Moroney Sue: Budget Measures (Financial Support for Newborn Children) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMoroney Sue: Budget Measures (Financial Support for Newborn Children) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee[Sitting date: 15 May 2014. Volume:698;Page:17976. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]SUE MORONEY (Labour): It is a pleasure to get a call on the Committee stage of Part 1 which is the part that does deal with the extension to paid parental leave—finally—by the National Government. So I am rising to support this step albeit it is meagre but from National’s point of view it is a giant step. It is a meagre step for some of the rest of us but still a giant step for National to have this part which extends paid parental leave by a further 2 weeks next year and then by another 2 weeks in the following year.I have got to say that that is giant steps for National but I am rising to ask parties to support the amendment to this part that I am proposing so that we can actually get to 26 weeks’ paid parental leave by 2016. That is what my amendment will do. That as my colleague Carol Beaumont just said is what the New Zealand public wants. We know that is what the New Zealand public wants because when it did actually have an opportunity to have a say on paid parental leave and when there was not a bill being rushed through under urgency but there was a bill going through a considered process as my bill—no I am not allowed to say “my bill”; the Labour Party bill I will call it—was doing. I know the National Party will like it being called a Labour Party bill just to remind people where this idea came from.I think what Part 1 reminds us about is that the National Government has no ideas of its own. This is its big Budget urgency item and it comes from the Labour Party. What does that tell us about how lacklustre this Government is? The fact is that it has completely run out of ideas it is tired and it is now casting around. The only place that it can find ideas from is when it looks over this side of the Chamber. That is what Part 1 tells us.My amendment will do what 99.6 percent of the 3806 submitters on the Parental Leave and Employment Protection (Six Months’ Paid Leave) Amendment Bill from the Labour Party which would bring in 26 weeks’ paid parental leave asked for. So I am urging all of the parties that have voted for 26 weeks’ paid parental leave to support that amendment because in doing that they can bring about 26 weeks’ paid parental leave as the New Zealand public has asked for. I am pleased to say that—The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Order! Order on the backbenches. I am trying to listen.SUE MORONEY: I am pleased to say that the amendment has been drafted in a way that will not compromise the National Government itself nor will it compromise any of its support parties because it has been drafted in a way that means there is no commitment to improve paid parental leave beyond what the Government is already proposing until 2016. That is long past when the confidence and supply agreement is in place for United Future and for the Māori Party. So this should cause them no concern in terms of honouring their confidence and supply agreement with the Government or with honouring the commitment that they have already made in this House to support 26 weeks’ paid parental leave.I know that the Hon Peter Dunne particularly will want to support this. I am sure he will because he is on the public record as saying that yes he is prepared to support 26 weeks’ paid parental leave but that he does not think it goes far enough. He does not think it goes far enough. So I am certain that he will be voting for the amendment that is on the Table to be voted on this evening. If he does not I think there are some real questions to be asked about whether he supports his own party’s policy or not. So I look forward to seeing what happens when we come to the vote on this part which I think will be some time away because I am sure that the Minister in the chair the Minister of Labour has had lots of questions asked of him that he will be wanting to answer.This part really does just two things and it does them 2 weeks at a time in the next 2 years. Sadly although I think the intentions are reasonably good it will not actually address the submissions that were raised at the Government Administration Committee in submissions on that other bill. I want to talk about a particular submission that really resonated with me. It is the one that sticks in my mind out of all the 3800 submissions. It was from a woman who gave us her submission in Auckland. She talked about the struggle that she had. She gave birth to twins and this submission stays with me because when I looked around the room when she was describing what her day looked like when she returned to work I swear that there was not a dry eye in the room. I think that included the officials as well and they are pretty hard to get going.What she described was that she had to go back to work after having these babies when these twins were 3 months old. At that time she had 12 weeks’ paid parental leave. Financially she had no option but to go back to work. But what was happening for her was that the twins were feeding at different times during the night so on four occasions during the night she was up feeding one or other of these twins—they were not feeding at the same time—and then she was getting up and going to work the next morning. She was taking the train and dropping the babies off at day care which she found extremely difficult to do. She found it really hard to leave them at day care. She would then get on the train and travel to work. Two times or I think it might have beenthree times during the course of the day she was then travelling by train back to their day care to feed these babies and so—Hon Member: What’s this got to do with Part 1?Jacqui Dean: Yeah hello? Lots of people do that.SUE MORONEY: What has this got to do with it? I am not sure. Jacqui Dean does not know what this has got to do with it. What this has got to do with Part 1 is that this woman said to the select committee that the upshot was that she—Jacqui Dean: Women are more resilient than you know.SUE MORONEY: Oh well look I am sorry that Jacqui Dean does not empathise with this woman’s story but after 6 weeks she handed in her notice. She resigned because she could not do it. What she told the select committee was that if there had been 26 weeks’ paid parental leave in place she believed that she would have been able to actually go back to work and cope at that stage and that would have meant that she would still have had her job. She would still have her job. When this woman came before the select committee her twins were 3 years old. She said: “If I knew then what I know now I would have got through that but I didn’t.” Today she still does not have a job. She lost her attachment and her connection to that workplace because the duration of paid parental leave was inadequate.It is still going to be inadequate for women in her position after this Government has passed this bill because another 4 weeks in 2 years’ time is actually not going to help that woman in that situation. That is what it is all about. It is all about helping parents so that they can cope so that they can actually focus on giving that attention to their child and to their baby to get the bonding and attachment going really well. Another 4 weeks is not going to achieve that and that is what all the submitters on the Labour Party bill told us. They told us that 26 weeks was what was going to actually start getting towards that.So what we have here in Part 1 is a Government that recognises that it is in trouble over this issue and it recognises that it needs to try to respond and react but it does demonstrate that it is a Government that really truly still does not get it. It still does not get it and it is a big step for National to vote in favour for any form of paid parental leave at all. I get that. I do get that and I think that is a giant step forward. But please do not think that this bill addresses the issues that the Labour Party bill has been put forward to address. Those issues are the ones that have actually been supported by Plunket by Barnardos by Unicef and by a whole range of other organisations.Plunket put out a press release today and it said that it was good to see paid parental leave being extended but it begged the Government to do the right thing and go to 26 weeks. My amendment will give the Government the opportunity to do the right thing: vote for the amendment so that it does extend paid parental leave to 26 weeks. That can be done tonight. It can be done tonight and we can get it under way. But even better than that—