Tena tatou.

I think after that last exchange, I might go into consultancy, and provide a bit of training for transformation for less violent ways of talking.

But first of all, I want to commend Sue Kedgley and the Greens for this Bill.

Albert Einstein once said, “not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted”.

Such might be a great subtitle for this Bill – the Employment Relations (Flexible Working Hours) Amendment Bill.

How do we count the value of nurturing children, the vital role of parenting; the significance of family life?

I want to make it clear that our support is not based on the United Kingdom legislation. Our support is based on our unequivocal belief in whanau development.

How do we account for the status we give to the health and safety of children - their sense of being loved, valued and actively participating in the families and societies into which they are born?

Well, the Unicef Innocenti Research Centre's international league tables, published earlier this year, gives us a pretty good clue of how much family life means to New Zealanders.

Asked "how often do your parents eat a main meal with you around a table?", only 64.4 per cent of 15-year-olds in this fine land answered "several times a week", compared with an OECD average of 79.4 per cent.

Asked "how often do your parents spend time just talking to you?", only 51.9 per cent of our 15-year-olds said "several times a week" compared to an average of 62.8 per cent.

So, Madam Speaker, how sad is that.

Eating a meal; talking with your parents – and we are scoring in the lower half of the league tables. It’s like that tegel chicken ad – where the only way that Dad can be identified is by the nametag he wears on his shirt.

Madam Speaker, this House must face up to the reality of people’s lives - where poverty has confronted our families in levels of severity that make every day difficult.

We must face up to a reality where domestic violence has become normalised, where our health is compromised, the addiction of gambling, of alcohol use, of drug abuse, is crippling.

But we have been there before and we can and we will overcome.
Our transformation depends on us all stepping up to the mark, and restoring to our whanau, the capacity for making a difference in our own homes.

It won’t come from the hand of Government. It won’t come from the directive of a Minister. But it will come from us.

And that is the first clear reason why we, in the Maori Party, support the Employment Relations (Flexible Working Hours) Amendment Bill.

The central importance of whanau and our responsibilities and rights to care for our own must be preserved.

Another reality of today’s profile, is that working families are now the norm. The single largest family type is couples where both parents work.

But it is also clear that many, many parents find it difficult to juggle paid work and parenting.

I can certainly relate to that as a young mother having to go to work, not because I wanted to but because I had to. I would have loved to have been there to see my children take their first steps.

The Ministry of Social Development Work, Family and Parenting Study (2006) looked at 'work to home spill-over' effects. The vast majority of people surveyed (61%) felt that they missed out on some of the rewarding aspects of being a parent because of work.

One of the very rare downsides of my life as an MP is missing out on the wonderful richness of being a day to day Nanny to my beautiful mokopuna.

This sadness is something I share with all my colleagues in the Maori Party – MPs and staff alike – that our choice to be doing the mahi we are doing now, comes with an enormous cost, day in, day out.

The Centre for Midwifery and Women’s Health’s Research stated the other view – in one submission from a part time working Mum with young children. She said:

“I feel very privileged…and it would be great for other parents to have the same open-minded, guilt-free opportunity. As they say….they’re not young forever, and the greatest gift we can ever give to our kids is time”.

The greatest gift indeed.

For whanau Maori, the option of work flexibility would be a huge advance.

For so many of our families, the pressure of inadequate income and the challenge to meet basic requirements such as decent housing, sufficient clothing, adequate furniture, medical expenses, dental care and electricity; and an ample food supply, gives very little choice about the concept of work and life balance.

There are three particular points that must be emphasized here.

Firstly, the Living Standards Report alerts us all to a reality in which 27% of all Pasifika families; and 17% of all Maori families are reported as suffering severe hardship.

Choice and relative bargaining power are luxuries in such a life.

The second reality is that of all two-parent families, in which one parent is working, 28% are in poverty.

And the third reality, is to emphasize the advice from the Children’s Commissioner, Dr Cindy Kiro, that while employers and employees benefit from the flexibility of working hours, so too, do children.

This Bill, Madam Speaker, is about support for their rights, for their needs, for their well-being.

Flexible work times can assist in the relentless juggling of work, family and financial pressures.

An environment in which home life is valued, and flexibility is freely negotiated, will result in more productive and healthy outcomes for all.

And I want to also focus on the benefits that businesses can achieve from this change.

From the flood of letters that has swamped our offices, one would thinks every New Zealanders lived to work, loved to work, and longed to work without having another thought for children or family life.

It seems a long way off from the every day lot of my constituency who tell me about being constantly overloaded, tired, with drooping morale, sick kids, and chronic stress. I don’t hear a lot of joy about the freedom to work from home, to opportunity to vary start and finish times, or even the unspoken of luxury of study leave.

What I hear about is the sheer hard work of doing everything on a shoestring, taking on the ‘double shift’ of parenting and full-time work, and how when something has to give, well it’s not going to be the children or whanau that are given up.

So it seems to us in the Maori Party, that the offer of flexible working hours is a win-win situation for everyone.

And I want to just mention the support of the National Party which is conditional on flexibility happening without the mechanism of legislation to make it so.

For the constituents in my office, for our people, the reality is that power and control of working hours is simply not an equal negotiable agreement. It doesn’t cut both ways.

Assisting parents to balance work and family life has not – and will not come – by the wistful hope of good faith bargaining.

We support this Bill, therefore, because it is most clearly a worker friendly initiative which can give more weight to the intentions of the Employment Relations Act.

One cannot simply assume that employers will be automatically fair-minded and family friendly. Whilst we would hope that employers could recognise the benefits – such as increased productivity, improved moral, decreased absenteeism, enhanced staff retention, improved profitability – the bulk of the lobbying that came into our offices does not give us that hope.

Finally, I want to share the results of a recent Australian study, An Unexpected Tragedy.

That report concluded that long working hours lead to strained family relationships, a high social costs which impacts heavily on parents, and results in reduced child wellbeing.

Will this Parliament be the one to stand in the way of a brighter future for our children?

© Scoop Media