Employment Relations (Extended Time for Personal Grievance for Sexual Harassment) Amendment Bill

I move, That the Employment Relations (Extended Time for Personal Grievance for Sexual Harassment) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Education and Workforce Committee to consider the bill.

This is a simple bill but it deals with a complex and difficult matter of sexual harassment. The bill itself extends the time during which a person can make a personal grievance claim from 90 days to 12 months in cases of sexual harassment. Sexual harassment is an invidious and difficult issue to talk about, let alone take action to try to prevent or to seek redress when it is found to have taken place. Our law does try to deal with it but it could be better.

Let me set out the problem. First of all, we have a definition of sexual harassment in workplace settings in the Employment Relations Act (ERA). Section 108 says that in workplace settings sexual harassment occurs when an employer or representative of an employer (a) directly or indirectly makes a request of that employee for sexual intercourse, sexual contact, or other form of sexual activity that contains an implied or overt promise of preferential treatment; or an implied or overt threat of detrimental treatment; or an implied or overt threat about the present or future employment status of that employee; or by the use of language, either written or spoken, of a sexual nature; or the use of visual material of a sexual nature; or physical behaviour of a sexual nature that directly or indirectly subjects the employee to behaviour that is unwelcome or offensive to that employee, whether or not that is conveyed to the employer or representative, and that, either by its nature or through repetition, has a detrimental effect on that employee’s employment, job performance, or job satisfaction. That’s how we define sexual harassment in workplaces.

It can also occur when a customer or client engages in similar behaviour. If an employer takes action to ensure that sexual harassment doesn’t happen and prevents it from occurring again—ensures that employees are safe and comfortable in their places of work—then, of course, no personal grievance to sexual harassment can arise. So far so good.

The difficulty arises with the nature of sexual harassment. People are often reticent about sexual matters; it’s not something we discuss particularly openly and we can be embarrassed to admit that something of a sexual nature has happened. Sometimes we may not even understand what is going on. Add to that the power dynamic in a workplace. If a senior worker, or an important client, or even just an older employee makes life difficult for someone, then all too often it is hard to speak out. Our cultural norms of shame and fear can hold us back. The power that another person holds over us can hold us back. We can be so upset and traumatised by the experience that, for a while, all that can be done is to retreat. And that can hold us back. The fear of retaliation can hold us back. Of course, there’s still the narrative out there that she must have done something to cause this, which can hold us back.

Therein lies the problem that this bill addresses. Ninety days may just not be enough time to raise a complaint in cases of sexual harassment. This is not just a theoretical problem, we know that sexual harassment is a common work problem.

In 2018, the New Zealand Law Society commissioned Colmar Brunton to investigate the realities of bullying and harassment within the legal profession: “When asked if they had been sexually harassed in a legal environment at some time in their working life, 31 percent of women and 5 percent of men said they had.”

Lawyer Zoë Lawton started a blog collecting examples from within the New Zealand legal profession of what went on. Here’s an example from that blog. It’s quite long but I’ve chosen it because it illustrates the range of problems that people deal with.

“I am grateful to have the opportunity to share my experiences in an anonymous forum. I wish I were courageous enough to make my comments publicly. I worked at one of the large commercial law firms in Auckland for about four years. During my time there, I experienced the following: the male solicitors ranked all of the female solicitors on a three-tier ranking system. They openly discussed women’s rankings in the office. When a young female lawyer travelled up to the Auckland office to assist on a case, several male solicitors took turns to walk past the office where she was sitting and then indicated whether she was worth sleeping with by giving a thumbs up or a thumbs down. The women in the team were given nicknames that corresponded with their physical attributes. When a young woman was frustrated about a legal issue, she was asked if she was on period. A partner was talking on the phone to a client and assured the client that there were ‘plenty of good looking sheilas in the office’ and he would make sure he sent one down to deliver the documents. Many, many loud conversations in the office, during work hours, where the men discussed their Tinder exploits in graphic detail. Men who would walk past women and make gestures as if they were ‘motor-boating’ them. They thought the women didn’t realise what they were doing. A partner with a creepy reputation who always found a way to end up going home in a taxi with a particularly drunk female solicitor, ‘just to make sure she got home ok’. This happened several times. I don’t know what happened after they left the function.

