Support Workers (Pay Equity) Settlements Amendment Bill

I move, That the Support Workers (Pay Equity) Settlements Amendment Bill be now read a third time.

I won’t speak for too long, not only because I won’t be able to speak for too long, but I’m thankful for members of the House for the very great scrutiny that they have given in traversing all manner of policy issues that sit behind the bill and the funding of it as well. The members have quite correctly pointed out that that is what would be ordinarily discussed in the select committee proceeding. That is not what has happened this evening.

It is important to get this legislation through, and I do reiterate the motivating factors behind it. This is a group of low-paid workers. The previous Government legislated a set of pay rates that were protected and applied to all of the workforce. I know we’ve had a bit of banter across the House this evening, and the National Party has proven, really, what heroes of the working class they actually are—on their off night. It was the right thing to do and it was a progressive thing to do, but it did leave in abeyance the pay equity ambition that this group of workers had, and to the extent that that was done in order to get changes to the Equal Pay Act so that there might be a better process for that to happen, that was certainly understandable. In any event, five years has moved on and it has not been possible to progress anything further, at least towards this group of workers’ ambitions for pay equity.

What we are doing tonight is an interim and somewhat pragmatic step that gives a pay adjustment. It is not what the workers themselves would have wanted, it is not what the employers themselves are saying they would like to have provided—funded by the Government—but it is, I think, in the circumstances not out of order in terms of what’s happening elsewhere in the labour market. But what’s most important is that we now get on.

This Government backs these workers and their employers to get on and get a pay equity settlement done under the Equal Pay Act. We will do that. We’ve made some arrangements and made some commitments in order to do that, and we will do that. In a matter of, hopefully, not too long a period of time, we’ll significantly lift the incomes for these workers and make it a more attractive proposition for those who would want to go into this sort of work, and this is on the back of a general movement that this Government is making to lift remuneration in the health sector.

This is a very important workforce, as we have seen. They’ve made an enormous contribution throughout COVID, but, actually, they do every other day as well. We need to do everything we can to show how much we value the health workforce and support them to lift their pay. So that’s what this does.

As I say, I’m very thankful to members for their attention to this in this urgent setting, and I look forward to their continued support. On that basis, I commend the bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Before I provide some reflective and concluding comments in my third reading contribution, I want to briefly reflect on an interjection I made on the Minister of Health at the end of the committee of the whole House about not answering questions. There was one question that I thought was inadequate, but I actually want to commend the Minister for his contribution to the committee of the whole House. There are, I think, unfortunately, a small number of Ministers that I think really enter into the spirit of the committee of the whole House and the technical analysis of bills, and Mr Little is one of them. To the degree that he could, he attempted to address the very, I think, legitimate and quite important questions that the committee had, especially given that we didn’t have the opportunity to do so in a select committee. So I put that on the record.

He is a hard-working Minister, but that is really where the commendation ends in respect of this process and this bill, because I think even if Mr Little was reflecting, in his heart of hearts he knows that the process was poor by any measure. But the outcome is going to be deeply dissatisfying to all of the parties and probably to his own Cabinet, actually, in not being able to achieve a better outcome in the time frame—and I don’t mean the time frame of the last six weeks; I mean the time frame in the last five years, of which four years and eight months have been under a Labour-led Government. So there is still some work to do.

A few weeks ago, I had cause to dive back into my calendar for the second half of 2015 or early 2016 to try and ascertain the date of a meeting that I and my then ministerial colleague Amy Adams had with the Hon Peter Dutton, who was then the home affairs Minister. We met in Sydney, as the joint justice Ministers, with Amy Adams as justice and I as Minister of Police—so it must have been 2015. I found the date, but I had to pour through an absolute mountain of appointments and meetings in this diary, and it reminded me of the tremendous workload that busy Ministers have, and I know Mr Little is one of them.

But in amongst all of those diary appointments was a plethora of meetings of what’s called CMSSER, or at least it was then: the Committee of Ministers for State Sector Employment Relations. I don’t know if there’s an equivalent committee. But the membership included and was chaired by the Hon Paula Bennett, our Minister of State Services. It had the weather eye of the Minister of Finance, the Hon Bill English; Dr Jonathan Coleman; myself; and one or two others.

