Moroney Sue: Parental Leave and Employment Protection (Six Months’ Paid Leave and Work Contact Hours) Amendment Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMoroney Sue: Parental Leave and Employment Protection (Six Months’ Paid Leave and Work Contact Hours) Amendment Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 25 May 2016. Volume:714;Page:11265. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]SUE MORONEY (Labour): I move That the Parental Leave and Employment Protection (Six Months’ Paid Leave and Work Contact Hours) Amendment Bill be now read a second time—for a second time because this is a bill that has essentially been before this Parliament before a bill that was drawn out in 2012. So for 4 years—for 4 long years—we have been debating in this Parliament a bill to get paid parental leave to 26 weeks and we have had majority support for this bill passing and yet the Government has continued to play political games for those 4 long years with families’ lives to try to prevent it from passing. Well I hope that this is the final time that I will begin a second reading speech on this bill and I hope that the Government will see sense and remove its threat of a financial veto for a measure that after all is asking for children in Aotearoa New Zealand to get the best start in life. What could be less controversial than actually getting it right in the early months? What could be less controversial than that?I suspect that we are about to see—or are we about to see—the male backbenchers from the National Party rolled out to oppose this bill when in fact tomorrow in the Budget we will see the National Government actually propose an extension to paid parental leave. Are we about to witness that—that they are going to put the backbenchers up as fodder to actually argue against it and oppose it while Bill English has in his back pocket a plan to actually extend paid parental leave? I believe that is exactly what we about to see played out. But we will wait and see for tomorrow.It would be an extremely foolish measure of a Government that has become arrogant and stopped listening to New Zealanders to continue to oppose this measure. Why do I say that? Because as the Government has continued to play politics with this issue as it has tried to buy people off with the idea of a couple of weeks here or a couple of weeks there the passion for this has just got stronger. The passion for this has got stronger not only from the Labour Party but it has got stronger from the New Zealand public. How do I know this? Because the first time round this measure in this bill had around about 3800 submissions made on it. That is a substantial number of submissions on an issue. But the second time round after the Government had been forced to increase paid parental leave to 18 weeks that number grew to 6800—so it nearly doubled the number of people who were making submissions on this bill. But that is not the end of the story because the numbers supporting it grew also. Of those 6821 submissions made this time round on this bill 99.94 percent of them were in favour—99.94 percent were in favour.But the Government is completely out of touch on this issue. It does not get what most New Zealanders get. Most New Zealanders understand that it is just smart economics to put a little bit of investment in in those early months of a child’s life in order to get the bonding and attachment right between parent and baby and in order to support good breastfeeding regimes so that as taxpayers we do not continue to pay an ever-increasing amount of money on hospital admissions on bad education outcomes and even on building more prisons. All the evidence and research says that if we do not get this right if we fail to invest and give children the best start in life we as a country are going to end up spending more and more money on bad outcomes. We on this side of the House we in the Labour Party want to invest taxpayer money in making sure that we are giving children the best start in life and that we do not continue to spend money on bad outcomes. That is what this bill is all about.I said that this was the second time that the second reading is happening on this bill and that is true. That does not happen very often in this Parliament but it is happening on this occasion. I just want to reflect on the last time that the second reading came before this House because I have talked about the political games and boy was that second reading ever the pure demonstration of the amount of politics that the Government was prepared to play just in order to deny parents this level of support which is afforded in so many other countries—so many other countries. That is the sort of politics that it has been playing.So what happened? I just want to recap: last time round the Government actually stopped talking on a bill before mine in order to try to make sure that the second reading speech could not continue. That is what it did. It was foiled in that attempt because another one of my good colleagues got up and took the call and we were able to continue but that was not the end of the political games.What happened next was that I discovered that one of the parties supporting the bill the Māori Party had one of its MPs called out of the House urgently because his daughter was giving birth to one of his grandchildren. Te Ururoa Flavell was called out urgently and we sought leave from the Government to have his vote counted on the second reading debate. And do you know that miserable Government denied leave for that to happen? Here we were talking about paid parental leave and the importance of it—the Government was trying to convince the country that it thought it was important too and it denied leave to Te Ururoa Flavell to actually go and attend the birth of his grandchild and have his vote counted. That is what the Government did. Then what happened next was that the Government incorrectly cast the Māori Party vote against the bill which meant that on the night it was defeated. But fortunately the Māori Party corrected the vote on the bill the next day in Parliament and it was allowed to proceed on its way but that is the level of political games that the Government has been prepared to play over this.Tim Macindoe: No this is the level of dishonesty of this member.SUE MORONEY: I still recall Mr Macindoe on that night watching Pita Sharples come down to the House to correct the Māori Party vote being taken out of the Chamber by you—by Mr Macindoe not you Mr Assistant Speaker—and stopped from correcting the vote on that night. [Interruption]The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Order! I know there is some heat in this and there are some accusations that are being made. There is an opportunity for rebuttal and I would just ask members to tone it down.SUE MORONEY: It seems that nothing has changed on that count. But I really do hope—and I am pleading with the Government for the political games to stop now. It is time to give it up because even the ballot goddess is against the National Government on this one. The ballot goddess made sure that this bill got drawn out again so that we could debate once again some of the things that are important for families in this country and put their interests firsts and prioritise their needs.Some other things have changed since the last time we were debating this bill. This time round the thing that really struck me about the submitters who came in and told us their stories was the number of young women—and by that I am talking about women in their 20s and 30s so anyone younger than me is a young woman. They came and told their stories about how under John Key’s Government they were having to make decisions about whether they paid off their student loan whether they saved for a house or whether they had a baby. These are the sorts of decisions that young people are having to make under this Government. They are having to decide with the huge housing costs that they are facing whether they are going to spend their lives trying to get into homeownership or whether they are going to have a family. Those are the very serious issues that confront today’s young people in making these decisions.I never had paid parental leave when my children were born but I will not be one of those people who say: “I never had it so neither should anyone else.” Instead I take the view that we need to make progress as a country. We can do better. We now have the research and evidence in front of us that tells us that this is a wise investment and we should not pretend otherwise. Tomorrow the bill that I am proposing would cost just 1.27 percent—1.27 percent—of the amount of new spending that that Government is going to propose in its Budget. It has said that it is going to propose at least $1 billion of new spending so it cannot argue that this bill is unaffordable—1.27 percent of Budget 2016 is all this bill would need in tomorrow’s Budget so I do not want to hear the members opposite get up and pretend that this is unaffordable. It is simply about priorities and the priority should be families and giving children the best start in life.