Many of these are not offensive enough to warrant a complaint to HR [on their own]. However, looking back on the experience, I now realise that this was a toxic environment that was rife with sexual harassment.”

That is just one entry in Zoë Lawton’s blog. There are pages and pages and pages of them. Sexual harassment is commonplace, despite all the work we’ve done in past decades.

But when the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment took an in-depth look at bullying and harassment in a report in 2020, it found that, between 2015 and 2019, the ERA considered just 14 cases where sexual harassment was the main basis of a personal grievance, and the Employment Court considered none. That seems odd. We know that people experience sexual harassment at work. We know it is far from uncommon. We know it causes people to leave their jobs.

In that Colmar Brunton survey of lawyers that I referred to earlier, of those who said they had been sexually harassed, 39 percent said it affected their emotional or mental wellbeing, and 32 percent said it affected their job or career prospects. People are badly affected by sexual harassment at work, and yet the ERA hears very few cases about it. That suggests that something is wrong in our settings.

Employment lawyer Susan Hornsby-Geluk says that one of the issues is that three months is just not long enough when it comes to sexual harassment. Although there is an exceptional circumstances clause in the law, which means that a case can sometimes be heard even if it’s raised after the three-month deadline, in practice, none have been because the ERA has interpreted exceptional circumstances very narrowly. So there is a problem in respect of raising personal grievances with respect to sexual harassment—it’s just not happening.

Of course, the same might be said about bullying in the workplace and other causes of personal grievance. Three months is just not long enough to consider and then lay a claim. However, that is a matter that the select committee might examine. As is, indeed, the issue of when the 90 days—or, if this bill is passed—the 12 months begins. Is it at the first instance of sexual harassment, or the second, or the last? What if there is a pattern of low-level events, how does that affect the time during which a personal grievance claim can be made? I hope that the select committee will examine these issues and I look forward to hearing what they think might be done in this regard.

Finally, I wish to acknowledge the woman who did much of the work that lies behind this bill—from assembling the evidence, to meeting with the Minister for workplace relations, and with my Green Party colleague Marama Davidson, and meeting with me. Zoë Lawton, thank you for your work. If this bill, in due course, becomes law, it will be in large part because you made it happen. I commend this bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. And thank you for the opportunity to speak on this, the Employment Relations (Extended Time for Personal Grievance for Sexual Harassment) Amendment Bill in the name of Dr Deborah Russell MP. This, for those people tuning in, is what’s called a member’s bill, where this member has had the good fortune of having won the ballot in order to get this bill considered by Parliament. And she’s had more luck than I have on these matters.

This is a bill that we in the National Party will support to select committee. And we do want to put this legislation in front of the wider public for them to comment on and give some feedback on, because we all know that the problem of sexual harassment in the workplace continues to be something that many workers and employers have to face. It’s nothing new; it’s been around since the dawn of time, and my sense is that there is far less tolerance for it now than there was in the past, and that’s a good thing. But there is still an enormous amount of work to do to show and give a clear indication that any form of harassment is not acceptable in the workplace, let alone sexual harassment. It extends in all sorts of workplaces in all circumstances. Certainly I remember being a victim of it myself in my teenage years, and many people in society have had to deal with unwanted attention in this way and have had to cope with it and all the things that have come along with it, and have had nowhere to go, not knowing what to do, and it takes time to work its way through. So the basic argument behind this bill or this proposal is that 90 days—three months—in order to lodge a personal grievance on this matter may not be sufficient time, given the nature of the circumstances behind what kind of harassment went on. And so, on the face of it, definitely worth considering.

I suppose the issue that we have to consider, and what we’ll hear some advice from, of course, would be to say, if we were to extend the time available for personal grievances across the board from 90 days to 12 months, then that would create, I think, a lot of problems. Because you’ve got to think in terms of small businesses and small-business owners and the uncertainty that would be created in the minds of those business operators having the potential for some sort of personal grievance to be raised extended over many, many months and towards a year. So at least at 90 days people have some sort of sense of certainty of how things are going and what’s going to happen.

