Prebble Richard: Holidays Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Prebble Richard: Holidays Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
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Hon RICHARD PREBBLE (ACT) 
: 
 I rise on behalf of the ACT party to speak to the Holidays Amendment Bill—and the ACT party recommends to the House that we do not vote for this bill. I will start with the point raised by Sue Bradford from the Greens with regard to medical notes. Of course it is the Green Party’s fault. They are the ones who wanted to have amendments introduced into employment law setting out various requirements with regard to medical certificates. For 50 years we have had no law on the matter and no problems at all. There is no need for the Government to start getting involved and telling employers and employees when they need to produce medical certificates. 
Sue Bradford 
: That was nothing to do with us. 
Hon RICHARD PREBBLE 
: I have heard the Green Party raving on about medical certificates and wanting the laws changed on that. The best law change would be to have no law at all. There was no problem prior to the “Green” Labour Party deciding that it had to tell employers and employees when or whether they should produce medical certificates. 
But let me turn to a second point—the major claim of the Government that this was an inadvertent mistake. Well that is interesting. The inadvertent mistake was that people could get paid double time on double time. I say that that is interesting because the Council of Trade Unions turned up to the select committee and said: “No it wasn’t. We always knew that that would be the intention.” Why is that interesting? Well one of the reasons it is interesting is that under the Official Information Act we now know that the original legislation was the result of secret talks between the Government and the Council of Trade Unions when they wrote the Holidays Amendment Bill. Only after that did they go through the sham—and I call it a sham—of asking the rest of the country what it thought about it. 
Employers warned the Government earlier this year. The ACT party warned the Government that it should not be passing a law of this sort. I agree with the Council of Trade Unions on this matter that this is another bungle by the Government and that it is not an unintended consequence. All that has happened is that the Government has found it impossible to publicly justify the fact that some people are able to receive what is really a very large sum of money indeed for working on a statutory holiday especially when their contract of employment contemplated that they would be working on that statutory holiday and they would be paid accordingly. I will give one example that I know of personally as a former Minister of Railways. When I was Minister of Railways— 
Hon David Cunliffe 
: As if we could forget! 
Hon RICHARD PREBBLE 
: I thank the member—he says that he remembers. 
Hon David Cunliffe 
: He will be long remembered for that. 
Hon RICHARD PREBBLE 
: I thank the member. The railway engine drivers had their own union. They approached the railways and said that they would like to go on a salary and no longer wished to be paid penal rates for overtime shift work or for working on Christmas Day. That was a proposal from the union. Members might wonder why the union would make such a proposal. Well it had a very good reason. It had quite a good superannuation scheme—not quite as good as ours but quite a good superannuation scheme—which is fixed on their base pay. They worked out that if they lifted their base pay then their superannuation would be better and over their whole lifetime they thought they would be better off. 
The railways agreed to the proposal. Why was that? Because the actual cost of working out penal rates overtime triple rates on Christmas Day—and the engine drivers used to get paid all sorts of different things such as wet money etc.—ran into millions of dollars and the railways would be better off if all the employees went on a salary. Under this bill even though those engine drivers voluntarily agreed to be paid an extra amount of money and that they would not be paid those payments along has come a Labour Government and said: “We override those freely entered into agreements and rail must now pay penal rates at Christmas time even though the engineers are getting paid a higher base rate because of what they gave up.” That story is repeated time and time again right through our shift-work industries. 
But there is another matter that is even more serious. The select committee is very ideological. The Labour members on the select committee are all former trade union officials of one sort or another. The select committee without consultation after it had heard submissions changed the whole basis of holiday pay which has been fixed in New Zealand for more than 60 years from ordinary time which we all know to a concept called “relative day’s pay”. What is a relative day’s pay? Well one goes back over the previous 4 weeks and works out all the penal payments that a person might have received including for example a payment for attending and that is put into the sick day or the day off on a statutory holiday. 
The effect of that is not that some people get paid more for staying at home; it is actually that all people do. The reason that they do is that it costs something to go to work and when that cost is deducted one is under the law now always better off to have a sickie. When we consider the shift-work industries like the meatworks and like Wattie’s—crucial export industries—the effect of establishing this on a relative day’s pay has actually been devastating—and I do use the word “devastating”. 
One example was given to us by Wattie’s which said that it had a worker—in this case it did not think he was trying to work the system—who went off sick just after he had received his 4 weeks’ production bonus. The result of that was that a worker who normally gets paid $16 an hour got paid $38 an hour for being sick. If he had turned up to work that day he would have been paid $16 an hour. But by not going to work he got $38 an hour. 
We were then told—as we were told by the meat industry—that people have worked out that there are certain days like just after they have received a bonus on which if they do not come to work they can get twice as money as they would get if they did go to work. Human beings being human beings are suddenly discovering they are sick. We have just heard the Green Party repeating the Labour Party line and saying that in the meat industry there has been no evidence of this sort of behaviour. The meat industry which is still our biggest export industry says that since April—that is not long ago—sick days have gone up more than 70 percent. Because sick days cost more they have gone up—they have doubled—and that is in only 6 months. 
We understand how human beings are. In fact this is an invitation for people to be sick on days when they can get paid double as in the example I gave. We are crippling those industries. Carter Holt Harvey which is the second-largest company in New Zealand has told us that its average employee has 100 days’ sick leave due. How is that firm even supposed to enter the contingency costs now? Under the relative day’s pay they cannot work it out. What it has worked out is that this is a statement by the Government to an international company like Carter Holt Harvey which has not invested at all in any job in New Zealand under Labour that it ought to move to Australia or somewhere else. One hundred days’ pay on average is owed to every single worker at Carter Holt Harvey and under this proposal its sickness bill has just doubled. We are talking about tens of millions of dollars. 
I say to the Government that we should reject this bill. It is better to get holiday pay fixed up than it is to pass a bill that is fixing up only a small part of what is a very substantial problem. This Labour Government which boasts that it is business friendly and boasts that it is doing well has actually passed a bill that will cripple our export industries.