Upston LouiseHon LOUISE UPSTON (National—Taupō): Thank you Madam Chair Williams. It's my first opportunity with you in the Chair to congratulate you on your appointment as a presiding officer.I just want to speak to the title and commencement clauses and to build on some of the comments that my colleague the Hon Michael Woodhouse made around the start date. I would understand the requirement for the lack of scrutiny had this been coming in on 1 January 2018 for example. But no it states clearly that Part 1 is coming into force on 1 July 2018 and I know Sue Moroney will be very pleased in terms of that commencement date—extending it to 22 weeks.But what does concern me is the fact that there is a substantial amount of time between now and then when some of this additional scrutiny could have taken place and that opportunity then has been missed to really pull apart some of the fiscal impacts as well as one of the issues that I think really a full Cabinet process and a full select committee process rather than urgency would have made a difference to. That is on the impact for example—the unintended consequences stated here on women's employability.Part of that is relevant to the Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) that was brought by Sarah Dowie around keeping in touch because one of the challenges when you have an extended duration—by the time we get to Part 2 on 1 July 2020 it'll be an extension to 26 weeks. That's a long time for an employee to be away from a workforce and I know in earlier times that women taking paid parental leave were quite scared about making contact with their employer. I had one case for example that someone brought to my electorate office where they had thought that attending the retirement function of someone they'd worked for for 20 years would have had an impact on—basically the cancelling of their paid parental leave.So I do think that in terms of the commencement the Government had the choice of starting it on 1 January next year which I guess would have made sense in terms of why this is being rammed through the Parliament. But because they have chosen commencement on 1 July 2018 I'm still somewhat confused in terms of why there hasn't been the opportunity to work through the issues—both perhaps unintended in terms of the SOP around return to work that we've fixed in this process but also the opportunity to enable greater flexibility for families to design a leave that works for them and their family.So the commencement particularly of the extension to 22 weeks—clearly that's what we campaigned on—to come into force on 1 July next year 2018 is important. But it does provide a huge gap both in terms of the scrutiny that I think this Parliament deserves—the New Zealand public deserves—and also I think for the 52nd Parliament. As I look around the House we've got a large number of new members from every party and I think we've denied them the opportunity to actually see how a select committee process works particularly on a bill that is actually unanimously supported. So in terms of the commencement being 1 July 2018 there was sufficient time to do that.There's definitely more than 26 weeks actually—which is what you want to extend the paid parental leave to finally. So if you think about that 26 weeks there's more than enough time to have given it the scrutiny it required. Perhaps if the Government had taken it even to a Cabinet committee the collective wisdom of your Cabinet colleagues could have meant some of these issues had been traversed. As I've said the offer was on the table from the Hon Michael Woodhouse to make it workable to increase the flexibility.