Willis NicolaNICOLA WILLIS (National): National supports the Equal Pay Amendment Bill. We support it for the very good reason that we think that gender should not be the basis for determining the pay that someone gets and that men and women deserve not only equal pay for doing the same work but equity in the payment for the work that they do based on the value of that work rather than the gender of the people doing it. This is what this bill sets out to achieve and it establishes mechanisms which allow people to make claims where pay equity and equal pay principles are not upheld. National supports this bill and we have supported advancing a framework of this sort for some time and it is particularly frustrating to members on this side of the House that women in New Zealand have had to wait inordinately long for this framework to be established. In fact it is emblematic of the approach of this Labour Government the way that this bill has been progressed. This is a Government that is very good at announcements and is terrible at delivery because the process by which this bill came to the House is reflected in what is finally in it. The National Government saw the need for amendments to our existing legislation in order to allow pay equity claims to be made more easily and within a better framework that would mean that people were less required to resort to the courts. The feedback that National had got was that using the courts for these sorts of processes was cumbersome provided a significant barrier and meant that some cases were not able to be progressed. And that was the rationale for advancing legislation of the sort to provide a more practical bargaining framework. So National had work under way and then Labour came to power. Denise Lee I want to pay tribute to her because she is someone—she is one of the many women in this country who have championed the need for a bill of this sort for a bill that allows for pay equity claims to be made and she submitted a bill to this House. She brought to this House a bill very very similar to the bill we are debating tonight and I would invite the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety to articulate in any clear way what there is in this bill that we are debating right now that is superior to the bill that Denise Lee brought in and what was in her bill that could not have been amended at select committee 2½ years ago. Denise Lee brought a bill to this House and it was summarily dismissed by the men opposite because they felt that it wasn't a Labour bill and they wanted to take the credit. If it seems to you that perhaps I'm exaggerating what happened there I want you to think about when this bill was actually introduced. This Government bill which essentially picked up Denise Lee's bill and put it a Labour sticker on it was introduced on Women's Suffrage Day the 125th anniversary. That was the day that Labour announced their Equal Pay Amendment Bill. What a feel-good coincidence that that could be Labour's bill. And so the bill that we have here is important absolutely but the way in which it's been co-opted by members opposite is disappointing and I think shows poor intent.Then of course what happened is that we did consider it at the Education and Workforce Committee and I like members opposite do want to say how thorough that select committee process was. We did hear from a number of submitters both those who felt that they had been subjected to unequal pay whose work had not been valued appropriately by their employers historically or currently. We heard from women who were concerned for the future of other employees and who spoke of the need for a good process. There were technical issues which we had to consider. We were very aware of the wait these sorts of frameworks can have on employers in terms of them needing to go through these processes and needing to ensure that the way in which they determine pay is fair. So we analysed this. We received a lot of advice from officials. There were technical issues that we went through at length and I think we did a pretty good job.So the select committee reported back and on reporting back we had every expectation that the bill would be progressed forthwith. So it was genuinely surprising to National members on the select committee—and I don't know how members from Labour felt—when this bill was allowed to languish for months upon months upon months. And the Minister has not given us an explanation in any detail about what was so wrong with this bill that we're debating right now that emerged from select committee. He's told us that it needs a clean-up in the form of a Supplementary Order Paper (SOP). Well of course we don't have that SOP before us so I can't presuppose what's in it. But I do think that it's fair as a member of the select committee and a member of this House that I would expect from the Minister that he would explain why it took months and months and months for him to make up his mind about what he'd do with this bill and even when he does that the SOP isn't going to be provided until the committee stage despite the goodwill and good intent of members on this side who want to work in a cross-party fashion who want to work across this House to advance the pay equity framework for women. So it's very disappointing.Not only that but what we've seen in this clumsy and incompetent approach in which people make symbolic announcements and then let things languish because they don't actually know how to deliver on the detail of them is that in that time we have seen that women have had to continue under the current framework for equal pay claims and for pay equity claims which is the very framework that more than three years ago now was identified as being problematic and creating and making—there'd be too many barriers for women wanting to advance these claims. So the actual result of the Government dithering around on the delivery of this bill is that equal pay for women—pay equity for women—has not progressed at all. And I think that that is absolutely emblematic of the approach of this Government which is make the big announcement and worry about the delivery later make it clumsy make it incompetent. Great intentions—but when it comes to making it happen just no good at it. So when I look to this bill I think about the future and I think Well how do I want it to operate and how do I want it to be?" And I want this to be something that means that if any group of women any group of employees genuinely believe and can demonstrate that they are being underpaid on the basis of their gender that even though they are doing work that is of equal value to a group of men—who may be doing slightly different work but they are doing work of equal value—that group of women can go through a process that is not overly cumbersome that allows them to demonstrate that to have an independent assessment of that a fact-based assessment of that and that they can then work with their employer to get fair compensation for that lack of pay. Yes I hope for that process. But the thing I think is much more important and that I really want from this bill and that means that I wish that it had been progressed earlier is that I want it to be very clear to every employer to every employee that we have an expectation in this country that gender does not play a role in the pay that people get. And what I am frustrated by and what I think members on this side of the House—and certainly Denise Lee—are frustrated by is that in the service of the timing of a press release this Government has put the advancement of those objectives at risk. And I think that's not good enough. It's disingenuous and it's unfair.So when my two daughters grow up how will we know whether this bill has actually been successful? Well we know that this bill's been successful when we actually see that these sorts of claims are no longer necessary because we've established a framework in which people don't want to have to be doing compensation and that they pay people fairly to begin with. But we will also see that that gap between the pay of men and women which currently sits at about 9.3 percent is reducing in real time. But I would commend to this House that we remember that the contents of this bill as good as they are—and who knows what's on the SOP but I hope I hope that the Minister has drafted that in good intent and it doesn't gut the content of this bill that's been worked so hard on—is not just this bill that will advance the pay for women. There are many more things that need to be done and they start with actually ensuring that women have the opportunities that men do and I still believe there are many barriers to that. But this is a step forward. It's just a shame it took so long for the Government to take this step."