If you extend that to 12 months, then that uncertainty hangs in the back of the minds of a small-business owner in particular because of the very severe consequences that that can have for their business if a personal grievance is raised and the whole process drags them into the ERA—the Employment Relations Authority—the court structure, the many thousands of dollars involved in lawyers and in pay-outs and things like that can be an absolute nightmare for small businesses struggling to stay afloat. And so we certainly wouldn’t want to be adding to the challenges that those businesses have to face at the same time. So we’ll be very keen to get a sense of how this would work in practice and whether or not this particular aspect, sexual harassment, is a special case. Then, naturally, we would be very cautious about extending this to all sorts of other cases of personal grievances so that that uncertainty that many small businesses would face would be extended further. So that is something that we’d be very keen to hear from in the select committee process.

So just for those people tuning in, what happens is this is a bill that’s been introduced by a member. We’re having our first reading now, and if it passes, which it looks like it will do, then it goes off to the select committee, who will call for submissions, and everybody in the public will have an opportunity to have their say. I’m sure we’ll hear from many people advocating for this extension. We may hear from some people voicing a note of caution about how this should operate and some of the dangers therein, and then we’ll reflect upon that and report back to the House.

So that’s a process that we’ll be looking forward to, but overall we in the National Party do share deep concerns—well, do share a common opposition that everybody in this House, I’m sure, extends to sexual harassment in the workplace or, indeed, in any part of our lives, and wanting to send a very clear message that it can’t be tolerated and that all New Zealanders, male, female, whatever, should be able to work without feeling the oppression that comes from ongoing sexual harassment. So there is no clearer message that can be sent, and so we’re looking forward to the discussion and thank the member for bringing this opportunity before the House, and look forward to the further debate this evening. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. This evening I rise, with gratitude, to speak on the Employment Relations (Extended Time for Personal Grievance for Sexual Harassment) Amendment Bill. I say “with gratitude”, because this is needed legislation, and I’d just like to thank my colleague Dr Deborah Russell for bringing this to the House. We’ve heard the need for this from two of our colleagues already, and I imagine that we will hear more before the evening is up. But I just wanted to add to the words that my colleague Dr Russell said, and just to define for the House, again, what we mean when we’re talking about sexual harassment. Sexual harassment, as we’ve heard, is any unwelcome or offensive sexual behaviour that is repeated or is serious enough to have a harmful effect, or which contains an implied or overt promise of preferential treatment, or an implied or overt threat of detrimental treatment.

This bill is asking for a very simple change to the Employment Relations Act. Basically, what it’s asking for is that it will extend the time that a personal grievance involving sexual harassment can be brought to 12 months. I understand that, in the select committee process, this may not be where the bill lands, but certainly that’s what sits before us at the time. And we know that this is primarily an issue that affects women, although by no means exclusively. We’ve heard from Mr Goldsmith this evening that he was, sadly, a victim himself. I can say that I, too, have been a victim in my past, of sexual harassment. And I would be astonished if anyone here could say that they had not. Although I obviously can’t speak for any of my colleagues, I can speak for my friends and for people who I’ve spoken to on this issue, and they confirm that this is a widely felt issue of deep concern.

As Dr Russell said, the Colmar Brunton survey did reveal that 31 percent of women said that, in their lifetime of work in law, they had experienced sexual harassment. Thirty-nine percent of the people said—and that included the men—it had affected their emotional or mental wellbeing, and 32 percent said it affected their job or career prospects, so this is no small issue. Nineteen percent of lawyers said that they had resigned from their job, and so why is it, do you think, that we see so little reporting? Well, people report fear of consequences; they fear that things will be made worse by reporting. The fear that this is not felt to be serious enough. And that’s what the lawyers were saying they felt. Others report concerns that this won’t be kept confidential, and that we know that reporting sexual harassment, in itself, is traumatising. So we can understand that there is a need for a little extra time so that people can come to terms with what’s happened to them, to maybe get the help that they need, get the support that they need to ensure that, when they do come forward, they are not at risk.

