Moroney Sue: Parental Leave and Employment Protection (Six Months’ Paid Leave) Amendment Bill — Recommittal Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMoroney Sue: Parental Leave and Employment Protection (Six Months’ Paid Leave) Amendment Bill — Recommittal Third Reading[Sitting date: 25 February 2015. Volume:703;Page:1930. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]SUE MORONEY (Labour): I move That the Parental Leave and Employment Protection (Six Months’ Paid Leave) Amendment Bill be now read a third time. I thought I would never ever get to say those words because what a wild ride this has been—what a wild ride this has been. This bill was pulled from the ballot almost 3 years ago in April 2012. Actually it was the Thursday just before Easter. I recall it very well because a lot has happened since then. Can I at the outset thank all of the parties that have contributed to making sure this bill did in fact get to its third reading. I want to thank the Green Party New Zealand First the Māori Party United Future and Mana when it was in Parliament for ensuring that these families families of newborn babies had their issue debated in our Parliament. It is only because of the support of those parties that wehave got to the point where we are.But I want to reserve my greatest thanks and gratitude to my Labour colleagues. It is the Labour Party that had the courage and—yes Mr Key—the guts to stand up for families when no one else would. It was my Labour colleagues who at the height of a global financial crisis understood that this was where the brighter future really did lie for New Zealand. It was my Labour colleagues who despite the fact that the Government was running a scare agenda of saying that nothing could be spent on anything positive actually decided to turn the tables and trust New Zealanders’ instincts and say: “Yes New Zealanders will back a positive initiative that will make a real difference.”—and did they ever. New Zealanders got this. They were able to demonstrate that it was the Labour Party that is completely in tune with the thinking of decent hard-working New Zealanders.Despite the fact that the Minister of Finance at the time over-inflated the bill said it was going to cost $500 million and tried to frighten the New Zealand public into not putting families first and not supporting children in this way it backfired. The New Zealand public sensed that the Minister of Finance was exaggerating. They knew he was wrong and they knew in their hearts that this was the right thing to do. The New Zealand public was in tune with the New Zealand Labour Party and the New Zealand Labour Party was in tune with the New Zealand public.We know this because there were a couple of polls that were conducted and I imagine that the National Party did more than a couple of polls—I think it was polling regularly on this issue. It is the only reason that it has actually capitulated on this because it knows of the public’s support. When Television One went out and surveyed about a thousand New Zealanders and said “It’s going to cost $500 million—do you want it or not?” 65 percent of respondents said “Yeah.” Even at that exaggerated level—[Interruption]—yes they did. And the members opposite still do not believe it but the poll said 65 percent wanted paid parental leave extended to 26 weeks despite the fact that the Government was exaggerating the cost of it and threatening a financial veto against it. So from the get-go there has been this sort of controversy and that sort of degree of push-back from the National Party opposite because it did not trust the public on this it did not want to prioritise families and it just did not get how important it is.When it came to the select committee process we had almost 4000 submissions come to the Government Administration Committee on this. That is how strongly people felt about it. And 99.6 percent of those submissions were in favour of extending 26 weeks’ paid parental leave to all the families who are currently eligible. Only 0.04 percent opposed it—0.04 percent opposed it. I remember one of those submissions really well for all the wrong reasons because Business New Zealand in its desperation to try to support the National Government’s opposition to this bill decided to come and argue in front of the select committee that the reason it opposed this bill was that if women had 6 months away from paid employment they would completely forget how to do their jobs and they would need complete retraining and this was going to be a big imposition on business. It was going to cost them a lot of money and that was why it should be opposed.Well I think Business New Zealand very soon crawled back into the cave that it had crawled out of on that occasion because we had to point out to them that actually the law as it stands already allows women to have 12 months’ leave from their jobs and then they come back and do their jobs quite successfully. That was the level of desperation from the supporters of the National Party’s opposition to extending paid parental leave. That is how desperate it did get.The first deception happened in the select committee on this bill in this wild ride because the National Party MPs faced with seeing the strong support that this bill had and knowing how bad it was going to look for them decided that they needed to try to turn this round somehow. So they came to me and asked for an extension of the time for the Parental Leave and Employment Protection (6 Months’ Paid Leave) Amendment Bill to stay in the select committee so that they could have some time to talk their colleagues into supporting it. I took that in good faith and I probably should not have. A very wise woman told me quite some time ago: “Never trust a Tory.” Never trust a Tory she said and I should have remembered that. I forgot it at precisely the wrong moment and I trusted the Government MPs when they promised me that if they extended paid parental leave it would be done in a bill in my name. That is the commitment they gave me. They lied. They reneged on that commitment—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order!SUE MORONEY: Sorry Mr Assistant Speaker—they misled me. They deceived me. They misled and deceived all of the families who were relying on an extension of paid parental leave to 26 weeks.Tracey Martin: And they laugh about it.SUE MORONEY: And they laugh about it because they think that is clever. They have played politics with this bill from day one but they have forgotten—because of their arrogance—that they are in fact playing politics with people’s lives. They are playing politics with those very important first few months of a baby’s life and I think it is disgraceful.We came to the second reading of the bill when it came out of the select committee and there was more drama. I do not know whether people recall this but the National Party whips made a mistake when they cast the Māori Party vote and they had the Māori Party voting against the bill instead of in favour of it. That meant that the bill could not proceed. When Pita Sharples came down—when he realised what had happened and he came down to try to correct the vote—he got taken outside by the National Party whips he got taken outside by some of the Ministers and he got bullied into not correcting the vote. It did over time get corrected but that is part of the interesting political story about this bill.We moved on—we did eventually get that vote corrected—and we moved on to the Committee stage and wow. Was that the National Party’s finest hour or what? It filibustered a bill that would give 26 weeks’ paid parental leave to families—filibustered it in order to try to stop it from going ahead. In the National Party’s finest hour it put up Mike Sabin to do four speeches lecturing New Zealanders on how to raise children. I am just going to say that again. It had Mike Sabin stand up on four occasions to filibuster this bill and lecture New Zealand families on how to raise children properly. Do you feel proud? Does the National Party feel proud about that? Well I hope that it will feel proud about that particular issuein the months to come.So after all of this what have we achieved? What we have achieved—what Labour and our allied parties have achieved—is we have pushed the Government into extending paid parental leave to 18 weeks over the course of the next 2 years. We know we have pushed the Government into that because Bill English looked right down the barrel of a TV camera when that bill came out of the ballot and said: “It is not a priority for us to extend paid parental leave. Even when we are in surplus we will not extend paid parental leave.” And look what has happened. But today the story has got even more interesting because now the Government is promising to deliver what my bill does today but not do it in my name because it is still playing politics. It has promised that it will do it in a bill in its own name. Thank you.