The two big health issues that were emerging at that time, one of which remains unresolved, was Holidays Act remediation across the State sector—and, as Minister of Police, I had the very uncomfortable role of going to Cabinet and saying the police had told me that they had an estimated $26 million of holiday pay arrears. That ended up being $33 million. The CMSSER, basically, went to the Ministry of Health—actually, at my request, based on my experience in the health sector—to say that, well, if police, who have shift work and time in lieu and all of that sort of thing, have got a $33 million problem, I bet the district health boards have got a much, much larger problem. The response was: “No, no, nothing to see here.” We had that response all the way through to the 2017 general election, when, we now know, there was a billion-dollar problem—and it’s still not solved, five years later. Actually, there’s a pattern that emerges here about problems not being solved five years later.

Then there was an emerging issue with the TerraNova case. We had a regular item on that agenda to consider, as observers, actually—interested observers to the case—about what was happening in the claim for section 9 of the Equal Pay Act 1972, applying to not only equal pay for the same work but pay equity for different work but of a similar nature, and that’s where the previous Government ended up with the 2017 Act.

Now, one of the things I think was revealed in the answers and in the speeches given by the Minister of Health today and tonight was—and this is the impression that he left me—that pay equity negotiations are somehow an iterative process, that female-dominated professions are on this kind of wheel of inequity. That’s not my perspective. It certainly wasn’t the previous Government’s perspective. The purpose of a pay equity settlement was to bring that occupation, that sector, or that role up to parity with occupations that were similar but were not female-dominated—a one-time thing that then remains equitable, and the pay increase has come through the normal bargaining process.

Now, it is possible that over time some sectors may slip back and it might be necessary in years to come for there to be a subsequent pay equity claim. My sense, and the way in which the pay equity bill that I introduced in 2017 was written, was that that not be the case, that that would be a very, very rare exception. But the framework for achieving equity was a singular event—with a pretty big price tag, but, nevertheless, that was it. That’s what I believed and my Government in 2017 believed we were doing with the Support Workers (Pay Equity) Settlements Act that we are amending tonight. Indeed, it would have been, had the Labour Government done what was intended, which was to actually get a framework in place for bargaining for increases past June 2022, and they didn’t.

As my colleague and friend Nicola Grigg said, not one of the 1,900 staff at the Ministry of Health put a diary note in the calendar and said, “You know what, in 2019 or 2020 we better get around the bargaining table.” No one in the Ministry of Health was actually aware of and planning to do just that, and I find that extraordinary in the extreme. Actually, the unions have probably let their members down too—I say that gently but firmly—until the Aged Care Association actually approached the ministry and the Minister last year, as was described by Dr Reti in his first reading speech.

Clearly, there wasn’t enough time. We were talking weeks, not years, to get to bargain, and we know that these things are very complicated, with multi-employers and a number of variables. There wasn’t a show of being able to get that sorted before this bill expired. So to kick the can down the road for another year and a half, after a five-year hiatus where the Government did nothing, really leaves a sour taste in my mouth and, certainly, in the 61,000 workers who are not being well-enough remunerated by this piece of legislation. It’s going to leave the business owners and the not-for-profits in that sector, frankly, mildly terrified, if Penny Simmonds’ calculation of one organisation is even remotely correct—and I think it’s pretty damn accurate, frankly—that the funding envelope to give effect to this piece of legislation will not be enough to cover even the wage increases, much less the other cost increases and the deficits that the aged-care sector are already carrying.

That is going to be the test over the next weeks and months, and, boy, we will hear about it. My colleagues and I have got good connections into the aged-care sector. We understand it. We care about it. We’re listening to it, and we will highlight, if we’re right—and I really hope we’re not—the degree to which the Government has underfunded this piece of legislation. We just don’t know. We are literally flying blind, despite the Minister’s best efforts to quantify the financial impact of this on the Crown, on the taxpayer, and on the providers. We know easily what it’s going to be for the workers, because that’s set in black-letter law, and they won’t be happy. I fear that nobody will, and that’s what happens when bad law is rushed through without good process—in fact, without any process. So we’ve done our best to highlight these issues tonight. I regret we’re having to do it. We do support it, reluctantly.