It’s undoubtedly true, as I said, that this is an issue that primarily affects women but, as well as affecting men, we know that our rainbow whānau are also disproportionately affected by issues around sexual harassment. Men, though, and women, I challenge you to not let this be our future. At 54, it breaks my heart that this is still a reality; that I’ve had to listen to young people come forward and describe changes that they’ve made to their careers as a result of experiencing sexual harassment. We know that men are victims too. Men and women and everyone: I need you to step up. I’m going to put a challenge. I’m going to ask you that, in addition to passing this piece of legislation, we actually challenge it every moment, and at every opportunity, any issues that we see in front of us, of sexual harassment. Don’t tolerate it, because this needs to stop. This is going to go some way to helping, this bill, and that’s why I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s a real pleasure to get to rise this evening and provide the Green Party’s support for the Employment Relations (Extended Time for Personal Grievance for Sexual Harassment) Amendment Bill in the name of Dr Deborah Russell. I’d like to congratulate her on the luck of getting it drawn but also for seeing a very discrete intervention that would make a difference and bringing that legislation to the House.

I also want to echo Dr Russell’s acknowledgment of Zoë Lawton and the work that she has done to bring survivors’ voices into the public to help reform our systems. It is incredibly important work and we have much work to do.

This piece of legislation, in extending the time that people have to raise a personal grievance that involves allegations of sexual harassment from 90 days to 12 months, does just make sense because of the dynamics of sexual violence as well as, often, some of the dynamics in the workplace that relate to sexual harassment. It makes sense to provide more time for those cases to come forward.

I note that in the consultation that the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) released in, I think, October 2020 around bullying and harassment at work in that document, they noted that they’d heard concerns about the lodging of cases with the Employment Relations Authority—that an employee must raise the personal grievance with their employer within 90 days of the alleged action. That is noted in that consultation as a problem, so it’s great to see that being addressed through this bill here. I’m still waiting. MBIE put out the consultation on that in 2020. It closed in March 2021 and we’re still waiting to hear from the Minister what the Government’s next steps in response to that public consultation will be. I’ve got to say I’m waiting with bated breath, because it is really important.

We have an incredibly complex system for responding to sexual harassment. We have the Employment Relations Authority, we have the Human Rights Act provision, and we have the WorkSafe provision, and we have our criminal justice system. And they don’t fit neatly together.

All except for WorkSafe require two parties and require the victim of the abuse to come forward and be potentially challenged and go sitting across from the person who they have experienced violence from. Rather than in the WorkSafe example, where they’re not necessarily having to—and there’s someone questioning this idea and saying they should have to, when actually it’s possible to investigate a situation and find the evidence and hear from the person accused. Nobody’s ever saying that that would not be part of it—but without requiring people to sit in the room together and be against each other.

So there is a lot of work that needs to be done in the system. When the MeToo movement was really erupting, and this is part of where it came back into public consciousness—that was in 2018 and we were really challenged as a country to do better. The Government took actions in terms of making sure that WorkSafe actually started responding appropriately to sexual harassment. That work has started, but more needs to be done, and this piece of work sits inside of that work being done by MBIE to look at the employment relations response.

We do need to get on with this because we’ve had like a wave of public concern around sexual harassment in the 1980s and we all thought we’ve got it fixed. Then it went out of public consciousness because we get awkward and uncomfortable and don’t want to talk about it, and then nothing happens and everything reverts back to the toxic environment that had been before.

This time, we have to make sure that we sustain our efforts and change our systems in a way that will ensure those who are causing harm are held to account.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Look, it is a real pleasure to stand and speak to this bill in the name of my colleague and very dear friend, Dr Deborah Russell. Dr Deborah Russell, I have to say, is one of the staunchest feminist women I know, and I utterly adore the fact that she has this bill in her name. I just really want to congratulate you, Dr Russell, for this bill, and appreciate the fact that if any bill should come before this House in your name, it should be this. So congratulations.

Look, the Employment Relations (Extended Time for Personal Grievance for Sexual Harassment) Amendment Bill—long name, but very clearly does some really useful things. What we know about sexual harassment—and we’ve heard from each and every speaker who’s kind of given us a bit of a definition: sexual harassment, under the Human Rights Act, and I’m just going to abbreviate it, is any unwelcome or offensive sexual behaviour that is repeated or is serious enough to have a harmful effect. I think we all, sadly, probably understand what sexual harassment is, from either our own experiences or family or friends. So I don’t think we need to go into that in any more depth.

