Logie JanJAN LOGIE (Green): Thank you Madam Speaker. With pleasure I rise to speak to the Parental Leave and Employment Protection (Shared Leave) Amendment Bill in the name of Nicola Willis. I congratulate the member for getting the bill drawn and I acknowledge Amy Adams who I remember having this discussion with previously when she last put it in front of Parliament.I've got personally a very long history with paid parental leave. I was part of the campaign team who got it introduced. We were one of last developed countries in the world to provide that support for our families. I am a huge believer in it. It's a policy that has multiple positive outcomes for our communities. One of them is that it's a very very significant contributor in terms of reducing the gender pay gap because women's time out of employment is—often with caring responsibilities—one of the main drivers of that gap. It's also a driver around women's attachment to employment which has positive social outcomes and it plays a really essential role in terms of supporting positive attachment in the early years and the wellbeing of our tamariki and children. The reason the six months—the 26 weeks—campaign was specifically in that link was to ensure breastfeeding was able to be supported at home during those early years specifically in that time frame.The Greens unlike Labour—I understand the arguments that they're making and I think they are genuinely valid arguments—are supporting this bill today because we believe that the conversation is really an important one to have as a country. Women in this country have said that paid parental leave and the sharing of it and the ability for both partners to take parental leave is one of their priorities. There was a survey in 2022 of 3500 women that said that making the leave entitlement available to both parents was their top-rated solution to support women to balance their caring responsibilities with other things in their life. That was ahead of even more Government funding for childcare. So if we're listening to women then we do have to engage in this conversation. The National Advisory Council on the Employment of Women way back in the day in 2008 recommended paid paternity leave leave specifically reserved for fathers of infants—not this proposal which is about sharing; it's about ring-fencing a specific allocation for the other parent which is what we know internationally will have the impact of encouraging that other partner to take the leave. There's a very low uptake of parental leave for the other parent in this country. International evidence shows us that just enabling people on paper to share the leave as this bill will do does not make a difference in terms of the increase in that other partner taking the leave.What makes the difference is a ring-fence provision of use it or lose it" and—possibly not surprisingly to many in this House—increasing the payments that recognise that actually one of the major disincentives at the moment particularly for male partners from taking the leave is the massive drop in family income that comes about if they take the leave because men are still far more likely to be paid much higher than their partners.At the moment there's been under this Government a 7.7 percent I think increase in paid parental leave. I want to acknowledge that but that is still significantly below minimum wage. When families are struggling to pay the rent and pay the bills we have to increase it. The Green Party policy is to have 100-percent payment of the average male wage if we're going to be supporting our families for 15 months—this is the Green Party policy based on the best evidence of what will support our families—and to increase it to enable people to have it and to ring-fence it "use it or lose it" for partners because actually we need to make that commitment to our children and to our families and to reducing discrimination. We're happy to have the conversation and hear from New Zealand to get that result which would be better than this."