Belich CamillaCAMILLA BELICH (Labour): Thank you Madam Speaker. It's my great pleasure to rise to take a call on this member's bill the Employment Relations (Extended Time for Personal Grievance for Sexual Harassment) Amendment Bill brought in the name of Dr Deborah Russell one of my Labour Party colleagues. It's especially pleasing to be able to take a call on this today having just left an event celebrating the fact that we now have 60 or half—50 percent—of the Parliament being women for the first time in New Zealand's history. I think that the fact that we do have support across the aisle for this change and hopefully support from the other parties yet to speak on this too and I think the fact that we do have that gender diversity within Parliament has allowed bills like this to proceed without too much difficulty because I think there's a shared recognition within the House of the importance of addressing sexual harassment the prevalence of sexual harassment and that we need to do more as a society to address sexual harassment. Many members of the House would've been aware of the Me Too movement and the Me Too movement in New Zealand submitted on this bill and was fundamental in advocating for this change. So I think it does this House and this Parliament a great service the fact that we've recognised this important matter and that we are acting on it.Now I was part of the select committee that considered this bill the Education and Workforce Committee and I do think it was a very useful process to go through and I think that was due to the goodwill generally across the committee to get this bill to a place where there could be cross-party support for it. But I also think it was to do with the way that Dr Deborah Russell shepherded this bill through the House. You would've heard from previous speakers and in reflecting on the content of the submissions that there were 26 out of 43 of the submissions that asked us to go further. They would've liked to see a longer period to bring claims in relation to other types of serious discrimination claims like racial discrimination. I want to acknowledge those submitters and also the serious issues that they brought to us. Those are important issues. There are additional challenges within our employment relations system in relation to other forms of discrimination. But Dr Russell was very clear that this bill addresses one thing and that is sexual harassment and so that is why we have kept this bill limited to claims of sexual harassment. I know that might be disappointing to some people some submitters but I would encourage them to think about how beneficial this change will be and the fact that we are able to have this cross-party support to get this through the House.I wanted to touch if I may just on the fundamental issue of this bill which is time limits in employment disputes. I prior to my coming into this House as an MP worked in employment law and took a great many claims for people both here and when I worked in England and Wales as an employment and discrimination lawyer on lots of different matters including sexual harassment. I think that if we look internationally we can see that our period of 90 days which applies to all claims that you need to raise as a personal grievance in order to protect your limitation rights is quite similar to some other jurisdictions. For example in England and Wales it's three months less one day—which is effectively the same thing but actually you have to file something in the Employment Tribunal in order to maintain that. So we do see that there are similar limitations that apply across different jurisdictions.I think there is an argument to say that sexual harassment—and I think this is what Dr Deborah Russell said in her speech which I listened to earlier in the debate—should be treated exceptionally. There are reasons for that in terms of how the victim or survivor of a sexual harassment experience—and these will be workplace experiences in relation to the content and the matter that we're discussing today—that harassment and how that will come to crystallise in their mind as an actionable act. It may not be for all people who experience sexual harassment that that is an immediate realisation. With some sexual harassment people aren't even aware that it's occurring until perhaps they explain annoying behaviour to someone else and there's a reflection that actually that's not appropriate within a workplace. Often it's not reported to people's employers and often it's just brushed away but I think that the great thing about this bill is it will—and I'm sure of this—allow more people who have experienced sexual harassment to obtain justice because it will remove the barrier of 90 days or three months and allow that period of time to be there. Now that is not an indefinite period of time as you will know—it's limited to that 12-month period—but I think it reflects better the real nature of experience of [Audio missing] particularly with workplace sexual harassment which comes with power dynamics between the employer and the employee. It comes with power dynamics even within different colleagues. So I think that that's especially important. We did hear some submitters who said that there should be no time period. I am not entirely convinced by that idea and one of the reasons for that is that we know from evidence that things become quite difficult and that's especially so in a workplace where people move on. Employers have a civil responsibility and it's very different from a criminal case in relation to the evidential burden—it's a much lower level—so I'm not 100 percent convinced by the argument that did come through in the submissions of not having any limitation period times at all. We obviously didn't accept that in relation to this particular bill. But one thing that we did do is really clarify that—and I say this. This hasn't come up in the debate so far but pre-emptively if other speakers are to address it nothing in this bill fundamentally changes anything else in employment law apart from the time period. So everything else in the Employment Relations Act and in all of the other different sections that we changed or recommended should be changed as a result of the select committee and the position put forward by Dr Russell—it was to only change the time period for claims of sexual harassment obviously within a workplace context. So everything else is the same. All of the other potential issues that people may have with the bill—well you probably will have those with the Employment Relations Act as well because it's the same wording throughout and I do commend the member Deborah Russell for that approach. I think it made it really straightforward and it meant that when we were looking at it we were really looking at the one fundamental change that she wanted to happen. We did look at the retrospectivity aspect of it and—to be clear—this bill is not retrospective. It won't affect anything that happens prior to it coming into law and that was an important clarification that was made with Dr Deborah Russell and the select committee. I think it strengthens the natural justice element of this bill and also unnecessary litigation in relation to serious and sensitive matters that may have impacted on people if the clarity was not there. I personally believe that we do owe it to try and make the legislation clear and accessible and easily understandable in order to allow people to utilise that legislation but also to not clog up our employment tribunals and our other courts and other jurisdictions with arguments that could have been made clearer had we as legislators turned our minds to it. So I do think that that was a helpful aspect. Another aspect which I think is in favour of this bill is its consistency with the Human Rights Act. In New Zealand if you experience some form of discrimination in the workplace you can choose whether to bring that claim through the Human Rights Act or the Employment Relations Act—you have to make a choice at some point. Under the Human Rights Act jurisdiction you have 12 months and under the Employment Relations Act you have 90 days. So there is in a way an incentive to utilise the human rights avenue which is under strain and I think—I haven't checked this before speaking to this point but my perception is that it does not have the same resources as the Employment Relations Authority. So we wouldn't want to create an incentive where people would prefer to use one jurisdiction but they're unable to due to the limitations. I think that that is a factor in the favour of this bill. So just to conclude I think that this bill will help survivors and it will help good employers and I commend it to the House.