Beyond Three Days

You may be lucky and work for a company who realises that a long weekend is not long enough, and who gives you more time and care. But should the time to grieve be down to an employer lottery?

In 2023 I didn’t know you got just three days.

I found this out the hard way. In early 2023, in the space of six months, I lost my daughter Lauren in a traumatic road traffic accident. I lost my business due to Covid, my relationship failed and I found myself homeless. I know what grief does to a body, how the elephant on your chest feels, how your brain won’t hold a thought. And what it feels like when the world expects you back at your desk as if nothing has happened.

I was self employed so I didn’t have to do anything but heal, but my daughter Charlotte, Lauren’s identical twin, was told she had to be back at work three days after losing her twin sister.

It’s why I started Beyond Three Days, the national campaign to lift New Zealand’s statutory bereavement leave, a number that hasn’t moved since 1981. The campaign has taken me into the media and into Parliament’s select committee process, and into hundreds of conversations with people whose hardest moment was met with silence at work.

Three days is nowhere near enough time to grieve, plan a funeral, then go back to work as if nothing has happened.

The Beyond Three Days campaign has put forward a workable, state-funded solution to New Zealand’s bereavement leave shortfall, ensuring grieving workers get the time they need without adding financial pressure to struggling businesses.

The campaign has formally presented its funding model to Workplace Relations and Safety Minister Hon Brooke van Velden and the Ministry of Business, Innovation, and Employment (MBIE).

We have always maintained that supporting grieving workers must be done in a way that respects economic realities. Forcing a traumatised worker back to work after just 72 hours creates an invisible productivity crisis. However, expecting small businesses to absorb the wage costs of an extension during a tough economic cycle is not the answer. The solution lies in a state-funded mechanism.

The campaign’s proposal highlights proven international frameworks and existing domestic infrastructure to achieve this balance:

• The UK Small Business Reimbursement: In the United Kingdom, under the Statutory Parental Bereavement scheme, employers pay grieving workers upfront but reclaim 92% to 109% of the cost directly back from the government, entirely protecting small business cash flow.
• The Paid Parental Leave System Blueprint: New Zealand already utilises Inland Revenue infrastructure to distribute crown-funded payments for major life transitions. Under the proposed model, days 4 through 10 of an immediate family bereavement would be treated as a state-subsidised “Compassionate Relief” period.