However, what we do need to do, as a society and in this House, is to acknowledge the great harm that occurs with sexual harassment. We also have to acknowledge the shame that is attached to it, and this is one of the reasons I am quite delighted that, at the moment, the bill is proposing that we go from a 90-day period to a 12-month period. I hope that that sort of time frame sits in a longer period, because the shame that people feel in having been sexually harassed, and the experiences they feel—they need to spend time to get the courage up, generally, to report. They may have had to leave their employment. They may have had to go into counselling or some kind of support to be able to take this step and to report. And that is because, quite often, in a gendered society, in a patriarchal society, we blame ourselves as women. And I just want to acknowledge that for those who are concerned about sexual harassment, to take courage and to do what needs to be done.

I want to come very quickly to the overall beliefs and values that my colleague Jan Logie spoke about, and I want to just acknowledge the work of Te Aorerekura, which is the work around family and sexual violence, the policies that we have. And in that, the very first stage of this work is around changing societal views and values, which is where I think this bill sits. It sits at the beginning of the process of change. And I also want to acknowledge what Jan Logie said in regards to—we did sexual harassment in the 1980s, and then we forgot about it, and it’s back.

I’d also like to just acknowledge the fact that we here in this Parliament have had some quite consistent and serious matters raised in regards to sexual harassment. So I am holding up here Bullying and Harassment in the New Zealand Parliamentary Workplace, which is a Debbie Francis report. We have done some significant work in this Parliament to make some changes, and I think that this piece of legislation will add to our the safety. So I would just like to acknowledge the fact that the first thing that we have in this House, for parliamentarians and for those in Parliament—the first thing that we say here is we show that bullying and harassment, including sexual harassment, are unacceptable. For me, that is incredibly important, because it shows us as leaders in this country, but also to those who work here that this is unacceptable.

So I would like to commend this bill, absolutely, and I would like to acknowledge my friend Deborah Russell for bringing this to the House, and I thank you. I commend this bill.

I call—[pauses]

💬 Chris Baillie: Chris Baillie.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Ian McKelvie): I was expecting to call your next door neighbour. Sorry, Chris.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of ACT to take a call on the Employment Relations (Extended Time for Personal Grievance for Sexual Harassment) Amendment Bill. Certainly a lot less contentious than the last couple of bills we’ve heard tonight, which must be a good thing.

This bill is an uncomplicated bill that extends the period a personal grievance related to sexual harassment can be brought from three months to 12 months. It reflects the view that due to the nature of sexual harassment, victims often take longer to come forward. ACT will support this bill to select committee. The current 90-day deadline puts a relatively short time frame to advance a grievance, despite the grievance being serious in nature. There’s a reasonable case to suggest that the grievance would still be present after the extended period of time. New Zealand has a pretty poor record around sexual harassment and violence, and ACT is empathetic to the serious issues of sexual harassment in the workplace.

There are a couple of things that will be heard during the select committee process that may require more information. The impact on business is difficult to quantify, but I can’t imagine it having a huge effect on anything. The current personal grievance process is very employee-biased, and any misuse of this bill needs to be treated very seriously. I was talking to a business owner last week, actually, who had one of his labourers take his ute home without permission, and he got a drunk driving charge. The employer couldn’t trust him. The next week, on Monday actually, and he’s up for a personal grievance because he reduced his hours. Or the waitress who was asked by her female manager to smile more when serving customers a couple of months ago; that led to a personal grievance for bullying. So we need to be really careful to make sure the personal grievance process is used how it is meant to be used.

I think we will hear in the select committee that this issue, and it’s been alluded to earlier by a couple of speakers, isn’t gender specific, and I think many examples won’t fit the expected profile that we all are going to assume.

We look forward to ironing out some of these issues in the select committee process and progressing this bill. We support this bill. Thanks.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. Look, it’s a pleasure to stand to take the opportunity to speak on the Employment Relations (Extended Time for Personal Grievance for Sexual Harassment) Amendment Bill. First and foremost, I’d like to congratulate my colleague Deborah Russell for knowing where to change the law in the right way. We know from previous members’ bills that sometimes a very small change in the law can make a very significant change in the daily lives of people in New Zealand, and I think this bill does exactly that. So the simple change of enabling a longer period to be able to lodge a personal grievance gives people time to process what may have happened to them, and to do that in a way that they feel comfortable and confident in being able to do that.

