Moroney Sue: Third Readings —Text is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMoroney Sue: Third Readings —[Sitting date: 10 March 2016. Volume:711;Page:9623. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]SUE MORONEY (Labour): It is a pleasure—a real pleasure this time actually—to rise and speak on the third reading of this legislation which actually started out being called the Employment Standards Legislation Bill and anyone listening to that title would have thought: “What on earth is that all about?”. Well it turned out that it was about people’s basic rights: people’s ability to actually have dignity at work people’s ability to have time to spend with their families and people’s ability to focus on their children and help them to get the best start in life. Those are some very basic requirements for what should be people’s happy and fulfilling lives but sadly in this House we have become so used to debating things that actually take away from people and that actually diminish people in their place in the world that yes we are feeling somewhat relieved to be able to celebrate this victory today.And it is a victory. It is a triumph of democratic participation and that is the thing that I feel most moved by with what we have achieved here today because it is through people working collectively in their large organisations like unions down to individual people coming along and making a difference and everything in between that has made this work. We in this Parliament could be used to doing things in this fashion much more if we had a progressive Government that was listening to the people more frequently and understanding what the issues were because it should not be an infrequent victory for us to be able to do the right thing by New Zealand people. It should not be that we as members of Parliament feel that this is almost a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Parliament to come together and do the right thing in such a common-sense way and in a way that actually improves people’s lives. Today I think people are getting a glimpse of the Government-in-waiting. They are able to see that a Labour-led Government under Andrew Little—who started off this debate for the Labour Party—will be able to lead and will make sure that the issues that really matter to people’s day-to-day lives are addressed. And Labour will work with a range of other parties some of which we are used to dealing with.And I want to thank all the parties that have worked with us in the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee to achieve what we have been able to achieve together over the previous months—and also parties that we are not so used to working with. I want to acknowledge Iain Lees-Galloway who has done a magnificent job in leading the fight for getting absolutely rid of zero-hour contracts—not just tolerating them and moving around the edges with them but completely getting rid of them. That is the work that has been led by Iain Lees-Galloway and in order to do that he has been working with the National Party and I have been giving him a little bit of gyp about that from time to time. But hey he just has to remind me that in order to actually increase paid parental leave I have been working with the ACT Party and I quite quickly remember that it is all a matter of degree.But it is worth it because it makes a real difference in terms of people’s lives and that is certainly what I came here to this House to do and I know that that is what my Labour colleagues came here to do as well. The zero-hour contracts and the fact that they will no longer exist in New Zealand is a big victory. I think zero-hour contracts continue to hamper workers internationally and no one has yet found a solution. I think we have found a solution. I think that here in little old Aotearoa New Zealand we have found a solution. It sounds pretty simple and Minister Michael Woodhouse wants to diminish its importance but workers now have to have guaranteed hours of work before they can be required to make themselves available for this type of work. It is a substantial movement.For the Labour Party we were not prepared to put our name to this legislation until that occurred because the guaranteeing of minimum hours of work will make a big difference for all manner of workers. I stand here as the mother of teenaged children who are about to enter the workforce—I hope—and for me knowing that they have that security makes a big difference to how I feel about them making their way in that part of the world. But it is not just young people. It is women—women who have worked for many many years and who are very expert in their roles who have been exposed to and subjected to zero-hour contracts. It is migrant workers who have been subjected to zero-hour contracts and it has increasingly been going into other areas. We had a lawyer come along to our select committee and tell us about her experience of being expected to be on a zero-hour contract. She put herself through that training and gained that knowledge and that qualification only to find that zero-hour contracts were the only thing on offer for her.So it is substantial and it is significant but the story I really want to talk about is the very good extension to paid parental leave that has occurred under this legislation. I want to thank the 26 for Babies coalition because it has worked relentlessly on this issue and it will continue to work relentlessly on this issue until we do achieve 26 weeks’ paid parental leave. But some of the measures that have ended up happening in this legislation are because of its work. Large organisations like Plunket and Barnados the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions and many other trade unions in this country have contributed to that debate and led that debate.But it is also about what a difference one woman can make. Actually the idea of having additional support for families where a baby is born pre-term came from a simple submission that was made on a bill that went through Parliament last year in my name. It was the submission of a woman by the name of Donnelle Belanger-Taylor. She came along to our select committee and she simply told her story. I say “simply” but actually I looked around the room after she told her story and I do not think there was a dry eye in that room and that included the officials and that takes some doing. But she was just talking about her life. She talked about the pressures on her when she gave birth to twins and she had another young child as well. So she had three young children under the age of 5 two of whom were new entrants into the world. They were twins and she through financial circumstances had to go back to work when they were 5 months old. She talked about what her day looked like. That is the simple story she told; that is what had us in tears. It was about being completely and utterly sleep deprived being up feeding one twin or the other and then taking public transport to her job the next morning. Well no—it was taking public transport to an early childhood education facility to drop her twins off and then getting on public transport and getting to work and then on three occasions through the day going back to feed those twins getting back to work finishing at the end of the day exhausted getting on the train going home again and then going through the exercise all over again—for 5 days of the week. It was her submission that kept me awake at night.It made me think about whether on the off-chance my bill did not proceed all the way though its final stages and that if I got the opportunity to amend it it was this group of families that I would work to support. I took an amendment like that to this House last February in 2015. I really thought it was going to get the full support of the whole House because it was so affordable and it made so much sense. Sadly on that occasion the National Government let us down. It voted against that very small measure. However subsequently after a lot of lobbying and a lot of campaigning Government members have found it in their hearts to finally come good on this issue and I thank them for doing that.But I want to say to the voters out there in the public listening to this debate let us just cut out the middle man. Let us just cut out the middle man in these sorts of debates. We could get progress much sooner much faster with a Labour-led Government being supported by a range of other parties in this Parliament and the parents of babies born pre-term in the last 14 months could have had this measure. They could have already had additional paid parental leave if it was not for politics being played over their lives. Today we have learnt—I hope we have learnt—as a House how to stop playing politics with people’s lives and simply get on with it. I am going to continue to push for 26 weeks of paid parental leave for all families who are eligible for paid parental leave and I hope that the Government will do what we have exhibited today and come on side with that; not play politics not threaten to use its financial veto but do the right thing for families because it is the right thing to do. I want the Government to take a lesson from what this side of the House has been able to do in this instance in order to do the right thing for New Zealanders.