My last comment is actually to the Greens. There’s been in the past, as I mentioned earlier, from time to time a situation where the Greens will abstain. I respect the fact that they oppose this bill, even though they support care and support workers. I get where they’re coming from, and we nearly did the same. But we will support it, and we look forward to seeing what happens next.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise to support this bill, the Support Workers (Pay Equity) Settlements Amendment Bill. I thank the Minister, Andrew Little, for his responses during the committee stage. I also want to confirm there is a ministerial group that oversees employment relations—that is the Ministerial Group on State Sector Relations (MOGSSR). So I am happy with everything. I commend this bill to the House.

Well that caught me a little bit unawares, Dr Anae, Ha, ha! I rise somewhat reluctantly again for I don’t know how many times tonight on this to speak in support of the Support Workers (Pay Equity) Settlements Amendment Bill. A name that, actually, we did spend some time on because, as my colleague the Hon Michael Woodhouse pointed out over and over, the pay equity bit of it was done by the National Government back in 2017 with the $2 billion pay out. And so, in fact, this time there is no pay equity component to it. And the other thing that, actually, I thought was missing from this title was that these workers really are caregivers. They are caregivers to our most vulnerable, and I’m not sure that “support workers” does justice in describing them.

We have talked about the five years, and quite frankly this has been sloppy and shoddy, and I’m sure there are a few backbenchers over there hanging their heads in embarrassment over this. It should not have been five years sitting abeyance like this. There is a thing called “bring up” in your Outlook; you might want to investigate how to use bring up so that this doesn’t happen again, because it should have been a simple process. In fact, if I was going to borrow some words that we frequently hear come out of Minister Little’s mouth, it would be “five years of neglect—five years of neglect.” So perhaps just reflect on that a little bit: the five years of neglect that did not get on to normalising a bargaining process for these care workers, these support workers who deserved to have a greater level of certainty. And it beggars belief that a health ministry, a Government, and unions didn’t bring this up; it actually took the employers, the aged-care sector, to bring this up. So there must be some pretty embarrassed people around, thinking, “How could this possibly happen?” And I said it right at the start. I shook my head as a new MP, how astonishing it could possibly be that this could happen.

So as we’ve been moving through this bill, I’ve been reflecting on the associations that I have with these care workers across a range of areas that I’m involved with. I think of all the care workers in the aged-care sector. And look, we’ve canvassed how much that sector is suffering at the moment, and I’ll come back to that a little later, but also I reflect on the care workers that we see in a number of the disabled residential facilities and the wonderful work that many of the care workers do there. I want to particularly acknowledge the ones that I had a lot to do with at Bainfield Park in Invercargill—an absolutely fabulous residential facility for people with disabilities. I just want to acknowledge the wonderful work that they and their staff do. But I also think of all those that go into homes all around the country where there are people suffering from different frailties, from disabilities, from injuries, from getting older, and they require the support of these care workers and they are under tremendous pressure, often getting from one place to another. I’ve seen them take time to have a chat and do a little bit more than just the caregiving role but actually extend some friendship and some much needed companionship to the people that they are working for.

And so it really is important. I know there’s been somewhat glib comments made about being the champions of the workers, but I hope there isn’t anyone in this House that isn’t the champion of our care workers in this country. They do a marvellous job under really trying circumstances. So I guess that’s where I have some real concerns at how disrespectful this process has been to them. The process has been disrespectful—the fact that they have not had any say in the process, they have been given or imposed a settlement of 4.6 percent and we’ve all canvassed how that is well below the inflation rate. So these workers that we’ve acknowledged are at the lower end of the pay rates, they have been given less than inflation rates, and that has got to be a concern. I am at a loss as to why a Labour Government would do that to these workers when the hard work was done back in 2017 by the National Government, when the large amount, the $2 billion, was put in to get that pay equity.

The other thing that I’m really concerned about is the impact on the aged-care sector. So our aged-care sector is on its knees at the moment, whether this Government wants to recognise that or not. A number of us have been liaising on various occasions with our individual aged-care providers, but collectively my colleague Joseph Mooney and the Hon Michael Woodhouse have spent time with this sector, and they are seriously in trouble in terms of their staffing and being able to provide the services that they need.

