Turia Tariana: Employment Relations (Flexible Working Hours) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Turia Tariana: Employment Relations (Flexible Working Hours) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:641;Page:11624] 
TARIANA TURIA (Co-Leader—Maori Party) 
: 
 Tena tatou katoa. I think after that exchange in the House I might go into business myself and provide a bit of training for transformation in terms of less violent ways of speaking. 
First of all I want to commend and congratulate Sue Kedgley and the Green Party on this bill. Albert Einstein once said that not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted and such might be a great subtitle for the Employment Relations (Flexible Working Hours) Amendment Bill. I want to make it clear that our support is not based on the UK legislation. Our support is based on quality of life for whanau. How do we count the value of nurturing children the vital role of parenting and the significance of family life? How do we account for the status we give to the health and safety of our children and to their sense of being loved valued and actively participating in the families and societies into which they are born? 
Well the Unicef Innocenti Research Centre’s international league tables published earlier this year give us a pretty good clue of how much family life means to New Zealanders. Asked how often their parents eat a main meal with them around the table only 64.4 percent of 15-year-olds in this fine land answered “several times a week” compared with an OECD average of 79.4 percent. Asked how often their parents spend time just talking to them only 51.9 percent of our 15-year-olds said “several times a week” compared with an average of 62.8 percent. How sad is that? For eating a meal and talking with one’s parents we are scoring in the lower half of the league tables. It is like that Tegel chicken ad where the only way that the dad can be identified is by the name tag that he wears on his shirt. 
This House must face up to the reality of people’s lives where poverty has confronted our families in levels of severity that make every day difficult. We must face up to a reality where domestic violence has become normalised where our health is compromised and where the addictions of gambling alcohol abuse and drug abuse are crippling. But we have been there before and we can—and we will—overcome. Our transformation depends on all of us stepping up to the mark and restoring to our whanau the capacity for making a difference in our own homes. It will not come from the hand of Government and it will not come from the directive of the Minister but it will come from us. 
That is the first clear reason why we in the Maori Party support the Employment Relations (Flexible Working Hours) Amendment Bill. The central importance of whanau and our responsibilities and rights to care for our own must be preserved. Another reality of today’s profile is that working families are now the norm; the single-largest family type is couples where both parents work. But it is also clear that many many parents find it difficult to juggle paid work and parenting. I can certainly relate to that as a young mother who had to go to work—not because I wanted to but because I had to. The Ministry of Social Development’s  
Work Family and Parenting 
 study in 2006 looked at work-to-home spillover effects. The vast majority of people surveyed—61 percent—felt that they had missed out on some of the rewarding aspects of being a parent because of work and I can relate to that too. You know I would love to have seen the first time my children walked and the first time they did a whole lot of things that unfortunately they did while I was at work and one of the rare downsides in my life as an MP today is missing out on the wonderful richness of being a day-to-day nanny to my mokopuna. 
This sadness is something I share with all my colleagues in the Maori Party MPs and staff alike; our choice to be doing the work that we are doing now comes with an enormous cost day in and day out. The centre for midwifery and women’s health research stated the other view in one submission from a part-time working mum with young children. She said: “I feel very privileged … and it would be great for other parents to have the same open-minded guilt-free opportunity. As they say … they’re not young for ever and the greatest gift we can ever give to our kids is time.” That is the greatest gift indeed. 
For whanau Maori the option of work flexibility would be a huge advance. For so many of our families the pressure of inadequate income and the challenge to meet basic requirements such as decent housing sufficient clothing adequate furniture medical expenses dental care electricity and an ample food supply gives very little choice about the concept of work and life balance. Three particular points must be emphasised here. Firstly the  
New Zealand Living Standards  
report alerts us to a reality in which 27 percent of all Pasifika families and 17 percent of all Maori families are reported as suffering severe hardship and we know that many of those families work two or three jobs just to survive. Choice and relative bargaining power are luxuries in such a life. The second reality is that of all two-parent families in which one parent is working 28 percent are in poverty. The third reality is to emphasise the advice from the Children’s Commissioner Cindy Kiro that although employers and employees benefit from the flexibility of working hours so too do the children. This bill is about support for their rights their needs and their well-being. Flexible working times can assist in the relentless juggling of work family and financial pressures. An environment in which home life is valued and flexibility is freely negotiated will result in more productive and healthy outcomes for all. 
I want also to focus on the benefits that businesses can achieve from this change. From the flood of letters that has swamped our offices one would think that every New Zealander lived to work loved to work and longed to work without having another thought for children or family life. It seems a long way off from the everyday lot of my constituency who tell me about being constantly overloaded and tired with drooping morale sick kids and chronic stress. I do not hear a lot of joy expressed about the freedom to work from home the opportunity to vary start and finish times or even the unspoken luxury of study leave. What I hear about is the sheer hard work of doing everything on a shoestring and taking on the double shift of parenting and full-time work and how when something has to give well it will not be the children or the whanau who are given up. 
So it seems to us in the Maori Party that the offer of flexible hours is a win-win situation for everybody. I want to just mention the support of the National Party which is conditional on flexibility happening without the mechanism of legislation to make it so. For the constituents in my electorate—for our people—the reality is that the power and control of working hours is simply not an equal negotiable agreement. It does not cut both ways. Assisting parents to balance work and family life has not been achievable and it will not be achievable by the wistful hope of good-faith bargaining. We support this bill therefore because it is most clearly a worker-friendly initiative that can give more weight to the intentions of the Employment Relations Act. One cannot simply assume that employers will be automatically fair-minded and family friendly. Although we would hope that employers could recognise benefits such as increased productivity improved morale decreased absenteeism enhanced staff retention and improved profitability the bulk of the lobbying that came into our offices does not give us much hope. 
Finally I will share the results of a recent Australian study called  
An Unexpected Tragedy 
. That report concluded that long working hours led to strained family relationships—a high social cost that impacts heavily on parents and that results in reduced child well-being. Will this Parliament be the one to stand in the way of a brighter future for our children? Kia ora.