Woodhouse MichaelHon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National): Thank you Madam Assistant Speaker. It's my pleasure to rise and take a call on the first reading of the Support Workers (Pay Equity) Settlement Amendment Bill. I do so wearing a number of present and past hats: firstly as the spokesperson for health for the National Party but also as the former Minister of Workplace Relations and Safety and Minister of ACC at the time the original bill was passed. So it does give me some pleasure to indicate to the House that the National Party will be supporting this bill at first reading and sees no barriers to that continued support through its passage. As a member of the Health Committee I look forward to what I expect will be very collegial discussions around hopefully the speedy passage of this into law. I do however take some issue with the Minister who moved the motion the Hon Willie Jackson and his slightly revisionist reflection on the degree to which mental health workers were somehow cruelly left out of the Terranova settlement in 2017. I should remind the House that as the Minister said that was a settlement that involved 55000 care and support workers almost entirely in the aged-care sector and the grand sum—the eye-watering sum actually—of $2.3 billion for that very important workforce. Actually as immigration spokesperson and former Minister of Immigration one of the really pleasing aspects of this settlement was that it took I think quite a bit of pressure off a number of aged-care providers in their challenge of recruiting domestic workers into this important industry. That's certainly a goal of the Minister who's just resumed his seat Willie Jackson as Minister of Employment and we certainly agree that to the degree possible New Zealanders should be at the front of the queue for the growing number of jobs in the aged-care sector. But we are talking about mental health workers and the Minister said They should have been included in the original claim". They were "wrongly excluded". Now I wasn't the Minister of Health at the time this settlement was agreed but I was in Cabinet and I did follow the debate closely. I went back to both the select committee report into the original Terranova settlement and Care and Support Workers (Pay Equity) Settlement Act in 2017. There was no mention in the select committee report of mental health workers. In the very positive third reading of that bill there were over 10500 words spoken and entered into the Hansard—there wasn't a single mention not one word mentioned of mental health workers. So to portray this as suddenly an issue where they were cruelly left on the margins of a negotiation is just simply not true. Not a single member of the Labour caucus of that time actually raised it through the bill passage process. Now somehow in Government they see an inequity and fix it. But in fact this was an entirely separate process. The mental health workers had filed a separate claim under section 9 of the Equal Pay Act and were proceeding along the lines not dissimilar to the process that was set out by the recommendations of the joint working group on pay equity. It was appropriate that it be pulled into this Act because that was the speediest resolution to the problem. But I reject the notion that somehow the previous Government had cruelly excluded them from the negotiation process. I note Ms Logie shaking her head; I have no doubt that we will hear a completely different version of events including—well let me guess how that's going to go. I predict—Nostradamus-like prediction though it will be—that she will say that the previous Government was led kicking and screaming into settlements. Hon Ruth Dyson: No through court actually. Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: Actually—well Ms Dyson says through court. Well actually the previous Government was very aware that had it not intervened had it not decided to settle by a different means then those parties—and the Government wasn't one of them—would still be in court deciding what section 9 meant setting out what the principles for equal pay would be. Our conservative estimate—because it would have been appealed to the Court of Appeal it would have gone to the Supreme Court—was that the earliest that that could have been settled by the court process was about 2021 or 2022.Hon Nicky Wagner: We fast-tracked it. Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: So we fast-tracked it—that's right Mrs Wagner. We worked faster because we knew that this workforce deserved that kind of remedy. The second thing we're going to hear I have no doubt is that somehow we then closed the door. We lifted up the ladder and let nobody else through by the bill that was thrown out by this Government actually—the Equal Pay Amendment Bill. Hon Nicky Wagner: It'll be faster if they take it. Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: Well we've traversed that. We'll never agree. We'll never see eye to eye on that. There is one thing I think we need to be cautious about though: there is a limit to the number of settlements that we can link off the Terranova settlement because actually each of these industries does have its own features and the merits of that stand alone. Now we may disagree with what the merit standards should be and indeed the Government unashamedly wants to lower the bar to a claim—that's fine. That's their prerogative. That's the discussion that's going on in the Education and Workforce Committee. But I was visiting a mental healthcare provider a residential provider in Auckland last year and they pointed out something that's quite problematic to the way in which this settlement is reached—that is the degree to which the required qualifications in order to get to the top tier of the pay scale are not relevant to mental healthcare and support workers. They are generic qualifications that were more suited to aged care. What they were having to do in order to ensure that their workers would get the access to the higher wages by the level four qualification was go and do qualifications that were entirely unsuitable for somebody in the mental health workforce. I think the select committee needs to have a look at that. The select committee does need to have a look and make sure that whatever agreement is put in place whatever law is passed those qualification criteria are fit for that workforce not a generic or aged-care - related workforce.But with that in mind—and something that we will need to do in committee—I'm very pleased to say that we strongly support this. We certainly support the workers and the extra pay that they I think already have that this codifies and we commend the bill."