Dyson Ruth: Parental Leave and Employment Protection (Six Months’ Paid Leave) Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDyson Ruth: Parental Leave and Employment Protection (Six Months’ Paid Leave) Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 05 November 2014. Volume:701;Page:674. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills):Mr Chairman can I say first of all that I wish I had not spoken in the Address in Reply debate because I could have used this as the opportunity to warmly congratulate you on your elevation and to also acknowledge the huge amount of work you did as the Associate Minister of Justice particularly in the youth justice area. I hope that you continue to make a contribution from a different position.We are speaking on clause 4 of the Parental Leave and Employment Protection (Six Months’ Paid Leave) Amendment Bill. I see that there are several amendments that have been tabled as Supplementary Order Papers that have yet to be discussed and I look forward to some discussion on them. This is the most important part of the debate this evening because it is about the purpose of the bill. Clause 4 is pretty straightforward. It just says that the point of this bill is to extend the provisions of paid parental leave to 26 weeks.Some people might ask why that would be the case—why 26 weeks? Why not 20? Why not 18 as the Government has decided is the magic number? Why would we go to that? The reason is that this is based on evidence of best practice—best practice for the newborn citizens of our country. I cannot imagine how the National members can say that they know better than the World Health Organization in terms of making sure our newborn babies have the best start in life. What gives the National Party members more evidence than the World Health Organization has? I do not think it is true. I think they are making it up. I know that the members who have been sitting in the Chamber for this period of the debate have not made a contribution. We had one contribution from the Hon Anne Tolley who talked about other benefits—benefits—that families get if they have multiple births if they have a child born with an impairment or if the child is born prematurely. I think she entirely missed the point.Actually the Hon Anne Tolley did quite a vitriolic speech in opposition to paid parental leave when it was originally introduced. I can recall it very clearly along with others. Nick Smith and Katherine Rich were others who contributed in that debate. It was pretty awful. They adamantly opposed the introduction of paid parental leave at the time. The National Party is on the record opposing the introduction of paid parental leave so when we are debating clause 4 in this legislation amending paid parental leave to 26 weeks which every country in the developed world thinks is a good idea I am not surprised the National Party is opposed to it.I want to commend the member who has this bill in her name Sue Moroney. This is a fine bit of work and it has been a very important debate for the Government Administration Committee to have but also for Parliament to have. The fact that it has taken 2 years 2 months and 3 weeks to get to this stage is probably the fault of the select committee actually. I think that it probably looked at the bill pretty rigorously during its investigation. I happen to know because I was sitting on the committee during that time and the clause that we are debating now was at the heart of a lot of the deliberations at the committee but so too was the cost and the number of parents who are not currently eligible for paid parental leave. We looked at international comparisons. We looked at all the evidence that we could.I do not know whether other members of the Committee recall but when this bill was first introduced Bill English threatened to use a financial veto to block it which is quite extraordinary particularly on a member’s bill. He got over that thank goodness. I am pleased that we got to this stage of the debate and hopefully we will get to a third reading and to the conclusion of it because what we heard about the purpose of this bill was that every single piece of evidence has said that this is best practice. This is the next big step that New Zealand should take to better support families.I have looked again at the submissions we heard. There were 3809 submissions which is quite a lot. We are just considering a fireworks petition and I would predict that we get a fair number on that but I do not think it will be anything like 3809. Of the submissions that the select committee heard 99.6 percent supported the purpose of this bill and the detail of it and said that this is the way to go. We had all sorts of organisations from employer groups to church groups and community organisations. We had individual parents. Both Jan Logie and Sue Moroney have spoken of—