Williams PotoPOTO WILLIAMS (Labour—Christchurch East): I rise with enormous pleasure on the third reading of this bill—a bill that has been well traversed I hope and robustly discussed I hope despite the truncated process. At the end of the day this is to give effect to the settlement that the unions fought long and hard for. In that regard while there has been some discussion about the potential for back-pay being lost and other conditions actually what this will do is it will put money in the pockets of women and other workers in the aged-care service and that is the important thing to acknowledge.This puts into effect the settlement that the unions have negotiated on behalf of their members and I am enormously proud to have been a very small part of this process. It was a really interesting process. It was a truncated process. However I believe we actually had really robust discussions at the Health Committee. I hope we had sufficient time to consider all of the implications of this particular legislation. We were certainly given a few nights in which to filter through and think about the implications of this. We may get some things wrong. There may be some things that we have missed out. But I know that we have thought about this and thought about all the aspects of this particular legislation and I hope that we have done our best to get it right.There are a couple of things that I do want to point out. This will impact 55000 workers. It is an enormous settlement and enormously important. There has been much talk about the extinguishing of rights and what has had to therefore go in order to ensure that these workers actually get the pay that they deserve. I will not spend too much time on that but it has been about negotiation and it has been about putting the interests of those workers to the forefront to ensure that their pay rates were moved to a rate that actually shows how much we value them as workers.There were employers and providers who came to the select committee who talked about the cost impact on their businesses. But every single one of them actually knew the value of the workers who were in their employ. They made the point that despite the fact that in the legislation we say we are contributing towards the costs to employers—I believe that the amendment that Jan Logie has tabled which unfortunately did not pass actually highlighted a point that there are some employers out there who will do what they can to not honour the terms of this agreement. That is a useful point for us to actually try to underline where we can the opportunity to encourage those employers to live up to the expectations of acting in good faith. So thank you Jan for attempting to do that. I know that that is now on the record so anyone reviewing this legislation will know what was intended by that Supplementary Order Paper.There was a lot of discussion around relativity—that the people who will benefit from this legislation may in fact be paid more than their supervisors or other people in the workplace such as junior nurses. That is a matter for the employers to deal with and address if they do not want to lose their staff who may move into care and support work because it advantages them in their pay packet. That is something that will be an issue. It is a pressure on the sector and it is something that I hope this Government will work its way towards supporting so that we can continue to have really sound support particularly for our vulnerable older people. The aspect of training and the support for training to get our staff qualified to level 4 is extraordinary and one that we really support and one that I hope the workers take up in huge numbers because it is to their benefit.I just want to talk about one or two other things before I hand over to others to make some final comments in this third reading. The first really is about the idea of pay equity. From the outset there have been lots of discussions about what pay equity is about. We know that this is a settlement agreement—this is not necessarily about pay equity—but I do not want the principle of pay equity to be lost. The principle of pay equity is to ensure that in industries where the work is done largely by women we are paid the same rate as we would be if we were working in industries where we could have a comparator with men. We have not done that in this case and that is a discussion—we have lost the opportunity in this case—that we must continue to have. In order to address some of the social harms in our community particularly that of poverty of our children we must continue the fight around pay equity and I hope it is not lost.In my first reading speech I talked about a support worker in the industry whom I knew and who showed me what this is all about. When coming into work one day in a dementia unit one of her clients immediately came towards her. The support worker had not even had the chance to sit down and have a cup of tea. This support worker grabbed the woman by her hands and held her hands in hers and talked to her for a few minutes. It was a really lovely exchange and it spoke to me about the care that our support workers have for people who are not even their family members. Thank goodness that they do because all of us may at some point in our life be in the situation where we are cared for by people who are not our family members and do not we want those people to be just like that support worker whom I knew?The thing that we cannot thank those care and support workers enough for is the amount of love that they give to people every single day. They are worth twice three times a hundred times what we are paying them but today we are going to celebrate and acknowledge them. They are finally going to have a little bit of what they deserve and we do not want to hold up the passage of this bill. On 1 July let us hope that you enjoy what you get in your pay packet because you justly deserve it. Thank you.