Support Workers (Pay Equity) Settlements Amendment Bill

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

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s nice to be called before you’ve even asked for it, but I move that the Support Workers (Pay Equity) Settlements Amendment Bill be now read a third time. This is a significant piece of legislation that’s broadly supported across the House, and I do welcome the support that all parties have indicated they will be giving to this particular piece of legislation.

The bill makes an important amendment to the Care and Support Workers (Pay Equity) Settlement Act 2017. That Act was a very historic settlement, and one that was very well debated in the House at the time. That was the settlement for those workers in aged care, disability, and home and community support sectors. It addressed the historical undervaluation of the work in those sectors simply because they were being done predominantly by women. The Act, however, excluded those working in the mental health and addiction sector.

This bill implements the new pay equity settlements for mental health and addiction workers, and vocational disability workers who are employed by Oranga Tamariki and the Ministry of Social Development. It ensures that the support those workers are providing, to support those experiencing mental health and/or addiction challenges, receives the same pay rates as those who are working in the aged care, disability, and home and community support sectors. It also corrects a formula within the existing Act, and formalises the ongoing payment of care and support workers’ rates to vocational and disability workers who are employed by Oranga Tamariki and the Ministry of Social Development.

This urgency has had a little bit of a pay equity / pay parity flavour to it, and I, for one, welcome that. I think it is appropriate that Parliament moves swiftly to ensure that people are paid a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work, and that they are not discriminated against based on their gender. It is simply wrong to suggest that, in a like-for-like comparison, some jobs are paid less than others simply because there are more women doing those jobs than in other sectors.

This bill goes some way to delivering the commitment that we have all made as a Parliament for quite some period of time now—decades now—to eliminate that practice. It is taking a while for that to flow through into actual practice, and so I think the fact that we’ve seen the changes to the equal pay legislation passed through the House yesterday—and I hope to see this bill pass through the House very, very shortly—I think that’s a good sign, and something that the Parliament will welcome.

So I want to thank the Health Committee for its consideration of the bill, and the amendments that they have made to the bill that have arisen from their deliberations. I think the select committee process did demonstrate that there is wide support for this bill, including across the House. The committee’s amendments have ensured that it better reflects the settlement that was reached between the unions, mental health and addiction service providers, district health boards, the Ministry of Health, and, of course, the separate agreement for vocational disability workers.

I don’t intend to speak for a long time on this legislation. I think it’s a good piece of legislation, it is an overdue piece of legislation, and I commend it to the House.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. It’s a pleasure to rise on behalf of the National Party to take a call in support of this very important bill that will soon be legislation. Can I just acknowledge the Minister, as well, for his words, and agree with him totally about the sentiment of the importance of pay equity and pay parity.

This bill will, quite rightly, look after two groups of workers—that would be the mental health and addiction support workers, and the vocational and disability support workers. I think we can never underestimate the work of support workers across the board. Quite often we focus more on the acute end and on our medical staff, who seem to take quite a lot of the status and accolades in caring for vulnerable members of our community, but when you look at one of these groups—the mental health and addictions support workers—we do know that these workers provide valuable support on the ground with people with complex mental health and addiction needs. If they get it right, it prevents that group of people getting into a crisis and it prevents them going into secondary and tertiary care.

I do know from my own background of working in the mental health and addiction sector that it is predominantly a sector with a female workforce, and I’d like to think that experience for me has been for the betterment in my career and has helped me see the world differently. It is concerning with an issue around pay equity and pay parity that in today’s day and age we are still attempting to address that issue.

I do want to pay my acknowledgements to the many people who have worked hard to bring this issue to Parliament. In some way, I suppose, it does validate that Parliament represents people and the advocacy that those people have taken to get this issue to Parliament. I think it speaks volumes that we have full party support here today.

I do want to acknowledge the Hon Michael Woodhouse, who did bring the Care and Support Workers (Pay Equity) Settlement Bill here under the former National Government in 2017, as well as Louisa Wall, as chair of the Health Committee, who I think has done a fantastic job this term in shepherding a large number of very important bills through the Health Committee.

I won’t take up too much time of the House, other than to say that this bill will be significant for a number of people who care. When you talk to a lot of support workers that’s in fact what draws them to the profession—it is that they just want to care for other people in their community—and, quite rightly, they today should get full pay equity and pay parity. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Tēnā koe e Te Māngai o Te Whare. Tēnā koutou katoa. As the chair of the Health Committee, I can say it was our pleasure to shepherd through the Support Workers (Pay Equity) Settlements Amendment Bill. This third reading allows us to, I guess, explain what the bill does, which is in fact to give effect to two pay equity settlement agreements between the Crown and, firstly, vocational and disability support workers, and, as my colleague Matt Doocey has spoken about, mental health and addiction support workers. This follows on from the Terranova settlement, which gave rise to the principal Act. Essentially, that established a matrix of pay rates, and I actually say they are akin to the living wage. They were exposed because of the Kristine Bartlett case, which highlighted that support workers were being systematically underpaid because the workers were predominantly women.

I want to acknowledge the E tū union. I want to acknowledge the Public Service Association. I want to acknowledge the New Zealand Nurses Organisation, and I want to acknowledge the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions. It has been the union movement that has advocated for our workers. Congratulations to our unions. They show how valuable and vital they are, and can I say to Muriel Tunoho that I know your work isn’t over, and you will continue to challenge the Government and extend the rights of workers, as you should. I commend this bill to the House. Kia ora.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise to speak at this reading of the Support Workers (Pay Equity) Settlements Amendment Bill, a bill that I’ve had a bit to do with over the years, being a part of Cabinet when it was put through. There were a lot of discussions about the affordability of it, and, at its heart, the fundamental principle here is that the people who care for our most vulnerable were not being recognised and not being valued in the way that they should. So, with a vast amount of discussion and argument, we got to the pay equity settlement in June 2017. That was an extraordinary and historic settlement of $2 billion. I think, from memory, the 55,000 or so aged-care workers around New Zealand were getting around $5,000 each a year, which is a big difference.

