Gosche Mark: Employment Relations (Flexible Working Hours) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Gosche Mark: Employment Relations (Flexible Working Hours) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:641;Page:11629] 
Hon MARK GOSCHE (Labour—Maungakiekie) 
: 
 I really relish the opportunity to speak in this debate on a very important bill which is actually very light in its requirements of employers. I will talk about the process first; I think it was a very good one. The Transport and Industrial Relations Committee took a 1 year gap with the Employment Relations (Flexible Working Hours) Amendment Bill so that employers could live up to the claims they made to the select committee that they would prove that the issue could be dealt with by education rather than by legislation. That year was wasted in my view by employers who did not pick up the challenge. So the select committee then worked on improving the bill and we have done a very good job. I think it is very fair legislation and as I said very light legislation in terms of its requirements of employers. 
I would like those who oppose the bill to consider these few facts. In the 2006 census 420000 New Zealanders reported providing support for an individual with ill health or a disability within the previous 4 weeks. This information comes from the very good document that Ruth Dyson has put out  
Caring for New Zealand Carers 
. This document also reports the fact that women are more likely to be carers than men. Around 63 percent of carers in New Zealand are women. Thirty-eight percent of carers in New Zealand are between the ages of 45 and 64 with a further 31 percent between the ages of 30 and 44. Maori and Pacific peoples are more likely to provide unpaid support. Why is that important? Well it tells us that a huge number of people just in terms of the community care for relatives friends or whomever in their homes or in other people’s homes. Many of those people also have to try to balance that caregiving with work. 
I will talk a little bit about my own personal experience which I am not wont to do in this House on members’ day but this is an appropriate debate in which to do it. Maybe my doing so will get home to the people who oppose this bill the sort of life that many New Zealanders lead and I am one of them. Tomorrow evening if I do not get home by 9.30—if the aeroplane from Wellington to Auckland is late—my 75-year-old mother-in-law will be required to wait at my home because the paid caregiver will have gone. When I come to Wellington I have to worry about that problem every Thursday night. Every Friday night from 9 o’clock until 8.30 the next morning I am the caregiver for my wife. My wife cannot do anything for herself. She is completely dependent on everybody else for everything: being dressed being fed being moved. She cannot get out of bed; she is hoisted out of bed. We cannot leave her at home. I cannot go out on Friday Saturday or Sunday night without finding somebody in the wider family to sit with her. That is a familiar story to many many people in New Zealand. 
I am lucky. I am in a job where I can juggle my hours—just—to fit in with those demands. We get paid caregiver time but we have to cover over 50 hours ourselves—that is me and my 75-year-old mother-in-law. My children are all working. They are in their 20s and one of them has a child. Both parents of that child have to be off to work at 7 o’clock in the morning; school does not start until 9 o’clock. One of my other daughters has to take that little boy to school and at the end of the day one of my nieces looks after him after school. That again is a common story in New Zealand families. It is not unique to me. It is the reality for hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders. 
People who say it should be left to the voluntarist system need to think again. I do as close as I can to a full-time MP’s hours—and we all know that down here we work more than 40 hours on just the 3 days of Tuesday Wednesday and Thursday—and I do at least 40 hours of unpaid caregiver time at home because the State is unable to provide full-time caregiver hours. That is a reality we have to face up to. I do not hear anybody saying we should increase taxes in order to relieve those people. No I hear people who are opposed to this bill saying we should cut taxes because we are spending too much on health. 
In the last census 420000 people reported that they were responsible for providing caregiver time in their families or in their communities. What is the multiplier effect of that? There is the person whom they are caring for; that doubles the figure. Then there are all the other family members. So the vast majority of New Zealanders at some time in their lives have those types of pressures placed upon them as well as trying to get on with their careers or their jobs and trying to put food on the table and pay the mortgage or pay the rent. So I find it absolutely incredible that anybody could oppose this very light legislation. 
We should think about the demand in New Zealand for a workforce. We have record levels of employment and record low levels of unemployment but we still have a labour market crying out for more people. Why would people oppose this measure? It is one of the ways of solving that problem of saying to people like me: “We can work around the constraints that you have in your life. We recognise that you have caregiver responsibilities for your child your disabled relative or your elderly mum and dad.” In fact the bill should go further and I hope we are able to amend it further so that even more people are captured by it. I lay down that challenge to members of the employer community. They should think about it. They always turn up at select committee hearings and say people are our most valuable resource so why would they oppose this legislation? 
Why would the National Party say it could all be done by voluntarism? I heard about the voluntary approach that the hospitality sector said it took. It said there were lots of restaurants in each street and if one did not offer employees the hours they wanted they should leave that restaurant and go to the next one. I am afraid that that is just not good enough. That is not the sort of flexibility that goes both ways; that is the sort of flexibility that goes only one way—the employer decides what the flexibility is and employees either meet it or they do not. 
The select committee heard from many many people. I remember the women from the women’s division of the Law Society—we did not hear from the men. They talked about the difficulties of trying to make their way in a career where the glass ceiling has been there for a very long time. Women from the Federation of Business and Professional Women talked about the difficulties of women with children being told by employers that a breakfast meeting was being held in the morning and although it was not compulsory they would really like all the team to turn up. Well how can women do that when the childcare centre does not open in time for them to be able to attend? All of us know the pressure to attend after-work drinks. It is all about bonding and team work and being part of the team and that is how one gets ahead in life. Of course the childcare centre is not going to look after the kid after 5.30 p.m. How can anybody in the National Party ignore that and sit there with a straight face? How can the employer community ignore that and say it is taking care of it voluntarily when we heard evidence from people from all walks of life who said that was not the case? 
This bill is very personal to me. It is not legislation that anybody should be frightened of. It will start to take care of the problems experienced by many of the people I come across because my wife has a disability and many of them are not as lucky as I am. They have had to give up their jobs and their careers to sell their houses and to become full-time carers. They have had to live with all the stresses and strains the sickness and all the things that as Tariana Turia said come with being a carer and they have had to put aside their aspirations in life. This bill could make a small step towards making New Zealand a better place and that is why I support it so strongly.