King Annette: Home and Community Support (Payment for Travel Between Clients) Settlement Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeKing Annette: Home and Community Support (Payment for Travel Between Clients) Settlement Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 11 February 2016. Volume:711;Page:8947. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon ANNETTE KING (Deputy Leader—Labour):May I begin by congratulating the chair of our Health Committee Simon O’Connor on his recently announced engagement—he is a dark horse. We met yesterday but not a mention of it. I think he was trying to avoid having to shout the committee a morning tea. Can I suggest that next week Mr O’Connor will be shouting us a very luxurious healthy morning tea at the Health Committee. But congratulations and I always love a happy ending.Labour supports this bill in the second reading of the Home and Community Support (Payment for Travel Between Clients) Settlement Bill. We were pleased to see that the settlement on this case was finally brought to this House because the Human Rights Commission made a ruling several years ago that travel should be remunerated. So this issue arose several years ago the Human Rights Commission—in fact Louisa Wall probably remembers it from when she had something to do with the Human Rights Commission. This issue has been around for a long time and we are very pleased that settlement was reached between the major parties.But I want to begin by giving credit to the brave woman who took the test case. You always have to have somebody who is prepared to put their hand up and to front an issue like this knowing that there is no doubt going to be lots of publicity and you are not used to that publicity but you are so committed to the cause that you are prepared to do it. That person was Jenny Goodman. Jenny Goodman bravely took that test case and claim on behalf of hundreds of fellow home-care workers. So I think it is important that we always give credit where credit is due to Jenny but also to the Public Service Association (PSA).As we know although we are passing this legislation—and I will get on to the process that we have been through in that—it is still a long way from dealing with the historic underpayment of home and community support workers. Most of these workers are paid close to the minimum wage and I believe that they deserve to be paid for the very important work they do commensurate with the responsibility that they have.We would not be able to provide the health services and the home-care services in people’s homes without this army of overwhelmingly women. It is an occupation that women have gone into—a caring occupation—and many of us have had parents who have been the recipients of fantastic home help from these home-help workers. And so yes we are very pleased to see that we have this bill back before the House. I have to say that it has been done in a very rapid manner. All parties on the Health Committee wanted to get it through so that we could reach the deadline that had been set.The bill was introduced on 24 September had its first reading on 13 October and was then referred to our committee. We made this one of the last tasks we did before we lifted for Christmas. We reported the bill back on 15 December. There were seven submissions and they had a similar theme through all those submissions which made it possible for us in the committee to make I think some very important changes to the original bill that came into this House.I thought what I would like to do is talk about some of the submissions that we did receive and what they had to say. For example the submission we received from the PSA and E tū said this: “There is a long running history of work by employees their unions and the Human Rights Commission to have conditions in this poorly paid and hard-working workforce improved. Part of this work focused on the reality that these employees spend a considerable amount of their working day travelling in their own vehicles between clients for little or no reimbursement.”And that was the issue I think that really did concern members on all sides of the House—that there were workers who would drive from one house to another within their working hours and they were not reimbursed for that but perhaps the plumber or the electrician or someone else who was working out there in the community and travelling between workplaces was reimbursed. So the PSA said that it supports this bill and it recommended that the Government have a commitment to improving both the terms and the conditions of employment for workers in this sector.The next submission I want to share with you is from the New Zealand Federation of Business and Professional Women. It came from the angle that we needed to be looking not just at this bill—and it said this about this particular bill. It said: “this is a step in the right direction but by no means the end of the journey. We want to see that this recognition of travel time is tied to inflation and if we are using the minimum wage as the yard stick that with the increase of the minimum wage this is reflected and linked to the travel time allowances paid.”It went on to say its concern was for vulnerable workers particularly women and that it believed the bill does go some way to recognising the contribution that these employees were giving in their time as unpaid employment. And it was unpaid employment when they were travelling between jobs because they were not being paid. The federation also said this is not the end of the work that needs to be done and it urged the Minister of Health to increase funding to the aged-care providers to provide pay equity for all aged-care workers in accordance with the Equal Pay Act 1972 and to change the funding model for aged-care providers to ensure any funding increases include ring-fencing of pay increases and accountability.We had submissions from the major employers of these women. One of them perhaps the biggest employer of these women is the HHL group Healthcare of New Zealand Holdings Ltd. It said this: “We are supportive of the Bill due to the benefit it will bring to our employees (and clients). This Bill represents a significant positive change for the Home and Community Support Services (HCSS) sector.” That was really the message we were getting from employers but also the message that we were getting from employees and unions. Another submitter—one that some of our rural members across the House will be familiar with—is Access Homehealth. It put in a submission and it said it supported this bill because it “provides major benefits to both our and the Home and Community Support Services (HCSS) sector clients and employees.”What went very well in this committee was having listened to the submissions the members of the committee across all sides of the House questioned very closely how it worked and whether we could improve on this legislation. Wehave I think made some quite significant changes that do improve the original bill. We recommended that we include ACC in the bill because ACC although it was not a party to the original settlement is explicitly mentioned in clause 1.3 of the final settlement agreement. That has been agreed to—that we include ACC in it—and that came from a recommendation from our committee.There are a number of other amendments that we made including to the definition of an employee. We recommended replacing the definition of an employee so that “The intent of the settlement … is that non-salaried staff only would be covered. The new definition would clarify that for the purposes of this bill [now] a person is an employee within the meaning of [“employee”] in the Employment Relations Act 2000 and is someone who does not receive a salary.”I know that I am running out of time but those who read the amendments that we made including a new schedule 3—we took away regulation-making provisions and have put them in a schedule—I think will see that this bill has been improved by the work of the whole committee. So we support this. We are very pleased with the progress that it has made. It is a very good start but it is not the end of the journey for those very important home-care workers.