Now, they face all sorts of increases in their costs, just as households have: so increases in their power bills, increases in the cost of running their vans, the diesel and the petrol for their vans, increases in food, increases in medical supplies, maintenance of their facilities. So they’ve had all these increases and they’ve been given a 1.9 percent increase by this Government—1.9 percent. And I’m not sure how much more this Government thinks they can squeeze blood out of that stone, because what we’re hearing is that this sector is on its knees. We’re hearing big providers that have been providing these services for 100 years are running significant deficits—$1 million deficits. So when we couldn’t really get a sense of whether there was going to be more on top of that 1.9 or whether, in fact, the Minister thinks that 1.9 can cope with this increase of 4.6 percent for what makes up the bulk of their workforce—whether he thinks they can cope with that—or whether, in fact, those providers are going to have to go back and redo their budgets and try and squeeze something more out somewhere else to stop their deficit blowing out any further.

So I think this Government, by its five years of neglect, have been disrespectful and have put those workers, those caregivers in a position where they are going to have absolutely no say over whether they accept their 4.6 percent or not, and they are going to put all those employers who have a workforce made up predominantly of care workers in a position where they thought they were facing a deficit because they’d been given so much less than inflation but they’re now going to be facing an even greater deficit. So sloppy, shoddy, and having implications across workers, employers, whole sectors. There should be an awful lot of heads being hung low over that side of the House. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’ll tell you what I think is disrespectful: dragging Kristine Bartlett to the Supreme Court to actually put a clause into a bill in 2017 that prevented workers for five long years from bringing genuine pay equity claims, which, fortunately, expires on 30 June. I commend this bill to the House.

Hon Member: Is that it?

Order!

Tēnā koe, Madam Speaker. It’s been quite a journey this evening, listening to—I think all members from across the House recognise the value of care and support workers and the amazing contributions that they make to the long-term wellbeing of our families, our communities, and our country as a whole. This takes me back a bit to the rhetoric in 2020—during the pandemic—where instead of guaranteeing livable wages for all essential workers we kind of just said, “Thank you”. I think we need to do far more than a 70c increase, effectively.

Throughout the process, what I heard was both the National Party and ACT trying to trash the Government over the process while at the same time not really committing to further wage increases for care workers. And at the same time, we have the Labour Party who was rightfully calling out the National Party for putting so many of these workers—back in 2017, and prior to that—through an arduous process in terms of getting that $2 billion pay increase.

I think the reason we put in a tabled amendment to lift those wages of support workers was effectively to recognise that we needed to maintain the value of the 2017 settlement while pay equity is negotiated, as it was based on the same calculations that were used to establish the rates in 2017. This would have basically seen an increase of around $7 instead of what we’re seeing, which is around 70c. I think if we’re all going to be speaking about the amazing value and the contributions that care and support workers make, I would have liked to see parties across the House support this tabled amendment, which by the way—and this particularly goes to my Labour colleagues—this is the approach that has been endorsed by unions such as the Public Service Association, E tū, and New Zealand Nurses Organisation members and representatives.

The truth is that care and support workers deserve so much better than the pay rates that Labour is pushing. We should have not been in a situation where the Government is rushing through legislation at the last minute, effectively silencing caregiver and community voices just to increase their pay by a paltry amount. Unions have said that if the same rate calculations were used today as were used in the historic Kristine Bartlett 2017 settlement, wages would be around—again, as I said earlier—$7 higher. So it just feels like exploitation, effectively, and this is why the Green Party cannot be voting for the bill as it is. We would have loved to vote for a bill that had reflected the fight of so many people, you know, all the way to 2017. And it is worth noting that the workers who will disproportionately be impacted will be Pasifika, Māori, and migrant women.

During the committee of the whole House, in fact, I was asking the Minister about the repercussions that he thinks this will have on migrant workers and the migrant women who are facing exploitation because many are on employer-bound visas. But the workers who effectively are having an exemption carved out when they’re coming in to being paid the median wage so they can work as support workers—and I was surprised at the Minister not understanding the implications of how this plays and interacts with the immigration system, because the immigration system itself identified that support workers aren’t paid enough. Despite the Government’s intent of having a so-called high-skill, high-wage workforce, we are accepting that we’re going to continue paying our support workers below the median wage, and below the aims that other Government departments are effectively trying to get in terms of the types of workers that we’re bringing in.

