Lee DeniseDENISE LEE (National—Maungakiekie): Thank you Fono Taane. [Mr Speaker.] It is my pleasure to speak on this bill in Niue Language Week and to attempt to acknowledge that with my limited abilities.It's with a strange combination of déjà vu and frustration I have to say that I stand up to take a call late this afternoon on this bill the Government's newly introduced Equal Pay Amendment Bill. The frustration is driven not by an opposition to the bill itself because we've clearly outlined that we will support it to its first reading. That's the right thing to do. The National Party supports this bill because achieving pay equity is our next hurdle that we need to cross as a society and we all acknowledge that. Closing the gender pay gap and achieving pay equity in New Zealand is incredibly important to us all. It's a principle the National Party supports and one that we have championed. As you know we got to this first and for reasons I'm about to explain I have a sense of pride in seeing this legislation achieve its first reading today. So the issue is not the bill itself.My frustration is instead because of the date. Today is 16 October 2018. It has been—let me get this right—eight months and 24 days since my member's bill titled Employment (Pay Equity and Equal Pay) Bill was pulled from the ballot. It has also been one year two months and 20 days since my colleague the Hon Michael Woodhouse first introduced the content of that bill to this House. In that time period spanning over more than one year this Government has blocked progress on pay equity on two separate occasions and you can't escape that: once when they blocked the bill from being reinstated back on to this Parliament's agenda—the 52nd Parliament's agenda otherwise known as the Order Paper—and again when they voted it down on the first reading of my member's bill. They railed against the bill back then in March and their opposition was well-known.SPEAKER: Order! Order! I'm going to bring the member to the bill currently before the House now as I did with the previous speaker Jenny Salesa. Thank you.DENISE LEE: Will do so Mr Speaker. I intend to refer to the joint working group's principles which the bill is undergirded with and also point out the three main differences. So thank you Mr Speaker—will do.Jacinda Ardern mentioned very clearly in regards to that bill—she said the words How is it possible that we could introduce a bill that took an entire generation backwards in terms of our ability to achieve pay equity?" Well you can imagine my shock when this bill here that we're addressing this afternoon was tabled and I was able to see that 90 percent of that bill is word for word what we introduced and that's the reality and the stark reality—word for word.Now if you don't believe me I've got a copy of the bill here and in it I've highlighted the yellow. That is exactly word for word what was in the bill that I introduced as my member's bill. That's a lot of yellow. The pages keep going. I think I've just turned my sixth or seventh page. The yellow is the exact—Hon Member: You must have gone through one yellow highlighter.DENISE LEE: —same content. Apart from the fact that I ran out of highlighter ink it's a cynical move by this Government. They slammed that bill when it was first introduced earlier in the year. They reconvened the working group that based the same principles—they did a shabby copy and paste job and introduced their own nearly identical version. Now pay equity is an important issue for New Zealand and the Government has delayed progress for months just so—and here's the reality of the situation—they could grab their Suffrage Day photo op. That's exactly what happened and it's shameful. They're playing politics with pay equity. They turned it into a political game where both sides are trying to one-up each other but all around and all the while women in New Zealand want and need real progress and real movement towards pay equity.Now if you go through this bill you can see that the Government's made changes and we've heard them stand up and say that these changes were necessary to make it a better bill. But I want to point out that the Government could have easily made these changes at select committee or at committee of the whole House—again another stark point of reality. Had they not blocked the earlier versions of this bill remembering how similar the content is when I showed you it highlighted in yellow they would have had—I've clocked up—four opportunities to amend or make the bill into what they now see and what we see here this afternoon as their version.Now last month Iain Lees-Galloway and Eugenie Sage stood outside Parliament on the steps announcing the introduction of this bill here this afternoon. Had they done the right thing months and months ago rather than this bill just being introduced on Suffrage Day we could have actually signed this bill into law on Suffrage Day. Imagine that. On the 125th anniversary of women's suffrage we could have had the Governor-General Dame Patsy Reddy who also incidentally was the head of the joint working group—SPEAKER: Order! Order!DENISE LEE: —sign this bill into law. That's what we could have had. What a symbol of progress that could have been instead of what we now see as between now and then wasted time.Now I want to finish up my time refuting the claim that the changes that have been made in this bill have resulted in better outcomes than our version and I'm going to go through the three main differences. I've talked at length about the similarities because we can see highlighted in yellow ink exactly what those similarities are. So the main differences are—and I've got three—number one the Government removed our hierarchy that should have been used when finding comparable professions. So was that cynical on our part to have that hierarchy? No. We needed a pragmatic method to ensure structure when looking at claims. It's not easy but you had to start with something. That's gone.Number two: they've loosened the criteria to determine if a job is undervalued. We had both historically and currently undervalued; this version says either. Where will the line get drawn? That's a legitimate question. Why is it that Dame Patsy Reddy and the joint working group determined that it should be both?Point three: they've changed the criteria in this version that a claim must have "merit" to now must be "arguable". Again Dame Patsy Reddy highlighted—SPEAKER: Order! Order!DENISE LEE: —that merit was the way to go.SPEAKER: No sorry—[Interruption] Order! I'm just going to interrupt the member for a second. The convention in the House is that the Governor-General is not brought into the debate unless it's absolutely necessary. I think if the member just refers to the chair of the working party or something like that that is an appropriate approach.DENISE LEE: Thank you Mr Speaker. I'm happy to do so. When we look at the word "arguable" versus "merit" my main point here is who benefits from the word "arguable"—lawyers. That says it all and in my closing comments the major change inside this version of the bill—well the 10 percent that was actually changed—is that this Government has left the door wide open for the same long protracted bouts of litigation and breakdowns in negotiations that inevitably end up in court. We support this through to select committee but as a House we're going to have to be honest and as a select committee—and I'm really grateful that I'm on the particular select committee that this will be going to—we're going to have to be very very honest with ourselves and ask if we are legislating for true change here or are we legislating for more of the same types of battles that we've seen before. We would argue that the small amount of change that has been introduced here this afternoon is going to send us down many of those same tracks; namely long protracted court battles and the women of New Zealand not only deserve to have this brought into the House long before now; they also deserve to not have the same cycles of frustration. We support this bill to its first reading. Thank you for the opportunity to speak and to speak doing so in Niue Language Week. Thank you."