Moroney Sue: New Zealand Public Health and Disability Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMoroney Sue: New Zealand Public Health and Disability Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 16 May 2013. Volume:690;Page:10174. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]SUE MORONEY (Labour): Thank you for the opportunity to speak on this New Zealand Public Health and Disability Amendment Bill (No 2) and the principal Act that it amends. I actually want to take a slightly different tack to what my colleagues have taken. I get that the New Zealand Public Health and Disability Act does have a lot to do with this bill because it is about the care of people and particularly the care of people in the disability sector and it might seem that that is very fitting. But on the other hand quite a number of the clauses that we are about to—well in our case—vote against but that the Government is attempting to pass through under urgency in this Committee actually have an impact on the Human Rights Act 1993. I wondered why there was not an attempt to either amend that as a principal Act or make any subsequent amendments to that Act. I really do want to ask the Minister in the chair the Minister of Health who has returned for the debate to answer that question because I am really quite alarmed at the fact that we are actually extinguishing the rights of a significant number of New Zealanders who you could argue have quite significant human rights issues perhaps. We are extinguishing their rights to go the Human Rights Commission as of yesterday. That is quite a major part of what this amendment Act actually does or this bill—it isstill a bill at this stage—attempts to do. Yet we have nothing here that amends the Human Rights Act 1993 as the principal Act and nothing that subsequently amends that.Why I raise that is because the Human Rights Act is the Act that actually says what is unlawful discrimination and who is eligible to go forward to have their cases heard. Here we are debating extinguishing those rights with no reference that I can see to amending the Human Rights Act in this piece of legislation. Perhaps I am wrong about that and the Minister may want to point me in the right direction. But in Part 2 of the Human Rights Act 1993 it actually defines what is unlawful discrimination and there is also a part of that Act that prohibits what is unlawful discrimination. Correct me if I am wrong Minister but I believe we are doing exactly that in this Act. We are prohibiting a group of people from actually taking a case to find out whether they have been unlawfully discriminated against. And yet there is no reference—no reference—to the Human Rights Act 1993. Here we are amending the principal Act as being the New Zealand Public Health and Disability Act 2000. Yes maybe it fits but this is a substantial amendment that we are making—I would say an outrageous amendment actually an outrageous amendment that actually extinguishes people’s rights under the Human Rights Act. Why are we not amending that as the principal piece of the legislation? Why are we not even making any consequential amendments to that piece of legislation in this debate?That is the very thing that I think we would discover the answer to perhaps if we were allowed to have the normal democratic process of a select committee process. Or maybe the answer to my query is actually buried on this page. Perhaps it is but we will never know because it is completely blanked out and we do not know. Maybe the explanation is all here. Maybe this explains why the Human Rights Act is left unamended by what we are debating today despite the fact that that Government is extinguishing the rights of people to access what the Human Rights Act 1993 says they have absolutely the right to do. I am therefore encouraged and persuaded by colleague Maryan Street’s suggestion that perhaps the best thing to do would have been to have a stand-alone Act in its own right not to amend another Act that partially speaks to this issue but partially does not but perhaps to have a stand-alone piece of legislation. The piece of legislation that really stands out in my mind that would have been really great to use in this instance was actually a piece of American legislation which was around an equal pay Act. That was a stand-alone piece of legislation that was one of the first pieces of legislation that Barack Obama signed when he took over the presidency. He named that Act after the woman who took the equal pay case. He called it the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009. Would that not have been a magnificent thing to do in this instance?