Logie JanJAN LOGIE (Green): Thank you Mr Speaker. It's a real pleasure to get to rise this evening and provide the Green Party's support for the Employment Relations (Extended Time for Personal Grievance for Sexual Harassment) Amendment Bill in the name of Dr Deborah Russell. I'd like to congratulate her on the luck of getting it drawn but also for seeing a very discrete intervention that would make a difference and bringing that legislation to the House.I also want to echo Dr Russell's acknowledgement of Zoë Lawton and the work that she has done to bring survivors' voices into the public to help reform our systems. It is incredibly important work and we have much work to do.This piece of legislation in extending the time that people have to raise a personal grievance that involves allegations of sexual harassment from 90 days to 12 months does just make sense because of the dynamics of sexual violence as well as often some of the dynamics in the workplace that relate to sexual harassment. It makes sense to provide more time for those cases to come forward.I note that in the consultation that the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment (MBIE) released in I think October 2020 around bullying and harassment at work in that document they noted that they'd heard concerns about the lodging of cases with the Employment Relations Authority—that an employee must raise the personal grievance with their employer within 90 days of the alleged action. That is noted in that consultation as a problem so it's great to see that being addressed through this bill here. I'm still waiting. MBIE put out the consultation on that in 2020. It closed in March 2021 and we're still waiting to hear from the Minister what the Government's next steps in response to that public consultation will be. I've got to say I'm waiting with bated breath because it is really important.We have an incredibly complex system for responding to sexual harassment. We have the Employment Relations Authority we have the Human Rights Act provision and we have the WorkSafe provision and we have our criminal justice system. And they don't fit neatly together.All except for WorkSafe require two parties and require the victim of the abuse to come forward and be potentially challenged and go sitting across from the person who they have experienced violence from. Rather than in the WorkSafe example where they're not necessarily having to—and there's someone questioning this idea and saying they should have to when actually it's possible to investigate a situation and find the evidence and hear from the person accused. Nobody's ever saying that that would not be part of it—but without requiring people to sit in the room together and be against each other.So there is a lot of work that needs to be done in the system. When the Me Too movement was really erupting and this is part of where it came back into public consciousness—that was in 2018 and we were really challenged as a country to do better. The Government took actions in terms of making sure that WorkSafe actually started responding appropriately to sexual harassment. That work has started but more needs to be done and this piece of work sits inside of that work being done by MBIE to look at the employment relations response.We do need to get on with this because we've had like a wave of public concern around sexual harassment in the 1980s and we all thought we've got it fixed. Then it went out of public consciousness because we get awkward and uncomfortable and don't want to talk about it and then nothing happens and everything reverts back to the toxic environment that had been before.This time we have to make sure that we sustain our efforts and change our systems in a way that will ensure those who are causing harm are held to account.