Moroney SueSUE MORONEY (Labour): My contribution on this will probably last about as long as my voice so hopefully that will be for a longer period of time. Can I at the outset congratulate the unions Kristine Bartlett and the Minister of Health. But unusually there is another male I want to particularly congratulate on this and it is Peter Cranney who is the lawyer who took this case. It is a trade unionist turned lawyer who took this case. How historic must this be for Peter to see this today being turned into a piece of legislation and as the Minister said a historic case that is now becoming a piece of legislation that will always be part of our country's history and will be the subject of the debate for the rest of today. Congratulations to you Peter. You really have made a huge difference to a large number—thousands in fact—of workers and their families. What that means for them in their day-to-day lives and actually the go-forward for their families and for generations to come just cannot be underestimated. So well done mate.I want to talk about the commencement clause of this bill because hallelujah it is 1 July 2017—that is the day it is going to commence—but gosh it should have been an awful lot earlier. I just want to remind people listening to this debate that actually the principles used to determine this settlement and this outcome could have happened in 1990. They could and should have happened in the year 1990 not the year 2017 which is in the commencement clause. This is because it was in that year that the then Labour Government passed the Pay Equity Act 1990. That Government did not know that it was in the dying throes of being Government when it passed that legislation but that legislation effectively set out the same sort of process that ended up being endorsed by the Employment Court in looking at the Equal Pay Act 1972.It turns out—strange is it not—that we probably did not even need to have a separate new piece of legislation in 1990 to do that but we did have it. If that had been allowed to stay in place if the incoming National Government of 1991 had not as its first act repealed that 1990 Act then these women and their families the men working in this industry and sector and their families and men and women in other female-dominated occupations and industries would have had access to better wages for all these decades in between.What that means is that we would not be talking about child poverty in the large figures that we talk about it in this country today. Child poverty would have been in diminished numbers. In fact I would go as far as to say that it probably would not even exist if the incoming National Government in 1991 had not as its first act of vitriol actually extinguished the right of women to take pay equity cases under that Act in 1990.So I would really like to say that the commencement clause—I am going to vote for it of course because it does bring in something that has been desperately needed for decades. Those families those children have been robbed of this money of this opportunity of the right to have a decent income off the hard work of their parents—for decades—looking after some of the most frail and vulnerable people in our society. The amount of emotional work that that involves the amount of intelligent work and physical work that that involves to look after people who are disabled or people who are just elderly and need that extra support—that work has gone undervalued for far too long. So I endorse this commencement clause and I wish it had come earlier.