I think it also sends a strong message that we need to be more accommodating to enable people to come forward, and that’s exactly what this bill does. So currently only 90 days is able to be done for a report of sexual harassment. That can be difficult because that behaviour may be ongoing. That behaviour may have been occurring for a number of years. So coming to terms with that and being able to come forward is an important part. It is an imperative that employees have time to consider what has occurred and to feel safe to raise it with others. This bill will ensure that there is time to process and proceed in a manner which best suits that person and their family.

The current deadline seems an arbitrary number of days that imposes a deadline on victims of workplace sexual harassment and makes it less likely that they could potentially formally raise concerns about the behaviour of their colleagues. This bill will improve the personal grievance process for victims to consider what has happened to them before deciding to come forward.

I think importantly, it sends that message that it is OK to come forward. I’d like to share a story. My first job was when I was 15 years old, working in a supermarket, and I worked alongside other females at a similar age. Our boss at the time was sexually harassing one of the members of staff, and we did not know what to do. We knew it wasn’t right. We knew what he was saying was kind of a joke, but it wasn’t a right joke. Then it proceeded that he was offering driving lessons to one girl in particular after hours, unbeknown to her parents. It was me who at the time raised it with the superiors. I was terrified when I did it, but I knew that it was not right, and that member of staff was transferred to another supermarket. It was only when he was transferred that the victim broke down and cried. It was only then that she came to the full realisation that she had been a victim of sexual harassment. That experience, that stepping up and making a stand, got the full support of my female colleagues and formed and forged my experience in workplace relationships going forward to know that you need to call things out when you need to.

So I would like to hope that this bill sends a strong message to all those 15-year-old women or men in workplaces around New Zealand who are yet to be full adults and know what’s going on, or maybe who just think you’re along with colleagues in any of those circumstances. If you do not feel comfortable or do not feel right in your workplace, you have the right to challenge that, and you should not be curtailed by 90 days in order to be able to carry that forward. So I commend Deborah and her ability to take something that needs to change. I look forward to more laws in this space to continue to grow this strength of having good and strong workplaces where everybody can feel safe and enjoy their work every day. I commend this bill to the House.

Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker, and thank you for the opportunity to speak on this member’s bill in the name of my colleague Dr Deborah Russell, and I thank her for bringing it to this House. Sexual harassment is certainly very different from the sort of situation which Mr Baillie described about a worker taking a company car without permission. It is right that we treat the way that you might raise a personal grievance about those two issues very differently. But I’ve also reflected on the speeches in this House and about what sorts of situations one might raise a personal grievance in. I heard the words of my friend on the other benches Jan Logie ringing in my ears, when she said, “We get awkward and uncomfortable and nothing happens when we can’t talk about these things.” What is the cost of that inaction?

The cost of that is in situations like when I was in year 11 at high school. I went with my friend to a doctor’s appointment and I sat down with her in the waiting room, distracting her with a quiz in a Dolly magazine. As soon as we got into the office, she burst into tears, and it was up to me to explain to the GP why we were there. I told this GP that my friend had been working in a cafe for three months. Her manager had started hugging her on the first day that she was on the job. He would text her at random times of the night. He would hold her hand while he gave her the best shifts in the roster. He would hold her arm while in front of customers. One night, when he was dropping her home, he pulled up on the side of the road and undid his pants. We were in the waiting room of the doctors, waiting for an appointment because my friend was worried she was pregnant. It was the GP who told these two 15-year-old girls in our school uniforms that this was sexual harassment at work, among other things. As she organised tests and medication for my friend, the GP told me that we could get help for someone who had been harassed so severely at work. She wrote my friend a letter confirming the medical exam and she told us that she’d give evidence if my friend wanted to take it further. But my friend never did take it further. She felt shame and so much embarrassment, even to this day, about her own naivety. But I look back on that and see someone who couldn’t get away from a manager who was acting publicly like he owned her.

So this bill would improve the personal grievance process available to people in her situation, people who need time to think on the experiences that have happened to them, people who need to speak to their friends, people who need to seek the guidance of their doctors, of their church ministers, of their teacher, of people who they trust. This takes time, and 12 months to be able to do that as a young woman, for anyone in this situation, is what we need to improve this law. It’s a useful change, because everyone has the right to feel safe at work and, more importantly, have the time to safely raise issues with their employer.

