Lees-Galloway IainIAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North): It is my pleasure also to rise and speak in support of the Regulatory Systems (Workplace Relations) Amendment Bill which is one of the three regulatory systems amendment bills that we are considering this afternoon and that have drawn support from around the House.Dr David Clark: I hope your contribution will be more substantial than the most recent one.IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY: I think this contribution Dr Clark will be a little bit more substantial—in length if not in quality—than the previous contribution.The Regulatory Systems (Workplace Relations) Amendment Bill is the one bill of the three that was considered by the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee of which I am privileged to be a member. It is actually quite an important piece of legislation and it has become more important as a result of its visit to the select committee than it was before it arrived there. I say that not to suggest that that is all credit to the excellent work of the members of the committee although we did try very hard.Actually the officials identified areas where we could improve both the Employment Relations Act which is what Part 1 of this bill does and the Parental Leave and Employment Protection Act which is what Part 2 does. We should be very much appreciative of the work of the officials who supported us in considering this legislation. Frankly working people will be better off as a result of fixing the gaps that the officials identified.Regulatory systems amendment bills are generally fairly technical in their nature. They do not represent a significant policy shift. They are designed simply to make sure that the principal legislation operates in the fashion that it was supposed to. These are tidying up technical errors in the legislation that mean the legislation does not operate in the fashion that was intended by Parliament when the legislation was originally passed.I have spoken previously but I do want to cover one more time the changes that were recommended by the officials at the select committee to the Employment Relations Act. Those changes pertain to the very few opportunities that a working person has to take a personal grievance when they are subject to a 90-day no-rights-at-work fire-at-will trial period. These trial periods are an affront to people's natural justice. You basically have no rights for the first 90 days that you are at work if you are subject to one of these trial periods. Therefore we need to ensure that anybody who is subject to one of these periods absolutely has their rights—the few rights that they do have—very very carefully enshrined in law.When we as a Parliament rightly passed the Employment Standards Legislation Bill last year which got rid of those odious zero-hour contracts we added three extra provisions to the Employment Relations Act under which an employee could challenge their dismissal under a 90-day trial period. However unfortunately what we failed to do as a Parliament at that time was to correctly cross-reference the additional provisions to the part of the legislation that deals with 90-day trial periods to make it clear that a person dismissed under a 90-day trial period was able to seek recourse for a dismissal under any of those purposes.Not making these amendments in this legislation meant it was possible that it would have been more difficult for an employee to challenge their dismissal under a 90-day period and to lodge a personal grievance under any of those provisions. It is not entirely certain and in fact we are not applying this retrospectively because the advice that we received from the officials is that the unjustified dismissal provision is sort of a catch-all and that any worker who is dismissed for any one of those additional reasons would have been able to take a personal grievance as it was an unjustified dismissal.It is a sort of belt and braces approach I suppose in the legislation which is important when you are dealing with a situation where people's ordinary rights have been dismissed—not just diminished but dismissed—under this legislation. As the Employment Relations Authority has correctly judged in respect of the application of a 90-day trial period and the application of it in the law we need to adhere word for word to the law as it is written and as it was intended by Parliament. These are small but in this case incredibly important changes to the legislation.The original changes to the Employment Relations Act which continue to be supported by the House ensure that the responsibility for a breach of the Employment Relations Act falls where it is appropriate. The policy purpose was that officers of a company or a partnership or a limited partnership or a sole trader would be the senior people who have responsibility for the running of the organisation and are the people who are responsible in the event that that entity breaches any part of employment law. It is tidying that up to make sure that that policy is appropriately implemented.Part 2 of the bill relates to the Parental Leave and Employment Protection Act. Again an additional change was raised by the officials and that was to ensure that anybody who comes back to work as part of a keeping-in-touch day—we have added this new idea of keeping-in-touch days where someone who is on paid parental leave can come back and do a little bit of work or maybe come back for an important meeting that is occurring at work so they can keep in touch with their workplace while they are on paid parental leave. They can work up to 40 hours whilst they are on paid parental leave. If they work over 40 hours then they are deemed to have returned to work and they lose access to their paid parental leave.Unfortunately we left the word paid" out and again there was potential there where someone who came back after the paid parental leave period was finished and worked more than 40 hours would lose access to their unpaid parental leave. Obviously workers beyond the paid parental leave that they receive can then have up to a year of unpaid parental leave. Just the way the legislation was worded there was some possibility that working more than 40 hours during that unpaid parental leave period would then cause the employee to lose their right to unpaid parental leave. That was never the policy intention so we have inserted the word "paid". It is one word and it makes an awful lot of difference to the implementation of the policy. Again the original changes were in relation to when a person receives a payment when they have had a pre-term baby—again this is a new provision in the legislation which was also made as part of the employment standards legislation. This was part of the deal done between the ACT Party and the National Government when Sue Moroney's bill to extend paid parental leave to 26 weeks did actually receive the support of the House but was subjected to a financial veto by the then finance Minister and now Prime Minister Bill English against the will of Parliament. Part of the deal there with the ACT Party was that there would be additional provisions for people who had pre-term babies. Again we did not quite get the wording correct and this legislation tidies that up. So there are some small but meaningful amendments to our employment legislation. For those reasons the Labour Opposition is very very happy to support these bills.Regulatory Systems (Building and Housing) Amendment Bill read a third time.Regulatory Systems (Commercial Matters) Amendment Bill read a third time.Regulatory Systems (Workplace Relations) Amendment Bill read a third time."