Parental Leave and Employment Protection (Six Months’ Paid Leave) Amendment Bill

I just wish to make probably a quite brief contribution on new clause 8 of the Parental Leave and Employment Protection (Six Months’ Paid Leave) Amendment Bill. This is the clause that comes about because since we have been debating 26 weeks’ paid parental leave, guess what has happened? The Government decided to pass its own legislation in 2014.

💬 Phil Twyford: What a coincidence.

It is a coincidence, a strange coincidence, but, actually, the victory that this bill has had—this brave little bill, as I call it—is that it forced the Government into extending paid parental leave to 16 weeks from 1 April, I think, next year, and to 18 weeks from 1 April the following year, 2016. So we have had a victory. It might not feel like it today because all those parents so desperately needing the ability to have 26 weeks in the set of circumstances we have talked about during the course of this debate will not be having that, thanks to National voting against it. I think that is a great tragedy. But clause 8 was, I guess, acknowledging that there has been a movement in paid parental leave due to the success of this bill. That has happened in 2014, and as a result of that we needed to have some consequential amendments to that piece of legislation, which passed earlier in the year.

It is with regret that this call will be my last contribution on this bill in this House, but please be warned that it will not be the last time we will hear about 26 weeks’ paid parental leave—universally actually, because there is such a groundswell of support throughout the country for this now that the Government is not going to get away with burying its head in the sand and pretending it has done what is needed for the future of the country, because it simply has not. I want to take this opportunity to thank all those parties who have had the foresight to support the bill in its various stages up until this point. We are going to keep this battle going. We are going to keep this argument going, because this is the right thing for New Zealand families. This is the thing that really does deliver the brighter future for New Zealand. This is the investment that would make a difference, and yet the very Government that campaigned on delivering a brighter future is the Government that is stopping it from happening.

Thank you to the Green Party. Thank you to New Zealand First. Thank you to Mana, when Mana was here voting for it. Thank you to United Future. Thank you to the Māori Party, and, particularly, thank you to my Labour colleagues, who had the courage to know that this was the right time, even though we proposed it in the midst of a global recession. It was the right time to make sure that we invested in our families, and it was the right time to get this debate going, and New Zealanders joined with us. It is a great tragedy that the Government has not been able to see how important this is and has not had the foresight to understand what a wise investment it is in the future, and how, really, to build a brighter future. But the good news is that the rest of us are here to keep reminding you, and we will.

As I stand to speak to the last Supplementary Order Paper that will be discussed in the Committee on the bill, Supplementary Order Paper 472, I really just want to acknowledge Sue Moroney and the work she has done. What she has brought to the House is something that really resonates with New Zealanders. We know that this bill in its entirety has put pressure on the Government. It was forced to lift the number of weeks of paid parental leave from 14 weeks to 18. It did not go as far as Sue Moroney and the Labour Party have attempted to push it. We know that it is affordable, despite what the Government says, particularly with the amendments that Sue Moroney has put up. There were allegations by the National Government that this would cost $5 million, which was ridiculous.

💬 Sue Moroney: $500 million.

$500 million, which was a ridiculous amount of money that the Government assumed it would cost. It misled New Zealanders—I will say that. The real cost is significantly less than that, and, actually, with the amendments that were made so that it would apply only to multiple births, to children with disabilities, and to parents who had premature births, the cost was significantly reduced to around $6 million.

So I want to say, in my final speech on this bill, thank you to Sue Moroney and shame on the National Government for not agreeing with this. It was for pure politics that it has not supported this bill. It knows it is good for New Zealand. It knows that in the long run there would have been savings made for this country, but because it did not want the Labour Party to be seen to be popular or to be making a decision that was popular with New Zealanders, it opposed it—purely based on those political purposes. So, again, thank you to Sue Moroney, shame on the National Government, and hopefully in the next 2½ years Labour will have the opportunity to make changes like this, positive changes that New Zealand wants to see.

I am grateful to take a final call on this very important bill, and to speak to new clause 8, the consequential amendments, after seeing this Committee vote down the bill as it got narrower and narrower to try to deliver the 26 weeks—which all the health evidence, all the economic evidence, and all the social evidence showed us was our benchmark for looking after families and workplaces and, most important, babies in this country.

It has been a bit of a demoralising experience, I think, for many of us in this House to go through this process. There were the numbers in the House to get it through, and the Government stalled and threatened to use its financial veto. And then we lost the numbers. Even for the families in absolute need—those with premature babies, those with children with disabilities, and those with multiple births—the Government does not believe that it can find $6 million to be able to take care of those families. It just boggles my mind that we hear so much rhetoric from that side of the Chamber about taking an investment approach, and yet the Government cannot come up with $6 million. Or, you know, to give it credit about the full cost of it, it would be $55 million over 7 years. The Government cannot come up with that to care for families in the most need in this country, at the time in their lives when we can make the most difference for babies and for the lifetime development of those children, as well as the stabilisation of those families.

I just wonder what the Government means when it says “investment”, because if that is not investment, then what on earth is? I really do wonder. When we have seen that child poverty is such an issue in this country—

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Narrow it down.

I know; I will narrow it down. It is to the point of investment, which is around the narrowing of this bill. We have seen how, just by small investments like this, Australia has reduced child poverty by 30 percent, while this country has reduced it by 3 percent.

I just cannot understand what this Government’s concept of investment is, when we know that we can make a real difference, when 99.9 percent, I think it was, of submissions supported 26 weeks as a baseline. That is what all of the evidence tells us is the baseline—not 16 weeks; it is 26 weeks. It is a very disappointing day to stand in this Chamber, where this Government is depriving our families and depriving babies of that base provision, leaving us lagging behind the rest of the world in support for families when we think of ourselves as a developed country, as a country founded on principles of decency. The Government is not demonstrating an understanding of investment, it is not demonstrating a sense of decency, as it votes this bill down.

The question was put that the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 472 in the name of Sue Moroney to add new clause 8 be agreed to.