Hipkins Chris: Employment Standards Legislation Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHipkins Chris: Employment Standards Legislation Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 08 March 2016. Volume:711;Page:9465. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka): I am very pleased to take the first of what I am sure will be many calls in this debate on the Employment Standards Legislation Bill and particularly the part that deals with paid parental leave. I want to strongly support all of the comments that have been made so far that support the extension of paid parental leave. I particularly want to turn my attention to the typescript amendments tabled by Sue Moroney that deal with the length of time that paid parental leave is provided for.We in New Zealand as a result of this bill will have 18 weeks of paid parental leave. That puts us on a par with Australia but still well behind many of the countries that we would normally compare ourselves to in terms of social support provision. Many people might look at this and say “Eighteen weeks. Gosh that’s a significant improvement on the 12 weeks that it was when it was introduced.” but it is still a drop in the bucket compared with the historical levels of family support that we used to supply in New Zealand. I think that is one of the things that we often forget—that the welfare system in New Zealand has evolved and changed significantly over quite a period of time. Compared with the level of financial support that families in New Zealand used to get 18 weeks of paid parental leave is not actually that generous. We could provide a heck of a lot more.I support the amendment to change it to 26 weeks. Why 26 weeks? Well let us look at what parents are asking for and let us look at the benefits to the child of extending it to 26 weeks. One of the first things I attended as a member of Parliament relatively early on was a presentation by the Brainwave Trust. I am very interested in the educational implications of paid parental leave. The Brainwave Trust did some fascinating presentations on attachment theory—which I can see Paula Bennett is nodding her head towards me about. One of the things it showed was that if a child develops a positive attachment to a parent or somebody else early on—very early on—and it is a stable attachment then the child’s likelihood of succeeding in education and not ending up in some form of delinquent behaviour later on in life or ending up in prison is significantly increased. It is in those first critical years of a child’s life that the attachment is so vital. They are developing the fastest that they will ever develop their brains are at their most active and that attachment is so vital. So by extending paid parental leave to 6 months—26 weeks—we would really promote that and really foster that.I think there could be no better investment if you consider that in the short term it might cost more money but in the long term it is potentially going to save us a lot of money. It would improve educational outcomes. It would decrease the cost of social services which we spend money on to mop up the failures that we have. Let us prevent the failures in the first place. Extending paid parental leave to 26 weeks just makes financial sense.Then we think about what parents are asking for and what indications there are that parents would like to spend more time with their kids. One of the things that has interested me is the huge growth in early childhood education in the home-based area. What that says to me is that parents are looking for something else other than wanting to put their kids into childcare centres full time. I think one of the drivers behind the growth in home-based early childhood education is that parents would rather be staying at home with the kids themselves but because of the financial decisions they have to make they are not in a position to do so. Extending paid parental leave to 26 weeks would I think help to address some of that.I still think 26 weeks is not long enough. If you look at some of the other countries—I mean let us look at the UK. It is 39 weeks in the UK. Let us go to Germany. It is 156 weeks in Germany. When you think about it we are talking about 18 weeks under this bill and we are talking about a very modest increase under the proposed amendment put forward by Sue Moroney that would extend it to 26 weeks. No it is not going to happen all at once. The amendment staggers that increase. It says that from next year we would move up to 22 weeks’ paid parental leave and then from 2018 we would extend it to 26 weeks. I think that is a very financially responsible decision. There is the fiscal headroom in the Government’s accounts for this if you believe what Bill English says. He has allowed for fiscal headroom for future spending. It could be done within the existing Budget constraints. So there really is not in my view a reason why we could not extend it to 26 weeks’ paid parental leave when we consider the enormous benefits that might come from that. I have yet to meet a family who would not like to spend more time with their kids when they are very young. Why would we not do this?