Woodhouse MichaelHon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National): I found myself in the very rare if not unique position in the first 30 seconds of that contribution by Marja Lubeck to be strongly agreeing with her. She then went on and said some rather interesting things that I strongly disagreed with but the one point she made at the very start of that contribution was that we have very little data on this. Indeed the regulatory impact statement and the departmental disclosure statements have a paucity of information about what problem we're trying to solve. Are we trying to solve a problem that there is insufficient sick leave to manage appropriate absenteeism? Are people as many contributors have said exercising presenteeism? We've heard anecdotes of that but we have no data about it. The Minister has referenced in previous speeches on this topic the Southern Cross and Business New Zealand report the latest of which was in 2018 which demonstrated that I think there were 7.4 million days of time lost through illness in New Zealand in 2018 and that that constituted on average per full-time worker equivalent I think of 4.7 days per year. Now the Minister has also said that half of our workforce actually already have 10 days and so at a macro level there is an entitlement on average of 7.5 days per year. If workers are on average taking 4.7 days a year it seems at least on the face of it that the case for change hasn't been made. So my questions to the Minister are these. Firstly what evidence is there that there is abuse of sick leave? I think that's important. There's no point throwing epithets out that suggest that there is widespread abuse of sick leave provisions—certainly I can give anecdotes as well as an employer of some long period of time but I would resist the temptation to draw a conclusion about the New Zealand workforce more broadly on the basis of anecdote. But similarly I don't believe and I have searched that there is evidence yet of the phenomenon of presenteeism on a widespread basis and the data from the Southern Cross Business - New Zealand report would back that up.Now Marja Lubeck then went on to talk about sick leave entitlements being low. I don't think that's the case and the so-called culture of soldier on" is not evidenced by the data. Indeed I would be very interested in seeing the 2020 data and I encourage the Minister to look into that when it's available because last year illness fell off a cliff. We were all worried about a pandemic. That is true. But when normally 400 people a year die of seasonal influenza—more than 400—and thousands are hospitalised the death toll last year from seasonal influenza was zero. So we had a cold and flu season that was completely wiped out virtually by the fact that we started at home we didn't import influenza—because we were keeping COVID out we actually kept seasonal influenza out. And one would imagine that as a consequence of that the total number of days taken time lost through illness last year should have dropped as well quite significantly. So it will be interesting to see particularly given our productivity went down—we actually worked at work fewer days—whether or not the case for change the case for this legislation has been made. So my question to the Minister is twofold effectively. Am I correct in saying that there is no evidence of abuse of the sick leave process on a widespread basis but it's equally no evidence of presenteeism going on and does he think that that would be good data to collect? Because it seems to me that in order for us to consider whether this has been a success or whether we need to do more or less or something else actually we need a much better evidence base because as far as I can tell it doesn't exist."