Kuriger BarbaraBARBARA KURIGER (National—Taranaki - King Country): Thank you Mr Speaker. It's a pleasure to stand and take a call on this bill this afternoon. I was a latecomer to this piece of legislation. I've only been the spokesperson for women for the past two weeks and so I came into the select committee at the very last moment when we were adjusting the last few pieces of wording before it came back to the House. But I do want to congratulate first of all Ginny Andersen for putting this bill forward. Often members' bills see somewhere where there's a small gap in a piece of legislation that makes such a huge difference and this is going to make a big difference in the lives of women who suffer from miscarriage. It seeks to make it clear that employees are eligible for bereavement leave for three days if they do have a miscarriage. At present the Holidays Act doesn't allow for that so it's a very very strong move in my mind.It surprises me actually when I look through some of the reading that I've done around this because as the member mentioned before there remains for some people a secrecy—for some people a shame—around miscarriage and yes society can do better. You know it's quite surprising when you read that one in four pregnancies end in miscarriage and yet it's not something that is often noticed. It's not that we want to make a big thing about it for a woman either but it's just something that seems to go under the radar for the reasons of either shame or secrecy. I know the stories of a number of women who have had a miscarriage and then just picked themselves up and gone back to work and it's not until you know weeks days months later that the grief starts to kick in. So National supports measures which support women and families and that's why we're supporting this bill. Miscarriage is an important issue because it affects around 20000 women in New Zealand every year which is not an insignificant number. It's a very large number of people. We also believe that most employers would act in good faith when it comes to leave applications. However we recognise that there are some who may not. It's even wider than that because if there is secrecy and shame surrounding this it's not just that the employers might not grant the leave; it's actually that perhaps the woman is too embarrassed to ask for the leave too shy to ask for the leave or doesn't want to bring attention to the fact that she would need leave for a miscarriage. So I think it's really important that we make this clear.So the bill is removing ambiguity from the law making it clear that an unplanned end of a pregnancy constitutes grounds for bereavement leave for the mother and her partner or spouse and that the duration of the bereavement leave should be up to three days. Now when I came in a couple of weeks ago at the end of the discussion—and I'm not going to go through all of the particular changes because there are other people that were there and we've actually heard from Ginny Andersen herself what those changes were. But the one that I think was really significant in the last moments of preparing for this bill was that we thought about parents who were going to be adoptive parents.We looked at not just a woman and her partner in the sense that we think about miscarriage but someone who had undertaken to be the primary carer and so often that is somebody different than the natural birth mother. So we spent quite some time having a look around what the wording of that particular need would be in the bill. Really it was to support someone who had undertaken to be the primary carer and so that's described in section 7(1)(c) of the Parental Leave and Employment Protection Act 1987 of a child born as the result of a pregnancy. So if the child had gone to full term and been born then the person who had undertaken to be the primary carer would then be the primary carer of this baby. Under this Act if that pregnancy results in a miscarriage and the baby is lost then it means that there's also some grief that comes upon those people who had undertaken to be the primary carer had that pregnancy resulted in the birth of a live baby.So I think from me that's about all I'm going to say at this point but I again congratulate the member and I congratulate the committee on the way with which they've worked with this bill and brought it to the House in the way it has been brought to the House and it's a pleasure to commend this bill to the House. Thank you.