supplementary Order Paper process to adjust the framework to one that they are happy with?They haven't done it. It's an outrageous attack on the rights of those women to be able to start a process with a clear framework. Instead the message from this Government to the underpaid and the discriminated-against women in New Zealand is: Go to court. We're not going to help you. Go to court get a lawyer settle in for a long wait because you're not going to know where it's going to go and we would rather impose all of that cost on women on workers on the underpaid who have been discriminated against in New Zealand than give them a process give them a clear framework."I just think it's outrageous and I couldn't sit through this reinstatement debate and not put to this Government that they do need to tell the public of New Zealand why they're not capable of amending a very good framework. If they don't like it they can change it but instead they've chosen to wipe it scrap the process ignore the joint working group and leave the women of New Zealand with no idea how they're going to go forward from here and no idea when this will come up in the Government's agenda—and a long period of time to now develop whatever the Government are going to come up with if anything. For all we know they're just going to stick with the Equal Pay Act of 1972 and leave it all to the courts to work out.I don't think that's good enough and I don't think it's appropriate that the Government would simply put up a procedural notice of motion on the first day of this House without a word of explanation about how this going to help the women of New Zealand because it quite simply won't.Hon Member: Mr Speaker?Mr SPEAKER: I can hear the member but the Hon Judith Collins has been calling for longer."