Parental Leave and Employment Protection (6 Months’ Paid Leave) Amendment Bill

E Te Kaiwhakahaere, tēnā koe. Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to take this call on the title and commencement clauses of the bill. This bill, in Sue Moroney’s name, is called the Parental Leave and Employment Protection (Six Months’ Paid Leave) Amendment Bill. It is quite a mouthful, and it does, to some extent, I suppose, do what it says on the label: it is about paid parental leave. It is about protecting the employment of those workers who are on parental leave, so that they have work to come back to. But where I take some, I suppose, contention with the proposed title is the “6 Months’ Paid Leave”. That is not actually what the bill does—not initially, anyway.

When this bill was first looked at, at the Government Administration Committee, it came in three tranches. There were the parts of the bill that were supposed to come into force on 1 April 2016. Of course, those were overtaken by events, and we have amended the bill accordingly. Although there was no agreement in the select committee on the bill as a whole, we did agree it would be patently ludicrous to have a commencement of some clauses that had been overtaken by events. There had already been an increase, delivered by this Government, in paid parental leave duration but also the work contact hours, although not under that name—the staying in touch provisions, to allow parents on parental leave to keep in touch with the workplace, to keep up to date, without losing their entitlement—had already, effectively, been enacted by this Government.

In the bill as it stands now, when it comes into force, there will not be 6 months’ paid parental leave—or 26 weeks, as it is described in the bill. Initially, when the bill first comes into force, as of 1 April 2017, there will be 22 weeks of paid parental leave. This does not then increase to the 26 weeks, so the extra 4 weeks is added on, on 1 January 2018. In my view, this is not an entirely accurate description of what this bill does.

The bill should perhaps be called the “Parental Leave and Employment Protection (First 22 Weeks Next Year and then 26 Weeks the Year After That) Amendment Bill” because that would be, I think, a more accurate description of what it actually does. I know it does not exactly roll off the tongue, but it would at least portray this bill in a faithful manner. I think that is something that we should consider in this Committee stage so that it is fully understood that as of the moment it is signed into law by the Governor-General, it will not deliver 6 months’ paid parental leave—that is something that is coming down the track.

When one gives, it seems, little consideration to the fiscal impact of what one is doing, one does wonder why you would simply stop at 6 months when you are in the position of the Opposition of being able to promise very much and not consider too much what else has to be sacrificed to pay for those promises. One does wonder why you would simply stop at that 6 months, or 26 weeks, and why you would not keep on going. But anyway, that is my suggestion—that we bring some accuracy to the naming of this bill and make it very clear to the New Zealand public that it is, in fact, not 6 months’ paid parental leave that they will be entitled to from the commencement of this bill on 1 January 2017.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Can I just check: did the member move an amendment then?

No.

No, he did not. Right.

I rise to speak on the title clause. I think the point here is more than just the fact that the Government Administration Committee recommended that we strike out “and Work Contact Hours”. It is more to the point of the significance of why that has come about. In its most obvious sense, it is because the select committee recommended that the work contact hours provisions that were originally in Part 1 of the bill should be removed. But the real heart of the reason for that is that they are no longer required. That speaks to one simple fact, that a measure that this Government has put in place actually provides work contact hours to the same extent, or near to the same extent, in another piece of legislation that has passed through the House and is now an Act. The Government has undertaken those measures, which means that the provisions already exist in the law, and therefore there is no need for them.

But it speaks to more than that. What it shows is that while this bill and maybe other previous, similar pieces of legislation have been in the House in the past, the Government has been acting. The removal of the work contact hours from this particular member’s bill, because the Government has already done something that means they are no longer required—

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! I am going to require the member to resume his seat. I remind him that we are now debating the bill as it was passed at the second reading. The words that the member is debating are not part of the title and, therefore, are not part of the debate.

💬 Hon Ruth Dyson: A page a day. Get some advice from Paul Foster-Bell.

One page a day—thank you, Ms Dyson. In that case, we will instead move on to the commencement date. The commencement date would see the first tranche of 4 additional weeks from 1 April 2017. As my colleague has noted, originally that was going to be 1 April 2016, which, of course, would have been a bit of an impossibility, so it was a very sensible decision and recommendation to move that forward to next year, and then the further 4 weeks in 2018. But what that does is bring expenditure into those specific time periods, and as we have heard through the debate, the officials gave advice to the committee that the total expense over a 4-year period would be about $466 million additionally, and these commencement dates would lock that in. It became very clear that through to the fiscal year of 2020, that would see an additional cost. These commencement dates in this bill would commit the Government to that sort of expenditure.

The implications of that have been reverberating around the Chamber this evening, where people are very strongly suggesting that the fiscal conditions of today, when we could potentially enact the legislation, simply do not permit for that increased level of expenditure. Although Treasury may be forecasting some surpluses—some incredibly good ones, actually, in the years to come—they are quite some years in advance, and further ahead than even the commencement date of Part 2 if this bill were to be enacted. So both commencement elements of both Part 1, for an additional 4 weeks, and Part 2, for a further additional 4 weeks, would commit the Government to expenditure that does not easily fit inside the current fiscal envelope as projected by Treasury over the next couple of financial years—the period when each of them would come into effect.

That is the heart of the Government’s position, and has been throughout debate on the bill—that it is not about an additional dollar of paid parental leave; it is about the total cost of a programme. It has been the position that the total cost of 26 weeks is not affordable in what we have today or can see in the immediate term of the commencement of Part 1 and Part 2, and that remains our position. So as we come near the end of the discussion on these preliminary clauses, we would restate that were these clauses to be passed or agreed to by the Committee at this stage, and to progress to a third reading, then they would be, effectively, seeking to commit the Government to expenditure that does not readily fit within the envelope today. It is expenditure that we say we should not be now committing to for this purpose. The Government has many responsibilities to meet, and to expend more in this area would require a change in another area of expenditure. It is our view that what we have mapped out—at least, in the Budget for the coming 4 years—is a better use of those projected funds. So the Committee will make a call shortly, but it is our view—