Mitchell Mark: Parental Leave and Employment Protection (Six Months’ Paid Leave and Work Contact Hours) Amendment Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMitchell Mark: Parental Leave and Employment Protection (Six Months’ Paid Leave and Work Contact Hours) Amendment Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 25 May 2016. Volume:714;Page:11272. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]MARK MITCHELL (National—Rodney): I am very pleased to stand to take a call on this the second reading of the Parental Leave and Employment Protection (Six Months’ Paid Leave and Work Contact Hours) Amendment Bill. I want to acknowledge the sponsor of the bill Sue Moroney and I would like to just make some opening comments about something that she said in her opening comments in the House today. She looked across the House and she said: “The National Party is going to get a whole lot of their male MPs to get up and speak to this bill.” The inference from that is that we as males and fathers and parents somehow have got no skin in the game and cannot actually comment on this. I just want to highlight a point that I made actually through the Government Administration Committee and hearing process as well: the fact that my own experience as a parent was as a single parent raising my daughter. At the time I was a police dog handler—David Seymour: Sorry mate. You’re disqualified. You’re a man.MARK MITCHELL: Exactly—exactly David. I was also a proud member of the armed offenders squad and therefore I had some fairly heavy demands on my time. But I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed my job. I thoroughly enjoyed being a father. I was very lucky that I had support both some paid support and also some family support to raise my daughter but I cannot help but feel a bit offended for the men in this House who are parents who were somehow diminished in our role as a parent. So that is the first issue that I wanted to raise with you Sue.Sue Moroney: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. The member has said that he is offended. I am wondering whether he is saying that he is personally offended and asking for your intervention. Is he?The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): No that is not a point of order.MARK MITCHELL: Thank you. The second point that I wanted to raise is around the fact that most of us in this House—I look around the House; most of us have been raised—[Interruption] I will come back to you guys shortly all right? I am not going to forget about you. Most of us have been raised by parents—in fact all of us have been raised by parents who did not have access to parental leave. They did not have access to parental leave right? I feel like I bonded with my parents quite well.I do not feel that parental leave needs to be tied back to how we bond with our parents or the relationship we form with our parents. I do not believe that parental leave can be tied back as Ms Moroney says to the fact that we need to build more prisons to accommodate people who are going to offend because they are unable to bond with their parents. Effectively what you are saying is parents who choose not to have parental leave or have access to it are not going to be good parents and are not going to be able to bond with their parents. The next Labour speaker can get up and they can clarify that issue for us in the House because that is certainly what I heard in your opening address Ms Moroney. So that can be cleared up.The other point I would raise and I will be very interested to hear from a member of the Opposition—and Mr Lees-Galloway raised the issue—is that it is only $107 million a year. Well actually that is a fairly significant amount. What I am really interested in—and actually if we go back to 2011 and we think about the general election campaign and the debate that took place down in Christchurch I think it was between the then Leader of the Opposition the Hon Phil Goff and our Prime Minister when our Prime Minister challenged him on it he said: “Where are you going to get the money because you’re spending like a drunken sailor?” I do not know whether everyone in the House can remember but there was a moment there when the look on Phil’s face was that of a stunned mullet. He looked like a stunned mullet. He was not expecting to be asked: “How are you going to fund it? Where’s the money coming from Phil?”. He was caught out by the PM. He did not have an answer. It was terrible. It was so embarrassing. I mean I felt sorry for him watching it.So what I would ask a member of the Opposition to do—because this seems to be a massive Phil Goff moment that is going on—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Order! The constant barracking is out of order and I want you to tone it down.MARK MITCHELL: Someone from the Opposition has to stand up and explain to us where the money is coming from because all of us understand when we are running our household budgets that if we take money from somewhere in our budget or we are going to use it somewhere else we are making a sacrifice somewhere or we are giving something up. What I would like is I would like a member of the Opposition to stand up and walk us through where the money is going to come from and how you are going to fund the policy.In relation to paid parental leave do we think it is important on this side of the House? Absolutely we do. Absolutely we think it is important and we think that in this modern world if we are able to provide that then we should provide it. At the moment we are providing 18 weeks and actually under this Government there has been the biggest increase in paid parental leave than under any other previous Governments.I go back to 2007. This will interesting too to get some comments on this. In 2007 the Families Commission gave the Hon Ruth Dyson—I want to acknowledge Ruth because she is a very good chair of the Government Administration Committee—who was then the Minister of Labour a report that recommended that paid parental leave provision be increased to 13 months by 2015 including a month for fathers which you can probably work out by now I would support. Labour chose not to follow—Sue Moroney: Because we weren’t the Government.MARK MITCHELL:—these recommendations even though the Government was running a surplus. Oh you were not the Government then? Oh in 2007 you were not the Government?Hon Annette King: No you said 2015. You said 2015.MARK MITCHELL: No I said—well if I said 2015 I apologise. I will correct that—2007. Let us go back to 2007 when you were the Government.The next question I have got is: why did you not follow these recommendations? Even though you were running a surplus even though global economic conditions were very very good and you were in a position where you had a surplus—please get up and explain to me why the then Minister of Labour the Hon Ruth Dyson decided not to take these recommendations and extend it. There is probably a very good reason for it.The other thing I would be very interested to hear is why over the 9 years that Labour was in Government it did not progress paid parental leave.Hon Annette King: We did—2007 twice. Twice.MARK MITCHELL: Well unfortunately—I acknowledge you did it twice in small incremental changes that when we came into Government we increased significantly. It would have been nice if you had actually taken the same approach that we have and you had actually given it a real proper nudge and had a real go at it.Let us go through some of the things that we are doing. Not only has National increased the duration of paid parental leave in the last 12 months but we have actually widened the eligibility and increased the range of care arrangements. Home for Life carers grandparents and permanent guardians have had their entitlements extended under the paid parental leave scheme. We have built that in. We have extended paid parental leave to more Kiwi workers and I come back to what my colleague Paul Foster-Bell said about casual seasonal and contract workers as well as employees who have more than one employer.I think the other thing I need to just highlight is that we cannot ignore employers in the legislation that we pass in this House because they are the ones who actually create the jobs. They are the ones who create the wealth. We do not do it. We do not do it. We rely on them. So actually their voice is pretty important and pretty significant in this debate.When we talk about the submitters who came in front of the select committee we did hear some compelling submissions from employers in terms of how this type of legislation can impact and affect their business. The Government also extended paid parental leave to eligible parents of pre-term babies.