The bill is a small change but it will significantly impact on workplace culture and, particularly, silence towards sexual harassment. This culture of silence towards sexual harassment is something that all of us need to address. It’s right that we’re doing it in a member’s bill and with the support of the Parliament. I would implore all members around this House to take note and pay attention to the way that this bill strikes a careful balance between the rights of everyone involved in the employment process and the grievance process, because we need to get this right. It needs to be enduring. We cannot have a system where we revisit these rules, because the cost of not doing anything and the cost of not talking about these things and the cost of not making constant progress to improve the situation of workers—whether they are young, whether they are women, whether they are working in jobs where they are disempowered to raise issues with their employers—would fail all of them.

Ending violence against women, wherever it is—whether it’s in the workplace; whether it’s at home—has to be a priority, and changing our culture around raising these issues is a big part of that. This bill does it.

Now, speaking directly to people who might be going through this, it’s not your burden alone and it’s not the friend who was in my position who would be alone, is what I would say to them. There is a framework of legislation that my colleague Jan Logie outlined that deals with this sort of thing. The health and safety requirements at work require everyone to stamp out this kind of behaviour—not just your boss, not just your manager, not just the owner; everyone around you has a role to play in this. Making these processes easier for people and their situations is something that we can do in this House very proudly. I commend the bill.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I can’t say that it’s a pleasure to take a call on this bill tonight. What I do say is that it’s sobering to take a call and that it’s a trigger for many who have been through the experience of trauma associated with sexual harassment. I commend Deborah Russell in bringing this bill to the House for something that is profound and has a profound impact on people’s lives.

So I often speak about members in the House speaking from a level of experience, and for those of us who experienced trauma and the effect that that has on our lives, it does take time to deal with it. So the purpose of this bill is to extend the time for an employee to raise a personal grievance alleging sexual harassment from 90 days to one year. The impact of trauma on a person is something that does take time, and many who will be listening will find that this will be a trigger from past experiences and that it’s important to have the time to be able to process. So this bill is supported by the National Party, and it would seem that it has cross-party, throughout-the-House support for it to go to the select committee, which I understand will be the Education and Workforce Committee.

I listened to Dr Russell as the first speaker talking about this bill and the personal trauma and experience that Zoë Lawton has pursued with Dr Russell and also with this bill coming to the House. It prompted me, also, to look to the legal definition of sexual harassment, and it prompted me to go to the WorkSafe website, which outlines a guide there for persons who have been subjected to sexual harassment. There’s a guide there on the WorkSafe website, and a definition of sexual harassment has been addressed under section 108 of the Employment Relations Act 2000, and Dr Russell read and detailed that. On the WorkSafe website, sexual harassment is also defined by the Human Rights Act 1993 as any unwelcome or offensive sexual behaviour that is repeated or serious enough to have a harmful effect or which contains an implied or overt promise of preferential treatment or of detrimental treatment. So the definition of sexual harassment is both in the Human Rights Act and, specifically, section 108 of the Employment Relations Act.

This bill is important because, as I’ve referenced and listened to Dr Russell sharing Zoë Lawton’s experience and other persons’ experience of trauma particular to sexual harassment, it takes time, it take courage, and it takes support to be able to confront and to be able to expose what’s going on. Trauma’s debilitating, it’s crippling, it’s sickening, and it’s disempowering. This bill is invoking a process to empower, to encourage, to promote, and to confront those perpetrators of sexual harassment.

The Education and Workforce Committee will go through the detail of this bill to ensure that there is consistency with amendments to the Employment Relations Act in addressing grievances for sexual harassment in ensuring the appropriate extension of time from 90 days to 12 months is invoked. On that note, the National Party commends this bill to select committee for further deliberation.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s an absolute privilege and honour to speak in the first reading of this bill tonight. Before I start, can I also congratulate the member and my colleague Dr Deborah Russell on bringing this kaupapa—this really important kaupapa—to the Whare and starting that change that we know is needed in this space. While it seems like quite a small change in terms of the change to the Employment Relations Act, amending section 114 of the principal Act to extend the period that the PG, or the personal grievance, may be brought to 12 months from the nine months where that personal grievance involves sexual harassment. It has big ramifications, much bigger than just that simple change.

