Roche Denise: Employment Standards Legislation Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRoche Denise: Employment Standards Legislation Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 08 March 2016. Volume:711;Page:9454. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DENISE ROCHE (Green): It is a great delight to stand and take a call on Part 1 of the Employment Standards Legislation Bill the part that deals with paid parental leave on this International Women’s Day. I just also want to note that it seems incredibly appropriate that we are marking International Women’s Day with hopefully getting closer to the passage of this parental leave extension.The Green Party members are supportive of the provisions in this bill dealing with paid parental leave. We note that it increases paid parental leave to 18 weeks. Although our policy is to extend paid parental leave to 13 months we note that this is a step in the right direction and we are fully supportive of the 26 for Babies campaign that has arisen from subsequent members’ bills in the name of Sue Moroney. I want to pay tribute to Ms Moroney for raising the whole issue of parental leave in this House. I believe as do others in the House that it was her work with this member’s bill that meant that we have had a shift in the number of weeks that families are entitled to take with the birth of a newborn.I also want to acknowledge that it was her pragmatic approach to attempting to get her last member’s bill through the House that meant that she brought back to the House an amended bill that was to extend paid parental leave to families where there had been a multiple birth or a birth of a child with disabilities or a pre-term baby. It is great that the House has picked up the provisions around extending paid parental leave beyond the 18 weeks to those families where a pre-term birth has occurred and we support that totally. I will just put on record what that means. It means that if a family has an unexpected birth before 36 weeks’ gestation they can access a week for every week they are pre-term from then up to I think in total 13 weeks. It takes it to a total of 31 weeks if you include the 18 weeks’ paid parental leave.We are totally supportive of that but we are concerned that those who do have greater needs like families with multiple births and like families with babies born with disabilities are left out of this. So we hope that this will be addressed by the member’s bill that Sue Moroney is dealing with at the moment.We have had some concerns about the provisions in the Employment Standards Legislation Bill that were not necessarily part of the submission process—in fact I do not think anybody actually submitted on it in any great way. We are concerned about the whole area of keeping-in-touch hours. I do not really have a clear understanding of where that came from except that it was raised as a good idea. The concern we have is essentially that with those keeping-in-touch hours there could be a feeling of coercion on the part of the parent who is taking leave to actually come back to work when they do not want to.We acknowledge that the keeping-in-touch hours are just 40 hours that a parent can elect to go to work and that will not be taken off their leave provisions. However we are concerned that there may be coercion or a feeling of duty that compels a woman—particularly a woman—to go back to work. I know from my own experience of taking paid parental leave—way back in the day when it was quite an unusual thing to have—that you do feel there is a real necessity not only to stay in touch but also to make sure that your bosses do not forget you. I hope that things have changed in the 20 years since I took parental leave but sadly I am not sure that they have.We support the parental leave provisions in the bill. We absolutely support the fact that they have been extended to casual and seasonal workers as eligible employees as we believe that paid parental leave is actually a right that all families should be able to access not just those who seem to be in permanent paid work. I guess we will get on to hours of work in the next part of the bill. So we absolutely support that.We would actually support increasing paid parental leave beyond 26 weeks to 13 months. The reason for that is not only about the establishment of a bonded family and/or breastfeeding for the first 6 months but it also ensures that women are in a position to feel that they are able to take the proper amount of time off without stress and then be able to go back to work. Currently New Zealand is 24th out of the 25 OECD countries in terms of the paid parental leave provisions that we have. I believe that we should be investing in families. And if we want to compete internationally for a skilled workforce then we should be ensuring that we have provisions that encourage women to continue working and that protect their employment while they are on leave for an extended amount of time.I will leave my comments to basically this part of this bill at this stage. I just want to reiterate that although we support this we do have concerns about the keeping-in-touch hours. We can see how they could work in practice and positively in some cases but we are also concerned that there could be an element of coercion involved and people feeling like they have to stay in touch.All in all this is a step forward and we will of course support it. We wish it would go further and hopefully we will be back here soon—preferably before the next International Women’s Day—to actually achieve further extensions to paid parental leave.