Woodhouse MichaelHon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National): Thank you Madam Chair. Look it's a great pleasure to speak in the committee of the whole House on the Parental Leave and Employment Protection Amendment Bill a bill that we will be supporting. Before I go into the substantive parts of Part 1 I want to address a couple of the things that the Hon Tracey Martin has raised—in particular this belief that once they finally get their head around the very sensible Supplementary Order Paper that the Hon Amy Adams has put up to this bill they can kind of just bring it back to the House bring another bill and have it done.Well I have some news for the new Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety. There might be tumbleweed blowing through the Parliamentary Counsel Office now and the Government may be scrambling to try and find some legislation that it can debate in the first 100 days while it gets its momentum going—and I look forward to that—but I have news for the Minister: it is going to be a once-only offer. It is almost certain that the Minister in the chair will not have the opportunity to bring back a further amendment to this bill in the 52nd Parliament unless they intend to run the 52nd Parliament the way they began and that is by ramming through legislation under urgency without select committee scrutiny.I don't intend to relitigate the very sound and cogent arguments that this side of the House made against this process and the irony that this is not only a bill but a process that is being supported by the Green Party whose members lined up for nine years to rail against the use of urgency and the former member for Hutt South in his debate on the Standing Orders for the 51st Parliament made it very clear in his view that urgency should be taken only for emergencies and with effectively a supermajority in the House of 75 percent or more.I think what we are seeing here is a degree of naivety by Ms Martin that somehow we can just magic up another bill and bring it back through the House because there's always so much time—well the former Ministers on this side of the Chamber know how very very difficult that can be—but also that somehow the select committee process isn't important; it's rubber-stamping. Well I think we've got two very good examples of how a bill that we support could have been made better by the select committee scrutiny. It is true the argument was made—but not accepted—that this was a member's bill that was considered a couple of years ago and that's enough; that's all it needs. Well I can just imagine the hue and cry that would have emanated from the other side had the National-led Government previously done that.But I will give the Minister a bouquet—and I hope that that is indicative of the engagement that he intends to take in fair flexible and safe industrial relations in this country—because of the careful consideration and I understand acceptance of the very good suggestion by Sarah Dowie in respect of keeping-in-touch extensions which are the subject of both Part 1 and Part 2 of this bill. I encourage nay challenge the Minister to continue in that spirit. It is a comment made more in hope than confidence given my understanding of the Labour Party's manifesto for industrial relations but we'll see how that goes.With that though comes a brickbat and that is that effectively what we've heard from both the Minister and the Hon Tracey Martin is that the Government would like to consider Amy Adams' ideas which actually the National Party campaigned on in the 2017 election campaign as an extension of the very flexible arrangements that we put in place in the last Parliament to paid parental leave. No it wasn't 26 weeks because that was unaffordable at the time but we did go to 14 weeks to 16 weeks and then to 18 weeks. More than that we broadened the nature of the paid parental leave to extend it to people who would not otherwise have got it: whāngai arrangements casual employment being entitled after just six months' work in a 12-month period all qualified people for paid parental leave who weren't previously eligible for it.