Wood MichaelHon MICHAEL WOOD (Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety): I thank the various members for their questions and discussion on a range of points. I'll start with Ms Luxton's discussion about her experience as a small-business owner and some of the benefits of providing appropriate sick leave for her employees. She asked a very specific question of me which is that if someone works part time is it correct that sick leave will only apply on the days that they ordinarily work? The answer to that is yes. This is quite an important point in respect of the prorating argument that we've had a little bit of dialogue around so far. Because the reality is that a part-time worker only works on a certain number of days per week and so the incidence of sick leave that they will need to call upon is going to be less than the incidence of sick leave that a full-time worker will need to call upon. Because on average that person when they become sick will become sick on days that they are ordinarily working less than the number of days that a full-time worker becomes sick on a day that they are ordinarily working. So I do think it's just simple maths that some of the rhetoric that we have heard about a blowout in sick leave from part-time employees that every part-time employee is going to rack up the full entitlement simply isn't borne out—either by the maths or the facts.I do have to take issue with Mr Simpson's characterisation of small-business owners as apparently being widely willing to discriminate against people who have children. I think that is an unfair characterisation of the way that most small-business owners approach their employment relationships around their ethics quite frankly and around their willingness to engage legally in employment relationships because that would be an entirely illegal approach to take. I also put it to Mr Simpson that if that was the case we'd see it now. Because we don't have a prorating arrangement for sick leave entitlement as things stand either under the statutory minimum or under most entitlements in employment agreements that I have seen where people get a higher than statutory minimum entitlement. So if there was going to be widespread abuse if people were not going to be hired—because they had dependants—for that reason we would see it happening now and there is absolutely no evidence of that. I certainly do not expect that many—or any—small-business owners would behave in that way and I suspect some will be offended by the suggestion that they would.I do also want to take issue—sorry there was one other point just on the prorating issue. No I'll come back to that later. I'll touch on the other point raised by Mr Simpson which is that COVID has in some way been used as an excuse for this piece of legislation and again I certainly wouldn't characterise it in that way. COVID has been a very revealing period for New Zealand and I think that any Government would be foolish if it didn't try and draw some lessons from the experience of a global pandemic: the strengths in our society that it highlights but also some of the weaknesses and some of the things that we need to improve. For our Government the experience of a global pandemic has brought to the fore the question of workers having adequate sick leave so that their health is taken care of when they simply need to stay at home to get better and also the value of that in terms of not passing on bugs to others in the workplace.Here I want to come on to one of Ms Stanford's points which was an obsessive focus on what's the productivity argument here. Well I'll come to that in a moment—productivity is important but productivity is not the only reason why we have minimum entitlements in place for people in the workplace. We have minimum entitlements such as decent sick leave and good holiday leave and the minimum wage in the workplace because it's about how we want to treat people. When it comes to sick leave we want to ensure that when Kiwi workers are unwell they have a reasonable opportunity to stay at home and get better. I believe that it's very clear that that will support productivity because workers who come into the workplace and are unwell are unlikely to perform at the level that an employer would wish them to and they are very likely to pass that on to others in the workplace. In the second reading debate I did refer to a relatively substantial United States study—which I am happy to get the details of for Ms Stanford—which did show a 20 percent impact on productivity from workers coming in when they were unwell. But at its core we want workers to stay at home not just for the productivity gains but so that their health and their wellbeing can be looked after. It also stands to reason that a worker who is able to take sick leave to stay at home and get better will recover more quickly and therefore when they do return to the workplace are more likely to be back at peak performance in terms of the duties that they undertake.I think those are probably most of the key questions that have been raised by members to date and I'm happy to answer any further that come up.