You’ve heard many of the other speakers talk tonight around the difference in terms of sexual harassment as a PG, especially for women, but, actually, for anyone who has experience of sexual harassment at work, it is about that power imbalance and it is about making sure that people who have experienced that have the sufficient time to process that. It’s not that I think anyone who has ever experienced any kind of sexual harassment or sexual violence can truly process what that means for you. For everyone, it’s different, and it certainly warrants the time to be able to not only seek the support that you need to work yourself through that traumatising experience but also the courage and support that you might need to report that and also take the personal grievance, if you have the courage to do that. Unfortunately, as other people who have spoken tonight have said, that is not always the case—certainly, with people who have experienced sexual harassment or sexual violence.

So, again, although this is quite a small change, it is a big change in terms of making sure that we give that ample time for people to be able to seek that support. I would also like to add that while it is a high proportion of wāhine, or women, that do, where they can, report the sexual harassment, there are others as well. Other people mentioned tonight are the takatāpui, or the rainbow whanaunga, who also are prone to experiencing sexual harassment and other bad behaviours in the workplace, but it is also men, we know, as well.

So this is another bill, I believe, that goes to the bigger mahi that this Labour Party is doing and the Labour Government is doing in terms of making sure that workers are safe. No matter what that looks like, workers are safe when they go to work, and this is part of that bigger mahi we are doing with the fair pay agreements. We are making sure people have a voice. We certainly are making sure that women have a voice and that they feel encouraged, that they will be listened to, and that there’s a process there for people to be able to take their voice and their concerns through to.

It is really heartening to hear that others are supporting this across the House as well. We know, not just as women but, actually, even those that are not, you have your mothers and your sisters and your daughters—nobody wants to know that their loved one who happens to be a wahine or a takatāpui whānau goes to work and that they’re feeling unsafe or they’re feeling pressure, like our colleague Arena Williams spoke of tonight, around being pushed into a situation where they have no control over what that looks like for them. So, again, a small change, but actually massive ramifications in terms of being able to support our people who need this space to be able to figure out where they’re at, process that trauma, and then be able to make sure that they stand up for themselves and shift that power imbalance and remind people that this is not OK.

I just want to thank Dr Deborah Russell again. This is a really good bill. This is something that is really at the core of what the Labour Government stands for, and it’s for that reason I commend the bill to the House.

I call Dr Deborah Russell—some minutes in reply.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I will make this a brief call, given the time of night, just to summarise on the last matters of this bill. I’d like to thank my colleagues from across the House for their support of this bill. I appreciate that my colleagues in the ACT Party and the National Party have promised support as far as the select committee stage, but I think that discussion at the select committee will be very, very useful indeed.

A couple of the speakers raised issues around what it might mean for businesses. Of course, the cheap answer is that it has no consequence for businesses where there is no sexual harassment. That is the cheap answer. The better answer is actually to consider the balance of rights and responsibilities of both businesses and employees, and to work out how we can make that a little bit better. The contention of this bill is that three months is not long enough for employees. I have suggested 12 months would be a better balance between businesses and employees; I will leave the select committee to examine that.

I’d like to thank my colleagues who pointed out where this bill fits in the whole pattern of bills around sexual harassment and sexual violence. That was really helpful to put it in context. I’d especially like to thank my colleague Arena Williams for her story, which brought life to the whole matter, which made us really understand why it is important.

A final thought: I often say patriarchy harms men too—patriarchy harms men too. And, of course, men too can be sexually harassed, but this is a gendered issue. It is typically women, but men do get sexually harassed too. Nevertheless, if we sort this out it helps all of us to get along better, to run our businesses better, to be better employees, to fit together better in this world. And, indeed, fixing this problem, which might look as though it concerns mostly women, is something that, actually, helps us to dismantle the patriarchy and it helps us all. I commend this bill to the House.

Motion agreed to.

Bill read a first time.

The question is, That the Employment Relations (Extended Time for Personal Grievance for Sexual Harassment) Amendment Bill be considered by the Education and Workforce Committee.

Motion agreed to.

Bill referred to the Education and Workforce Committee.

Members, the time has come for me to leave the Chair. The House is adjourned until 2 p.m. tomorrow.

The House adjourned at 10.02 p.m.