Foster-Bell Paul: Parental Leave and Employment Protection (Six Months’ Paid Leave and Work Contact Hours) Amendment Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeFoster-Bell Paul: 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:11267. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]PAUL FOSTER-BELL (National): E Te Mana Whakawā tēnā koe. Tēnā koutou katoa e ngā mema. In rising to take a call on this Parental Leave and Employment Protection (Six Months’ Paid Leave and Work Contact Hours) Amendment Bill in the name of Sue Moroney I want to begin by rejecting some of the suggestions that Ms Moroney has tossed across the House. We on this side do not need to be lectured by that member on playing politics. This is after all the member who brought a funerary urn into this Chamber to play politics over a tragedy something that was actually offensive to members on this side and to many Māori people by violating decency—common decency—and the tapu of this House.I want to talk about the positive things that this Government has been doing in this space and why this bill is not actually required in the form it has been presented to the House by Ms Moroney. This bill intends to amend the Parental Leave and Employment Protection Act 1987 to extend paid parental leave to 26 weeks. There is a certain irony in this in that once again we have had a lecture from the other side on what a miserable Government this is—well it turns out that in 2007 the Families Commission gave the then Minister of Labour Ruth Dyson a report recommending that paid parental leave be extended to 13 months by 2015 including a month for fathers. Having the power as it did at that time but also running a surplus Labour still chose not to implement those changes. It chose to do nothing while it had the opportunity to do it; rather it plays politics with it once it sits on the Opposition benches.This is a Government that is committed to giving children the very best start in life—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Order! I am actually trying to hear the member and there is barracking on both sides. Barracking is fine but it should be reasonable and I actually want to hear what the member is saying.PAUL FOSTER-BELL: Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker. We are a Government committed to giving kids the very best start in life and that is why in our view this bill is neither necessary nor affordable. Under the watch of John Key and this National–led Government we have actually extended paid parental leave from 14 weeks to 18 weeks over the next 2 years as was announced in the 2014 Budget. We have consistently said that we are prepared to extend paid parental leave in a way that is affordable for the taxpayers of New Zealand as fiscal conditions permit but also affordable to the employers of New Zealand. The last thing we would want are measures that create greater unemployment in this country. We want as many New Zealanders as possible to have access to high-quality jobs. That is why we believe that the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment estimate of the cost of this bill which is $445.8 million over the next 4 years is unaffordable. We have extended paid parental leave in a way that the country can afford and this bill is just another example of Labour writing cheques that it knows it cannot afford to pay for.The other provisions in this bill that were examined in the Government Administration Committee and to which I paid particular interest were around the suggestion of contact hours. No doubt this was a well-intentioned provision by the member but it was somewhat superseded by events in that on 17 March in this year the Parental Leave and Employment Protection Amendment Act 2016 received the Royal assent. That legislation provided for keeping-in-touch days—which are essentially the same as or very similar to contact hours—that allow an employee to stay in touch with their workplace and to keep up to date with changing practices in order to maintain that network without invalidating any of their entitlement to paid parental leave. This is actually a sensible and logical measure. It was championed in the previous Parliament and before that by my former colleague Katrina Shanks the then National list member who actually introduced the concept I recall as a remit at a National Party conference. This was a positive sensible logical concept and it has actually already been implemented by the Government. So the select committee made the sensible—Chris Bishop: It was resurrected.PAUL FOSTER-BELL: It was resurrected by the Government but it was a sensible step to take this out of the actual legislation given it had already been passed.In the select committee we listened very carefully to a wide range of evidence. I took particular interest in the submissions from officials from the Ministry of Health around breastfeeding. We know that the research of the Nobel Laureate Professor James Heckman shows that the investment that you make in children from preconception to the age of 3 is the best possible investment you can make. It pays maximum return. We know that children who are breastfed exclusively for as long as possible will have the best possible health outcomes. However the evidence submitted from the Ministry of Health failed to show conclusively that in the New Zealand instance the extension of paid parental leave to the extent that the member is proposing would have that equally positive effect—particularly among Māori and Pasifika communities which have a lower than average rate of breastfeeding and particularly exclusive breastfeeding than the general population.There are considerable costs to this bill. There are potentially benefits from extending paid parental leave but because of that lack of conclusiveness to the evidence—the scientific research and empirical studies that were referenced in the material provided by the Ministry of Health—members on the Government side are not entirely convinced that it would have a benefit that would outweigh the significant financial costs to both the taxpayer and indeed to employers and ultimately to the employees if those jobs were extinguished from our labour market.National has done much to increase the duration of paid parental leave certainly much more than the last term of the previous Labour Government ever achieved. We have done a number of other things that help parents including Home for Life carers. We have whāngai parents grandparents and permanent guardians who have all had their entitlements extended.I want to pay tribute to my opponent—but friend—Tracey Martin who came into this House with a very sensible pragmatic bill that extended a clothing allowance to orphans. That was something that this Government could pick up and run with because it was done in a way that was not political. She did not play petty politics with that. She came in with a sensible bill and we were happy to back it phase it in in a way that was affordable and make that extra entitlement available to some of the most vulnerable children in the country and their parental and actually grandparental guardians—often it is grandparents or immediate whānau members who are the guardians—when previously they had access to no such entitlement. So I am quite proud of the work that the Government has done in that regard.We are also extending paid parental leave to Kiwi workers who previously were not entitled to it under the penny-pinching and miserable scheme offered by the previous Labour Government. We have for instance those who are self-employed but we also have casual seasonal and contract workers. We know that some of the most vulnerable in our workforce are those casual seasonal and part-time workers who previously did not actually get that opportunity. The seasonal workers who come in to do the vital work of picking fruit in the orchards helping out on the dairy farms and helping in our tourism industry which is very seasonally variable—those people are often on lower salaries and extending paid parental leave to them offered them a considerable improvement over the miserable scheme that the previous Labour Government left in place.Another area where I am quite proud of the work that the Government has done is in extending paid parental leave to the parents of pre-term babies—that is babies who are born early—giving an extra week of paid parental leave for every week that a baby is born pre-term. I know that there is not always exact certainty over when a baby is due but given that we have many babies in this country who are born a month or even 6 weeks before term their parents need that extra support. I am quite proud that this is a compassionate Government that John Key leads—a caring Government—and that we have come in and brought in that entitlement where none existed under the previous miserable scheme offered by the last Labour Government.Also the extension of parental tax credits is a very positive measure. We have extended paid parental leave but also increased the parental tax credit to give parents more choice about what is important to them during what is a very important time in any parent’s life. I think for all of these reasons that this is a bill we should not be supporting and I personally will be voting against it. Thank you.