Logie JanJAN LOGIE (Green): It is a great pleasure to follow on from that contribution from that member Sue Moroney and endorse all the points that she was making around this.I do want to start this contribution though by acknowledging the officials which I neglected to do in my second reading speech despite the fact that I was so impressed by the support they offered us and the really long hours they worked and their engagement with the issues that we were raising. I feel very grateful and I think the legislation is better for their contribution. So I do want to acknowledge that.I am really conscious of this debate and how many women's lives are on the cusp of just being completely transformed and how excited and moved so many thousands of women are right around the country at the moment. I am apologising in advance to any of them who may be watching because in the Committee stage I feel like I need to deal with some of the gritty aspects of this which are not so exciting and they are not so celebratory. But I do want to acknowledge the excitement that they must be feeling.So I just want to talk to some of the aspects in the Minister's Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 324 and the reasons that we came to those changes in the Health Committee. One of the first ones was moving the fact that this settlement will extinguish certain rights through negotiation—that is part of the settlement. It means that care and support workers will not be able to take an equal pay case through to the court until 2022.This settlement is really significant. It is our first big pay equity settlement using the Equal Pay Act. It is really really exciting and a major step towards equality and it is really important to acknowledge that. For me it was also quite important that this aspect that extinguishes the rights through the settlement was not put in the purposes. It was an issue that was raised by the Coalition for Equal Pay in the submission process that while for us as a Parliament it can be negotiated so that the limits in terms of settlement through a negotiation are really proper there would be some concern for Parliament to be saying that there was a purpose in the legislation to extinguish any woman's rights. That would be a bad look and not something we would want to do. But it has a functional role in terms of this piece of legislation.So it has been moved out of the purpose clause and into the overview of what this does. The purpose is enacting the settlement and to be able to achieve that it will involve the extinguishing of the rights as they have been agreed and that seems proper to me. The compendium change that goes along with it is the change to Part 2 clause 7 and it is the additional subclause (3) inserted by SOP 324 which states that To avoid any doubt this section …" relating to extinguishing potential claims "does not affect—(a) any claim … after … 2022 …" when I hope care and support workers will be ready and revitalised to take the next step towards full equality and having that discussion around what pay equity looks like in 2022. And it also does not affect the claim or potential claim under the Equal Pay Act for any other workers who are not care and support workers. So we just wanted to be totally clear that this is not setting a precedent for other workers in terms of the nature of the fact that this is being rolled out over 5 years and that there is no ability to review the pay over that 5 years.So this is an incredible settlement that has been achieved through collective union action and using the courts and it will be up to the next group of organised workers to come up with their settlement process and that will be determined on the conditions at the time and hopefully it will be a new progressive Government that will not come to the table with a set amount of money to begin with.One of the other aspects in the bill that I do want to talk to—and I want to also signal that I am tabling an SOP that hopefully has been tabled. [Interruption] It has not been yet but it will be coming soon. I am seeing some people looking surprised about that. Just to let you know it is to make an amendment to clause 15(1) to make it clear that this Parliament does not expect and that the legislation would not allow employers to cut a care and support worker's hours in response to this pay increase. In terms of the legal situation at the moment we do believe that it would be unreasonable and probably illegal because they are being paid at a set legal amount for those workers for their hours. But we want to make sure that that is a very clear message and that it is in the legislation because I have already heard of two cases where employers are telling workers that they will be cutting their hours in response to this.I know that part of the spirit of this settlement was—and just again kudos to these women workers and Kristine and the union. I know that the training aspects of this bill were in the interests of the development of the health workforce and the knowledge that we have got an ageing population and that we need more skilled people. This is about career development for them but it is also about ensuring the well-being of the people whom they are caring for and they always seem to put them first which I just think is incredible.They have also consistently raised concerns about the staff-patient ratios. If hours are being affected that will have an impact on those staff ratios which at the moment are set by legal bounds at a level that is too low for the dignity of the workers. So I want to make sure that we put in the legislation a clear message to employers that we will not accept you cutting workers' hours in return for this pay—that money is being given to you to pay them for the hours that you should be employing them for. I hope that there will be support in the Chamber for that SOP. Just to also touch on and thank the officials and the unions for picking up a mistake that maybe we had made in select committee around drafting that had created some uncertainty regarding the fact that we expected care and support workers or people who were primarily doing that work to be paid the full wage and that it was not going to be broken off into pieces for payment purposes. There has been a clarification of that in the SOP that has come to the House and that is a great result. And thanks I suspect to Peter Cranney again for his eagle eye and for helping us to sort that because we certainly would not have wanted to see any more fragmentation or any disadvantage come out of this. It certainly was not the intent in the select committee to do that.I also just want to speak in my final minute of this speech around the point that quite a few submitters asked us to include vocational support workers in this legislation. In the settlement it was acknowledged that they had a claim and that that the funders were the Ministry of Social Development and ACC if I remember correctly. I understand that the work is very very similar and there was a kind of a natural fit for them to be included in this but because the funding streams are different and it is apparently a different job we have been advised that it was not appropriate to include those workers in this legislation and that that negotiation had to happen separately. It is a shame that the Government could not have coordinated its efforts in order to be able to do this and it seems like we are going to be wasting our time in this House because that coordination did not happen. It is a real shame because how amazing would it have been to have added that group of workers who are clearly deserving to this settlement legislation. But finally bring on 1 July. These women deserve this pay increase."