So if we want to stop our support workers from leaving their jobs overburdened, tired, exhausted, and with ill physical and mental health, as a result of those working conditions, having higher pay rates would have been an excellent start to retain that workforce and address some of those shortfalls that we have that are creating massive pressure on the support workers that are out there at the moment. So again, the Green Party is committed to achieving genuine pay equity for support workers as soon as possible, and we will continue fighting for more substantive increases.

I wanted to, lastly, reflect on some of the comments that the Minister made during committee of the whole House when I was asking him about why he didn’t support our amendment. And one of the things that he said at the time was that fair pay agreements would hopefully help bring those workers to a much higher pay rate. And I think it’s worth basically noting, though, that fair pay agreements are a long-term fix to prevent pay equity gains eroding after pay resettlements are all sorted, not really [Audio issue] of sorting pay equity settlements. So I just don’t buy it that we can sort of hope that in many months’ time maybe, potentially, pay agreements will lift those wages. We have an opportunity right now to lift the wages of support workers to a level that reflected their struggle back in 2017.

So again, I’m really, really disappointed in the Labour Government for bringing in what I think is insufficient and a smack in the face for the many workers who’ve worked so hard to address this. I also noted that the Minister talked about revenue considerations as one of the barriers for not sort of putting the rates higher. And I want to say that the Green Party remains the only party with a credible revenue plan. So, you know, we really want Labour to adopt some of our ideas regarding tax reform so that they cannot keep using this issue of revenue as a barrier to guaranteeing workers the pay that they deserve. We look forward to pushing our Labour colleagues to do better and to genuinely be a movement for the working class. Kia ora.

ACT supports the working class. We support carer support workers to get a decent wage. What we don’t support is a Government majority—the Labour Government, the Labour Party—legislating wage rates in the House and embedding them in statute. That’s the kind of thing that Third World, tin-pot democracies that we regard ourselves as being far ahead of—that’s the kind of thing that goes on in countries that New Zealand would say, “We never want to be like them.” In fact, we don’t want to be like countries that don’t live up to our standard of democracy, potentially like Fiji when they had a coup. We’d ostracised them for a decade.

But what this Government has done is embedded in legislation wage rates, and that’s because rather than focus on fixing real problems with delivering services to the most vulnerable people—because that’s what carer support workers do. They look after people who have dementia. They look after people in aged-care homes, nearing the end of their life, and they look after people in families who have children or adult family members with disabilities. So these workers who ACT supports do a very important job, but it’s completely inappropriate to be legislating for their pay rates.

Now, there are some members of the Government ruling party—of the ruling party—who would like no more than to go around the country legislating wage and salary rates for all kinds of roles. They call those “fair pay agreements”—fair pay agreements. Now, imagine every time a sector, 1,000 workers or 10 percent of a workforce, wanted to get a pay settlement, a fair pay agreement—this is what they’d get. It would be a legislated process to deliver a wage settlement.

So if we think about the people who need carer support, those people with physical and intellectual disabilities, those people who are elderly and need care, and the type of people who’d care for them—well, I mean, this is the Support Workers (Pay Equity) Settlements Bill, and it recognised that there was a case that primarily women who worked in a sector were paid less, and the evidence was given that in fact that was because it was mostly women who worked in this sector. Well, it’s now 2022. This legislation has been around for over half a decade, and what we know about this sector is that, actually, it takes all types of people to look after all types of people.

I have a family member with a disability, a young man, and he actually prefers blokes to look after him. He prefers blokes to take him and do blokey things, to be there with him after school, to get the hammer and nails out and to fix things and make things. So while this is a pay equity settlements amendment bill that essentially, according to the Government, targets a gender disparity, actually what this bill doesn’t recognise is that it takes all types to care for all types of people.

Now, my colleague Karen Chhour has visited over seven aged-care facilities recently, and what the operators told her was that it’s not just the pay; it’s also all the other things that are cramming down on this sector. So there’ll be a pay rise that’ll go through, a legislated pay rise will go through—4.9 percent. The sector has been given a 1.9 percent uplift in their operating allowance by the Government. But if you think about all of the other things affecting them—the cost of feeding residents in aged-care facilities, the cost of taking them to activities in vans and buses, the cost of energy, electricity, gas, and everything else—this is going to impose an additional cost on the sector which they’re not funded for.

