Mapp Wayne: Holidays Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Mapp Wayne: Holidays Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:620;Page:16025] 
Dr WAYNE MAPP (National—North Shore) 
: 
 As we indicated in the second reading this is an extraordinary missed opportunity. The Government boasts that it is fixing up the unintended consequences of the Holidays Act. If it had listened to the numerous submissions it would know that business has effectively rejected this bill. Business rejects it because of what it does not do; not what it does do. 
The Government had the opportunity to fix the huge problems around relevant daily pay and it has wilfully refused to take that opportunity. These kinds of opportunities do not arise frequently and that is why businesses are so concerned with the failure of the Government in this matter. Did it listen to the Meat Industry Association? The association’s evidence showed that the cost of sickness in the first 6 months that the Holidays Act has been in force went up 50 percent. Fifty percent more people are now taking sickness leave than before. Why do they do that? Because the reality is that people can get more by being sick than by working. That is ridiculous and the challenge to the Government was to fix this up. 
We have provided the opportunity for the Government to fix that very issue. We have gone through a very careful process of preparing a Supplementary Order Paper. If the Minister cares to read it he can vote for it because it is precisely what he—or rather his predecessor—introduced in 2003 in the Holidays Bill. The proposal that National has put on the table is what the Government introduced just 12 months ago. What happened was that after the select committee process because there were no proposed amendments to the bill a sneaky deal was done that introduced the concept of relevant daily pay—the source of all the problems. 
I turn to Business New Zealand’s submission to the select committee in September of this year on the Holidays Amendment Bill. Business New Zealand made it very clear that it wanted this issue fixed. Government members had the temerity to suggest that Business New Zealand was part of the process of introducing relevant daily pay. That caused Business New Zealand to present a letter to the select committee which confirmed that at no stage did Anne Knowles of Business New Zealand indicate acceptance of the concept of relevant daily pay. Indeed when the original bill was released it did not include such a concept which is consistent with there being no agreement. 
So we are offering the Government the opportunity to go back to its own proposal—the proposal that was fair and reasonable. It is an advance from the Holidays Act of 1981 and there was widespread concern that that Act needed to be updated. So why will the Government not take the very reasonable step of voting today to fix the most serious problem in the Holidays Act by voting for its own proposal? Because that is the opportunity it has. One would think that when the Government carefully goes through the Supplementary Order Paper that I have introduced it will see that it can fix the serious issues not the issues that it is claiming have to be fixed which are minor and trivial compared with this major issue. We tell the Government to take this opportunity and vote for the measure that it introduced itself in the bill in 2003 and fix up the real problems of the Holidays Act.