Logie JanJAN LOGIE (Green): Thank you Madam Chair. I'm keen to take a short call in the committee stage of the Holidays (Increasing Sick Leave) Amendment Bill which is not one of the larger bills that this House has seen. In fact it's a very simple piece of legislation that extends the minimum sick leave entitlement from five days to 10 days and recognises I think after coming through a pandemic all of the adjustments that the Government has had to make to support businesses and staff to be able to ensure that people can stay home when they're sick. This bill feels timely at the very best and ideally this would have happened 10 years ago I would say. We hear continually from working people particularly those with caregiving responsibilities or public-facing jobs where they're in contact with a lot of other people that if people have only the minimum entitlements quite often actually they are turning up to work sick because they can't afford to take unpaid time off work and that actually parents and caregivers are leaving employment to be able to manage sickness of others in the family.When we hear from the Opposition their concern around the impact of this on employers I would again say that losing good staff because they're not able to care for their families or their own health is a greater cost than an additional five days a year maximum for that minimum of sick leave and that we have a problem with presenteeism which is people turning up to work sick and actually being compromised in their work and not being as productive as they could be. We all know that feeling in this House of turning up when we're actually sick and struggling to make decisions and get our words out. In some workplaces that's actually a risky thing not just the transmission of disease to others but also impaired decision making puts your colleagues and yourself at risk. So this is an incredibly important conversation for us as a country and the Greens are very pleased to be seeing this. We would have liked to have seen the transitional arrangements in the legislation—bringing this in over time that means that some workers won't get access to this increase for like over a year away and we're a bit disappointed in that because there is such an urgent need and people that have been talking to me are expecting it because they desperately need it for managing their health and their family.We've also put up a couple of Supplementary Order Papers (SOPs) responding to submissions that we heard through the select committee phase around people talking about how difficult it is with the many employers—and we heard this reflected in submissions from some employers—assuming that people are ripping the system off and making an assumption that they're doing that and requiring them to get a medical certificate to prove that they've been sick. And actually it's quite difficult to get into a lot of doctors' surgeries. I was talking to a family member recently who was saying it was a month before she was going to be able to get in to see her doctor. So we're putting additional pressure on our health system for no benefit. And so our SOP is to return our law to the state it was pre-2010 that would enable employers to request a medical certificate if they have reasonable grounds to believe the person or their family members were not sick. So it's actually to me about restoring good employment relationships. It doesn't create a good workplace environment if you are assuming that your entire team is seeking to rip you off. That's a really negative employment relationship. Being able to have honest conversations with people when you've got reasons to have concerns is how we actually resolve problems that can work out for both parties.So we've got this SOP in place also to ensure that we don't reduce the amount of accrued leave that people are able to gain which is in the legislation at the moment—it would keep it at the status quo and not get the benefit of the increase to 10 days so I hope there will be support for those amendments.