They’re actually struggling to get workers. Like, 4.9 percent isn’t really the problem. The problem is that it’s very, very difficult for people to come to New Zealand, to immigrate to New Zealand, to work in roles like carer support which are lower waged. They’re lower paid. That’s because these roles don’t require a significant level of qualification. In many cases, the experience required is minimal. The training is delivered on the job. In fact, they’re roles where actually some of the physical requirements of the job can be quite unpleasant. So these roles aren’t that desirable.

Now, if the sector was able to pay people a lot more—and look, I’ve worked in the waste industry. I know what it’s like to go to a site, to work at a rubbish tip, to work in hazardous environments wearing a whole lot of personal protective equipment, where things don’t smell that great, and you’d have to say that, actually, working in some facilities that care for people would have some similarities to that. Now, that’s not to say that those workers aren’t valued, because they are. But in fact, those roles are just not as desirable as other roles in society which people do aspire to become qualified at and to move on.

In fact, a lot of these roles have a high degree of flexibility. Caring for people is sometimes only a few hours at the beginning or end of the day or a few hours on a weekend to give a family respite, particularly if they have a child or a person in their family with a disability. So one of the reasons that this sector is not particularly well paid is because, actually, there is a high degree of flexibility and it’s very, very difficult in some cases to deliver a career path that would lead to the typical progression in wages and salaries.

But I want to come back to the problem with the bill. The main problem with the bill is that it legislates wage rates by statute. It’s completely unacceptable to ACT to take that approach. However, because the Government has left the sector with no choice and these workers otherwise would be left in limbo from 30 June, ACT will reluctantly support this bill while we ask the Government to resolve this once and for all, to give the responsibility back to the sector that employs support workers and to the workers themselves to negotiate an enduring settlement that actually means that the Government in future will not need to extend this beyond the end of 2023.

It is a pleasure to take a call, for the third time, on the Support Workers (Pay Equity) Settlements Amendment Bill, for the third reading. I just want to say it’s been interesting hearing all sides of the conversation. I think it is an important bill that helps plug some of the gaps that are remaining from the original issue, and I would like commend this bill to the House. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I will say with some conviction that it is a pleasure to take a call on the Support Workers (Pay Equity) Settlements Amendment Bill, but isn’t it a shame we’ve found ourselves here?

I would just like to correct for the record this evening that there’s been a number of assertions from the Government benches that this was a dreadful bill from the outset, designed by the former National Government. Actually, our piece of legislation was a significant correction to decades of underpayment of a female dominated workforce. But then you have to ask yourself the question: why have these women had to come to the table again? Where was the Government? It has had five long years to get this sorted and at the eleventh hour they finally come to the table, have a pseudo discussion, from what I understand, with the unions and couldn’t reach an agreement, so they slam it through the House this evening under urgency.

When a cost of living crisis is biting as hard as it is at the moment, I would contend that the 2017 settlement that meant about $100 extra a week for so many, and about $5,000 a year, made a real difference. Fast forward five years at a time when we’ve got inflation running at 6.9 percent, petrol $3 a litre, rents up 150 bucks a week—back then, that settlement actually meant a lot. It was significant. But here we are eight days out from the original piece of legislation expiring and we are coming to the realisation that the appropriation set aside for this 4.6 percent might not quite cover that.

I think it was about seven times the Minister was questioned this evening as to what that fiscal envelope actually looked like and we eventually, after seven questions, got a roundabout figure of about $358 million. But the very clever colleagues of mine—you know, those who have been chief executive officers of major institutions and those who have been chief financial officers of major institutions, and the Hon Michael Woodhouse, who was a part of the negotiation team of the original settlement—came to the conclusion that it ain’t going to be enough. It ain’t going to cut the mustard, which, once again raises the question: instead of keeping its eye on the ball, instead of staying abreast of the legislative agenda, ensuring everything was functioning as it should be, the Government contents itself with making hollow empty promises about how much they care and how much we should all be kind, when actually when it comes to the tangible work, when it comes to the effort of creating an amendment bill that will make a meaningful difference, it has fallen short.

