Dean Jacqui; Simmonds PennyASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): The House is resumed. When we rose for the dinner break we were considering the second reading of the Employment Relations (Extended Time for Personal Grievance for Sexual Harassment) Amendment Bill. PENNY SIMMONDS (National—Invercargill): Thank you Madam Speaker. I'm pleased to rise and speak on this the Employment Relations (Extended Time for Personal Grievance for Sexual Harassment) Amendment Bill in this its second reading. First of all I pass on my congratulations to Labour MP Dr Deborah Russell who was fortunate enough to have this member's bill pulled out of the hat—out of the biscuit tin I apologise. So well done to Deborah for getting that opportunity. The bill was examined in the Education and Workforce Committee of which I am a member. There were 43 submissions 19 of those submissions were made orally and as Dr Russell said the vast majority of them were in support. The bill is relatively straightforward; it is raising the number of days that a personal grievance alleging sexual harassment can be taken from 90 days to one year. This will create an amendment to the Employment Relations Act 2000. National is supportive of this bill because none of us feel that sexual harassment is acceptable in any context and of course in the employment context particularly so. In the first reading my colleague the Hon Paul Goldsmith spoke about sexual harassment not being a new thing that it had been around since the dawn of time. And I actually wanted to speak about an experience my mother had in her first job. This is my late mother; we are talking 75 years ago. Her first job was in the telephone exchange and for those young people around you might not realise that back then you actually rang and the connections to another line were made by a person in the telephone exchange. She was the first woman in Southland to hold that job and she struck a situation where her supervisor—her boss—was a male who pestered her to go out with him. She didn't take kindly to the pestering and refused to go out with him and found herself working mostly night shifts and weekend shifts after that. So indeed sexual harassment in one form or another has been there for many many years. Unfortunately my mother didn't have access to a personal grievance with 90 days—or a year— but she did the next best thing and got a job elsewhere for more pay. So I guess there were ways around it.I was somewhat alarmed to hear Dr Russell talk about how prevalent sexual harassment was amongst the legal fraternity. In the 23 years that I was an employer in the tertiary education sector I'm pleased to say that sexual harassment cases were very few and far between. Where there were cases—there are of course many ways in which it can be dealt with before getting to a personal grievance stage. We would all hope that any employer that finds an instance of or is informed of a sexual harassment incident in their workplace would move quickly long before it got to the stage of a personal grievance. But we know that that isn't always the case and the imbalance of power—often a supervisor has considerable power over a worker and that sexual harassment in those situations particularly is very very damaging. So we fully support that this bill will provide for those that consider they have been subjected to sexual harassment and may not be able to bring themselves to take the personal grievance within those 90 days. With this legislation passing they would now be able to have up to a year to prepare and get themselves into a space where they were comfortable and prepared to raise a personal grievance. We want victims of sexual harassment to be in that space where they feel safe to speak up and sometimes it isn't until they have got a new manager or have perhaps got themselves a new position a new role that they feel that they are in a safe enough space to be able to bring that action. So we are very pleased to support this and to show that the select committee process did have some input to this. We perhaps made more clear more explicit the retrospectivity clause—clause 17—where we were a little concerned that perhaps it wasn't entirely clear and so we sought to get an amendment which has come into the legislation saying in respect of a personal grievance if the action alleged to amount to the personal grievance occurred or came to the notice of the employee on or after the date of commencement of the… amendment Act." So it's important of course that anything that might have occurred prior will be dealt with under the legislation as it was at that time. So as I said I am pleased to endorse the fact that National supports this bill and we commend the bill to the House."