Martin Tracey: Parental Leave and Employment Protection (Six Months’ Paid Leave) Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMartin Tracey: Parental Leave and Employment Protection (Six Months’ Paid Leave) Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 03 December 2014. Volume:702;Page:1086. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]TRACEY MARTIN (Deputy Leader—NZ First):I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to support this bill. Around new clause 6 New Zealand First is particularly supportive of this. Personally my sister is the mother of twins who arrived early. They were delivered at National Women’s Hospital—I am not sure whether National Women’s Hospital is called National Women’s Hospital any more—and placed into the special baby care unit.I think you have to be in that environment to truly understand the extent of the stress on the parents when they have children in the special baby care unit. If you live in the main centre you have to travel back and forward several times a day to actually be with the babies because there is no accommodation provided or there was not at that time. So there are costs around that. Just the fact that you have got very little babies struggling for their lives inside the special baby care unit to provide support like this is not just critical. So we move away with a clause such as this from a conversation around bonding or all these other things but actually doing so is an absolute necessity for some of these families.Also for the babies and families in these circumstances there are often so many special requirements or needs—not necessarily just at that front end of delivery when the babies are so early and so small but afterwards when there are specialists required and so on and so forth. It is interesting.I would reiterate the point made by Chris Hipkins around just seeking wider clarification from the member who has put forward this amendment around how she sees that 26 weeks would pan out across the disability support services. I ask whether she has any concept of how many people this might affect downstream or any other technical details that I know she will have worked on because this bill was incredibly well worked on to start with. It was well processed it was well priced out and it was well traversed with the general public. It had a lot of support with the public in the last Parliament and it had a lot of support in this House in the last Parliament. We are yet to see whether it will gain the support that it needs in order to put something that is desperately needed with regard to support for babies and families at this very vulnerable end.New Zealand First will continue to support the bill for as long as we can. I do not think I need to elaborate any further in my contribution with regard to this particular clause but as I say I would support the member in the chair taking a call so that she could elaborate on the disability support services around that 26-week period and the work done behind it to advance the cause for these people who find themselves through no fault of their own in circumstances where their babies are in the special baby care unit. They need more support the babies need more support and there are ongoing costs for them in this period of time to support those newborns. Kia ora.