As a number of people have mentioned this evening, while it is the care workers themselves who are deeply, gravely impacted by this and it is them and their needs and their welfare that we must hold to the fore as the most important issues that we must deal with, they in turn also impact the public, those who need to be cared for. Everybody’s got a personal story. Myself, I have a 91-year-old grandmother, who just recently suffered one too many falls. She can no longer live independently. So whilst the family waits to get her into a cared-living arrangement, she’s sitting in the Hastings hospital. She’s been there for three weeks. She’s taking up a bed that someone from the public who’s really sick could use, all because the aged residential care cannot provide the staffing to care for her. That is just one example.

I’m just one person of the 5 million in this country who can relate a story like that. In my own patch in Selwyn, there are two aged-care facilities who have been shut since the Omicron outbreak. In Leeston, the Ellesmere Hospital had 12 beds for aged care. The Darfield Hospital had 10 for aged care. They have been shut because the Canterbury District Health Board cannot staff them.

Now, we’ve seen Andrew Little roaring across the Chamber this evening, claiming that Labour is the party of the worker and Labour is passing laws to look after the worker, but actually it was National’s law in 2017 that set this motion in train. Anything that that Minister has said to degrade and diminish the National Party’s legislation is just a diversionary tactic.

The Labour Government has dragged the chain on this. They’ve had five years to negotiate whatever agreement they wanted. It has taken until today, eight days out, to drag it through the House under urgency to come up with a substandard deal.

I call Glen Bennett—five minutes.

I’m grateful to be part of the Labour Party, which is the party of the working people; I’m grateful to have a Minister of Health who is exceptional; and I’m grateful for the Minister of Health, Andrew Little, for bringing this piece of legislation to this House. On behalf the working people, I commend this bill to the House.

I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. You probably can’t hear from the background, but it’s that time of the evening when we start to get into the flow of this bill. It’s an absolute pleasure to stand to rise on behalf of the National Party and as the member of Parliament for the mighty North Shore to do the third and final reading in regards to the Support Workers (Pay Equity) Settlements Amendment Bill.

It has been a process this evening in order to pass through elements of this bill under urgency; a process, I must say, that’s been more comprehensive on the Opposition side than this Government has done in the five long years that it should have utilised in order to avoid us even standing here this evening. But the role that we’ve had to do under urgency is to try and fulfil the fact that actually no feedback, no select committee process, and no opportunity or ability for voices to be heard in regards to feedback of this legislation has been possible. That’s a great shame, because we’ve talked about that this evening, in terms of the reality of where we are because of a failure to take the right action much earlier on in the piece.

I refer to the departmental disclosure statement which referred, quite clearly, under section 3.6, that the consultation or the discussions with the parties only occurred between 3 May 2022 and 26 May 2022. And, of course, we are on 22 June, and the original legislation that was put in place by a National-led Government back in 2017 under what was, at that point, a pragmatic solution—actually quite a quantum step change in terms of a reset required, and a significant injection, between 15 and 50 percent pay increases for this critical workforce, a reset piece of legislation that closed the gap, was put in play. As a result, it provided the framework and the runway, I guess, for the future Government to be able to use the time that they had, the five-year time period in which the bill was set up before it was to be repealed, to actually put in place a sustainable solution in regards to a pay discussion settlement between that workforce. But the great shame is that that process has not occurred, and, as a result, instead of that all being done and dusted, and, actually, the workforce and this critical workforce being able to have the ability to actually enter into those negotiations and do all that, we’re now, basically, just looking to extend this by another 18 months. That is a great shame because there was an opportunity to turn this around, but that opportunity has been right and royally squandered by this Government, and that is a disappointment.

It was interesting in the committee stage that we went through—and I do acknowledge and I do often enjoy, a little bit, as much as I do enjoy that, the interaction between Minister Little and that on aspects around health, genuinely. Out of some Ministers, when you ask questions, the responses are generally quite mixed, but I do recognise that the Minister generally does engage in a way in which provides responses—after a while, I must say—this evening. So he can be a little bit swifter in terms of getting to the point, but after seven attempts, valiantly we got him there in the end. But, I think that is important because we didn’t have a process. For those hundreds of thousands of people at home watching this this evening, we didn’t have a full and comprehensive process in terms of feedback. So it is important in terms of our democracy to go through this process.