Those of us in this House who have had experience with being involved with aged care and with mental health and addiction care, as my colleague Matt Doocey has, will be well aware of the nature of the vocation of the work that these people do. It is not just clinical skills, it is not just doing what is supposed to be done, it is going that extra mile, showing compassion to people who are vulnerable and lonely. So, for me, it has always been something that is essential because it was almost as if all of that was being taken for granted.

So with the Terranova settlement, which really did change the landscape of the professionalism of this group of people who, you know, are in there for the long haul as carers and workers, this has given them a proper structure and a professionalism in terms of their wages. I think that’s really important. The yawning gap, of course, was the mental health and addiction services carers: they were not being recognised, there was a lot of discussion and compromise at the time.

So the background to it is that this has been something that has been a long time coming. I, personally, feel that the work done by the mental health and addiction services is every bit as needed and needing to be valued as those of the aged care sector. So this was a very important part of rounding off, if you like, caring for the carers at the remuneration level. I think, also, the disability support workers, who I had a bit to do with when I was Minister, are also people that just keep soldiering on and keep doing what they feel needs to be done. This is an extremely important signal to them—as well as literally valuable to them—that we, as a country, appreciate what has been done by highly skilled people who do their very best on a compassionate as well as a clinical level. So for all of those reasons, and for the length of time this has taken to get to this stage, I will delay it no longer. I commend this bill to the House.

This is a very important bill and New Zealand First commends it to the House. Thank you.

I won’t take too long on this. I was fortunate to be the chair of the Health Committee in the last Parliament that pushed through that major piece of work—the $2 billion worth of work. We knew at the time, as did the Government, the unions, and others, that mental health and addiction support workers needed to be included. For reasons I won’t go into here, all those groups understood at the time it couldn’t happen. So I’m pleased to see—granted it’s taken three more years—that we’re here, but it’s a good win, and, as I mentioned with an earlier bill, it shows that this House can work cooperatively to do what its single purpose is, which is to support the people of New Zealand.

I’m pretty stoked to be able to stand on behalf of the Green Party in support of the third reading of the Support Workers (Pay Equity) Settlements Amendment Bill. What a great couple of days for women and for justice in this country, where last night, just on the mark of midnight, we passed the pay equity legislation that creates a framework to make it a lot easier for undervalued, underpaid women to be able to turn over the exploitation that they’ve been experiencing for all of their lives. This is a really momentous time for us as a country in terms of righting longstanding wrongs.

As we’ve heard from other speakers, this piece of legislation that we’ve got today is, in effect, an add-on to the settlement that was initiated by Kristine Bartlett, supported by the E tū union, the New Zealand Nurses Organisation, and a huge amount of work from those union members right across the country against their employers, who were supported by interventions from the previous Government, on the side of the employer, trying to block progress for those women to achieve pay equity. But they persevered and they won, and they got their $2 billion settlement. That is a tribute to the power of organising and being in the right.

It’s fantastic to now, today, see that being extended to mental health workers and vocational disability support workers, because last term when we heard what I think of as the Kristine Bartlett legislation, we heard from mental health workers about how it didn’t make sense not to include them in that settlement, because, in effect, it’s the same group of workers. They were really worried that their sectors would lose staff and be unable to keep providing for people, because they’d be going to the better paid jobs in the aged care and the formalised disability sector or non-vocational disability sector. So it’s fantastic to see this now, that problem being solved, and it’s a great day for justice.

💬 Hon Jacqui Dean: Mr Speaker?

Marja Lubeck.

💬 Marja Lubeck: Thank you, Mr Speaker.

I’m sorry. I saw her go before. We’ll get to you.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s great to see the Support Workers (Pay Equity) Settlements Amendment Bill pass following, of course, the historic moment—as referenced by my colleague Jan Logie—of seeing the Equal Pay Amendment Bill pass last night, which has been decades in the making. Also great to see that the mental health and addiction support workers, who were left out of the settlement by the previous National Government, are now getting their invaluable work recognised. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you. I’m very pleased to take a call in the Support Workers (Pay Equity) Settlements Amendment Bill. I’m quite sure by this stage of the passage of this bill that the detail of the bill will have been well discussed by this House and by the Health Committee. All members in this House have an interest in the provisions in this bill.

So I’ll keep my contribution very local and note that the changes made in the select committee—which is wonderful news, to hear that select committee was able to bring forward some good substantive changes which will clarify the duties of individually funded clients. This is a local issue for me as an MP. I have a number of small to very small communities which are geographically very distant from each other, and support workers in the past have found themselves under enormous pressure getting from client to client. They love their work. I’ve met with a number of them a number of times. Support workers are very committed to their work. They just get very fond of their clients, often, and want the best for them. But the funding issues and travel issues have always been very problematic for them.

So the changes brought by the select committee now mean that support workers can be employed by clients who receive individualised funding from the Ministry of Health. These workers and their employers are included in the settlement agreement, but the definition of “employer” in the principal Act doesn’t cover individually funded clients. So the changes brought by the select committee would ensure that those care workers paid by individually funded clients receive the same pay and conditions, including both the minimum wage rates and, of course, back-pay.

As I said, this is an issue which has been dealt with initially by the previous National Government and now this current Government. It is for the betterment of support workers across all fields, but even more importantly, I think, it has great benefits to the clients who are in their care. I support this bill to the House.

Bill read a third time.