Woodhouse MichaelHon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National): Ha ha! We got there. Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker and firstly as this is my first intervention in the 52nd Parliament can I congratulate you and your fellow presiding officers on your election to that very important role. Can I also congratulate the sponsor of this bill on stealing every single one of the jobs that I have previously had. He's expressed disappointment and I'm certainly disappointed not to continue to be the spokesman for those portfolios but I can assure the Hon Iain Lees-Galloway that the Hon Amy Adams and the Hon Simon Bridges are very very good friends of mine. I have a good memory and I know where the bodies are buried.But look I do find it incredibly disappointing that the first time I am on my feet in the 52nd Parliament during the first piece of legislation that we are debating it is a debate under urgency. I cannot tell you how much it feels like being in a parallel universe. As for the Hon Julie Anne Genter standing up and saying Well there were times when we criticised the previous Government for their taking urgency."—I challenge that member to name one time in nine years when this previous Government went into urgency when the Green Party didn't have a complete fit over it. I know it's not proper to read speeches but I am going to quote from Hansard. Tracey Martin actually reminded us to go and have a look at nine years of Hansard and so I have. Here's what I found: Jan Logie in the Local Government (Auckland Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill said "the use of urgency by the Government has again denied people that ability to participate in this decision-making process and has thus removed the depth from this discussion in [this] House. We do not even have a regulatory impact statement". That was two years ago. We don't tonight. James Shaw in his 23rd speech under urgency on the Biosecurity Amendment Bill (No 2) said to the Government that "if you want to introduce urgency on matters that are frankly not urgent then you can sit here and listen to it. You can sit here and we will spin this out." Then Jan Logie—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): Order! The member needs to come back to the bill.Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: This is a bill under urgency Mr Assistant Speaker and I think given the fact that I have been able to quote the plethora of speeches that have been given in this House about urgency it behoves this House—Hon Iain Lees-Galloway: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. It is well outside the Standing Orders for a member to directly challenge your ruling in the way that he just did.Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: Speaking to that point Mr Assistant Speaker I wasn't challenging your ruling; I was continuing my speech. It is well within the standard scope of practice for a bill that is under urgency to have the issues of urgency debated on it.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): Thank you to both members. The Hon Michael Woodhouse will resume his speech but he will come back to the bill. Thank you.Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker. This is a bill that is being debated incredibly unnecessarily under urgency. It will I understand take effect on 1 July which is nearly eight months away and it is not that we are having urgency for the committee of the whole House or the third reading. The first and second readings—this is almost unprecedented. The first and second readings are being taken together to remove the opportunity for the public to have a say and the reason for that apparently is because all this lazy Government has done is take a bill that was debated two years ago and changed the title on the basis that 6000 of Sue Moroney's friends supported it notwithstanding the fact that the estimated cost—and it was an estimate because there were no robust numbers done—was about $240 million. The Minister of Finance at the time ruled it out and said that he would exercise his veto and he made that decision at first reading which means that lots of people didn't bother submitting to the select committee. It means the friends that David Seymour was talking about—those who may very well oppose this—did not take the opportunity to have their say.Now I'm going to talk about the bill that did get passed into law last year of which I was the sponsor. The Parental Leave and Employment Protection Amendment Bill became the 2016 Act and I just want to touch on a couple of the things that that bill did to make a point about why it is very important that this goes to select committee. That bill increased the paid parental leave from 14 to 16 weeks and then from 16 to 18 weeks over time. That was important. But more importantly in my view was that it extended the range of people who would qualify for parental leave. Thanks to the advocacy of David Seymour after a bit of a misunderstanding around Sue Moroney's bill there was an extension—a very important extension I have to say—for premature babies and even now they could get up to 28 weeks paid parental leave depending on how premature the baby was. We reduced the time eligibility to six months out of 12—if you had been working you would qualify. Non-traditional relationships like whāngai were covered whereas previously they hadn't been and they weren't in Sue Moroney's bill. And of course there are annual adjustments now set in legislation so we don't have to keep going back and back and improving them. The point is the thing about a select committee process is not to rubber-stamp the Government's intentions. It is to make the bill better and we are losing that opportunity.Now Sarah Dowie my colleague and friend gave a very good example of where this bill could be made better and that is the keeping-in-touch provisions which Labour opposed and Sue Moroney's bill did not have. I am very pleased to note that in this bill they are going to keep them but they are not going to extend them. So we are going from 14 to 16 to 18 to 22 and eventually 26 weeks but with no extension to the keeping-in-touch provisions. Now I don't blame Labour for not thinking about it. It wasn't their thing; it wasn't in their consciousness. But this is the important part of a select committee process. This bill could be better. And yes we did campaign on going to 22 weeks but we also campaigned on very good options for parents to share the paid parental leave which again are not in this bill and they could be.We heard from the Prime Minister that she wanted a fairer and kinder Parliament that would have robust debate and that would have good scrutiny. That's what a good and strong Opposition is required to do—is obligated to do—and we will do it. But a collegial approach would have been to take this to select committee even for a couple of weeks. We have done that very successfully on some of the legislation that we passed in the last Parliament and it was made better by the public submissions and the fact that this isn't going to happen is a crying shame. It's a stain on the first bill that this Government introduces. And I frankly cannot believe the Green Party is sitting there chuckling away thinking urgency is funny when we can do better. We can make better legislation.I heard an extraordinary comment from the Hon Tracey Martin. In justification for the ropey regulatory impact statement she said—and I quote—"It's not going to cost the taxpayer anything because the taxpayer supports it." Sorry somebody has to pay for this. It left David Seymour and me scratching our heads but that is literally what the Hon Tracey Martin said and this document frankly is a fail. It is a definite D-. It's a "Could do better. Did not achieve."The wording in this makes the public the Parliament and even the Government none the wiser about what the cost of this important change is. The Parliament is being asked to write a blank cheque and if that is the idea that the Labour-led Government has about fiscal discipline it's going to be a very long and expensive three years.This is a poor start on a bill that we support but we should be doing so in a much more collegial way. We do the taxpayer and this Parliament a disservice when we cannot even give the public the dignity the opportunity of even a couple of weeks to actually kick this around and make it better. I'm really disappointed that we have to be so critical of the Government on this very important first start and I certainly hope they can do better."