I guess the element, and why we’re talking about this bill, is to recognise that large and significant healthcare workforce that this bill is intending to deal with, around their pay and compensation aspects. That workforce has been touched on, and it’s been interesting to hear some personal stories of my colleagues on this side. We all have examples in our lives of members of our broader family that are involved with, and are cared for by, these care and support workers. They do an absolutely tremendous job, under what are often difficult circumstances.

I have had the pleasure, and still do when I am out on an ambulance doing a shift, to go into rest homes quite regularly. As you can imagine, there’s a pretty high level of work load in that role, and often the interaction in that role is with those care workers and support workers. I take my hat off in terms of what they do in often what are hugely challenging, difficult circumstances and environments where, with workforce shortages, the burden and the pressure of that role on those individuals is very, very high. They are often not necessarily equipped particularly—you know, we talk about these aged-care facilities that are all gloss, the nice flash ones you see on TV, but the reality is that that is a very small percentage of the aged-care sector. Many are voluntarily organisationally led. They are significantly struggling around fiscal elements because of the funding model, and not only the funding model in regards to their workforce, which is what we were trying to get out of the Minister tonight, which is: does the funding envelope for this bill actually reflect the true cost burden that goes on to those entities as a result of this change. That’s important, because there’s a whole lot of other deficits or costs that that sector faces that they just simply cannot afford—the fact that they have to therefore absorb out of their other baseline funding the costs regarding increases in staff salaries.

As we know, and we’ve canvassed 70 percent of these entities, total expenditure budgets relate to staff costs, and that is a considerable element, and that is in this environment, with the impact of inflation, the impact of attractive opportunities within other aspects of the sector, or at the moment offshore primarily. The ability to retain this such important workforce is a significant challenge. So the importance of this bill in order to be able to provide some level of certainty and stability in terms of the pay of those critical elements of our health workforce is an element that I think we should have done better, and we still must do better in regards to the way in which we treat them, because trust and confidence in terms of this workforce is so important. You can thrash and stretch and take for granted a little bit a workforce, but, at the end of the day, that can only take them so far, and you cannot continue to sustain that level of pressure without expecting and not being surprised that they’re going to end up leaving the workforce, potentially not go into other employment or actually leave New Zealand full stop. So we must get our healthcare workforce and the way in which we retain that workforce in this country sorted. We’ve been raising this as an issue pretty much since I’ve been in this House, in regards to the challenges, and we haven’t seen the sustainable change in plans that we should have had, which would in part have avoided where we are this evening.

I think the other aspect just to recognise is that we have sort of been a little bit flippant around the fact that this wasn’t thought of until a month out from where we are today, but that’s the reality. You sort of reflect on this and you go, “Surely not. Surely that can’t be right.” I can imagine people at home going, “That can’t be right.” But that is the reality of where we are, and we’ve talked about and evidenced it this evening, and that’s a great shame. Whether it’s the fact that officials, or whatever, have been distracted by other aspects, at the end of the day Kiwis want accountability from their Government, they want accountability for delivery, they want accountability from their Ministers, and they just want to see that, when someone says they’re going to get something done, they’re going to get it done. The challenge here, and what we’ve seen through this bill, is that the reality is that we’ve got a Government that makes a lot of promises, does not have ability to deliver, and as a result someone pays the cost, and the cost in this example is going to be paid by some of the most vulnerable workforce. I commend this bill to the House.

Tēnā koe, Madam Speaker. Ngā mihi o te tau hou Māori. Haere mai nei ki tēnei Whare. A short call from me. This bill is a simple, straightforward one that ensures that, while the enduring solution that we need is progressed, our support workers don’t move backward. And it’s been a pleasure to hear the contributions of the members around the House tonight, engaging with the technical detail of this bill. It’s been a pleasure listening to a Minister who is engaged with that detail, has answered the questions, and has thoroughly engaged with this House’s processes, and I commend this bill to the House.

I declare the House in committee for consideration of the Commerce (Grocery Sector Covenants) Amendment Bill.