Shanks Katrina: Parental Leave and Employment Protection (Six Months’ Paid Leave) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Shanks Katrina: Parental Leave and Employment Protection (Six Months’ Paid Leave) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 25 July 2012. Volume:682;Page:3956. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
KATRINA SHANKS (National) 
: 
 It is my pleasure to take a call on this Parental Leave and Employment Protection (Six Months’ Paid Leave) Amendment Bill tonight. Everybody in this House will agree that spending time with your family is important. I am a mother of three—a working mother—and every single moment I spend with my— 
Dr Rajen Prasad 
: All mothers are working mothers. 
KATRINA SHANKS 
: Sorry what was that—every mother is a working mother? They absolutely are. But I absolutely believe that every moment that we spend with our children is valuable especially when you cannot always be in the home with them. We are lucky we live in a country that puts a value on children and supports their parents. I believe that families are the cornerstone of our society and we need to strengthen them as much as we possibly can. 
But this bill this Labour bill puts a cost on the taxpayer of $150 million a year and with Labour’s own costings that is $0.5 billion of taxpayers’ money over the next 4 years. Where is this money going to come from? Well I can tell you exactly where it is going to come from. It is going to come from overseas lenders. We are going to have to go into the international market place borrow money and pay back interest and this is money we cannot afford to borrow. The Labour Party wants to drive New Zealand further into debt. It wants the country to borrow more it wants the country to spend more and it is doing it thinking it is just going to be OK. Well actually we cannot. Having the State running up debt does not help families. Borrowing more does not help families. What helps families is smart policies and sound economic leadership and this is what this Government is delivering for the people of New Zealand and New Zealand families. We need to get back into surpluses. We need to get back into the black and we are going to pay for the policies the right way with money in the bank. 
Under this Government we are going to spend the taxpayers’ money wisely and support families with holistic family policy approaches. So what are we doing for family policy you might ask—not that those members are asking—but what would you do for family policy? This is what we are doing. We have got free doctor visits for most under-6-year-olds. We have got higher Working for Families payments. We are spending—listen to this Sue Moroney—34 percent more on early childhood education than was ever spent under the Labour Government. We are fully funding PlunketLine 24/7 which that Labour Government cut. We are boosting maternity services by $50 million for new parents and vulnerable parents so they can go and get more access to the services that they need to support their families. We have got the lowest inflation rate since 1999 and how does that help families Labour would ask. Well it is pretty obvious. Lowering the cost of living for New Zealand families is absolutely fundamental for them to survive in these tough times. 
So what are we going to do in the future you might ask for families instead of this $150 million one-off policy? Well what we are going to do is target 98 percent of our under-fives to attend early childhood education over the next 5 years. What a fantastic start for our families. We are going to improve maternity services to get the access better for those families. What a great start for our families. And by 2017 we are going to increase infant immunisations to 95 percent for 8-month-olds. What a great initiative for families. There is a right time and a wrong time to implement policy and this is not the right time to extend parental leave. 
 I just want to raise one issue about parental leave that has not been talked about in this debate and that is about the signals and the trends that we are hearing about coming from the sector—from midwives and health professionals in the sector—about what is happening. The trend we are hearing about is that parents now believe—we are seeing a trend—that they are taking only those 14 weeks that the Government is paying for. Previously families used to save. They used to plan to take the leave that they would like to take with their families. So when we have policies like this we have to be very careful to ensure that we do not send the message that parental leave is for only those 14 weeks; it is absolutely not. Thank you for the opportunity to speak tonight.