Parmar Parmjeet: Parental Leave and Employment Protection (6 Months’ Paid Leave) Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is subject to correctionParmar Parmjeet: Parental Leave and Employment Protection (6 Months’ Paid Leave) Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 08 June 2016. Volume:714;Page:11804. Text is subject to correction.]Dr PARMJEET PARMAR (National): Thank you for the opportunity to contribute in the Committee of the whole House on the Parental Leave and Employment Protection (6 Months’ Paid Leave) Amendment Bill. I am not on the Government Administration Committee but I have contributed on this bill in previous readings so it is really good to have this opportunity.Speaking on Part 1—as we know Part 1 is about affordability and also about extending paid parental leave to 22 weeks. As I said I am not on the select committee so I did not hear the member Sue Moroney who spoke before me on this bill explain why she proposes that paid parental leave should be extended in two stages. That was one of my questions I wanted to ask the member: why did she decide to propose that we should extend paid parental leave in two stages? That first stage is extending it to only 22 weeks.There is a resemblance to what the Government has done. We increased paid parental leave in two stages. We increased it from 14 weeks to 18 weeks over 2 years and the reason was affordability. We wanted to make sure that what we are doing is affordable. We also made sure that we were not just increasing the length of the paid parental leave but including other workers. We included other care arrangements along with extending the length of paid parental leave. So—The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! I am going to interrupt this member as I interrupted the previous speaker twice. This is a debate on this bill and not on previous bills. So members going over what happened previously might have been relevant at the second reading and might be relevant at the third reading but it is not at this Committee stage.Dr PARMJEET PARMAR: Talking about affordability that was my question to the member: why did the member decide to propose this extension in two stages—that is going to just 22 weeks in the first stage? If it is about affordability I want to ask the member—the cost of this is going to be close to half a billion dollars. Where will the member get that half a billion dollars? Where should we cut that expenditure all the investment that we are currently making in order to increase paid parental leave to 22 weeks?We know that the intention behind this bill is good but it is about affordability and it is about timing. We know that in 2007 the Families Commission recommended increasing paid parental leave to 13 months and then the Labour Government decided not to because it knew that it was not affordable. So my question to the member is still how are we going to afford to increase paid parental leave so quickly when we have already increased paid parental leave to 18 weeks from this year. It is a long-term view. It is not a short to medium term view. It is not something that we can start this year do for a couple of years and then decide that it is not going to work. We need to see what will be the cost of this policy when we implement it in the long term.It is important that taxpayers understand why we are doing it. We are answerable to taxpayers and I would like to know from the member how she is going to explain to taxpayers that it is a good measure to increase paid parental leave so quickly when we have already increased it to 18 weeks—to increase it to 22 weeks. I do understand that the reason is bonding. I also see that—Carmel Sepuloni: You know what it means?Dr PARMJEET PARMAR: I do understand that this is about bonding and yes bonding is important but that does not mean that if parents go back to work after 18 weeks or 22 weeks or 26 weeks there is no bonding or no opportunities for bonding with their children.I also want to know why the member decided to increase it to only 22 or 26 weeks. Why not go longer? Because there are other proposals in different countries that want to see paid parental leave be longer. It is not that we should be comparing our paid parental leave with other countries because if other countries are doing something that is not a statement to us that we should follow. We have our own things to look after. We have to see what is affordable in our country. Given that we have just come out of a huge global financial crisis and that we had the Canterbury earthquakes we need to be very careful in terms of how we manage our finances. We need to see what is affordable. Looking at the timing this is not affordable and I still ask that question to the member as to how she thinks spending close to half a billion dollars on this is justified. How will she justify it to taxpayers? Going around talking to people they think that as we have already increased it to 18 weeks we need to see the impact of that before we jump on to the next step. It is something that we need to be very careful about how we invest our money.A member spoke about cutting spending for charter schools. That is very ironic—