Weenink VanessaDr VANESSA WEENINK (National—Banks Peninsula): Thank you Mr Speaker. I rise in opposition to the Employment Relations (Protection for Kiwisaver Members) Amendment Bill. This bill is in the name of Dr Tracey McLellan who was the previous member for Banks Peninsula so it gives me a little bit of pleasure to oppose this bill.This bill provides yet another ground for personal grievance claims. Personal grievance claims have become a little bit of an industry. For some businesses it's actually been a form of—businesses are being conned. There was an example in Dunedin a couple of years ago where a chef would sign up at one restaurant he'd turn up for one shift then he would claim to be not particularly well—sick couldn't be bothered turning up whatever. The company would then tell him that Well basically we haven't really got an arrangement here." Then he would say to them immediately "Well I'm going to take you for a personal grievance." Then he would write a formal letter. His whole tactic was to get them to pay up $10000 because they had to weigh up if it would be more expensive to fight the personal grievance or—Hon Member: Pay the go away money.Dr VANESSA WEENINK: —to just pay the guy to go away. So all this bill will be doing is creating yet another grounds for personal grievance cases. It's an absolute disgrace.So this is a bill that had previously—there'd been previous changes to legislation back in 2006 got reversed in 2008 under the last National Government. We made it possible so that there's a lot more transparency so that employers and employees can actually have the conversation themselves to decide how they want to have that. So this bill would then reverse that and make it compulsory. It is just yet another example of typical Labour woolly thinking of not understanding the consequences to businesses of creating yet another cost to businesses when we're in a cost of living crisis. As one of my colleagues explained adding costs to businesses is ultimately adding costs on the employees themselves so this is just not a very sensible amendment to the Act. Some of the ideas behind it of protecting people and wanting to make it more enticing for people to be on KiwiSaver sound like a good idea—we don't disagree with that. But we don't think that this is the mechanism to do that.Part of one of the consequences that this bill might have is disincentivising the use of total remuneration packages which actually can be quite a useful way of discussing an employment arrangement. It is an element just of perception that some people have—that if there's a total remuneration package that's offered somehow KiwiSaver employment contributions from the employer don't really count that it's not actually part of that. But actually it is still part of the total remuneration and it is saving towards people's retirement. It's encouraging people to contribute towards the total amount that they have saved by the time they retire. So total remuneration packages potentially are a very useful mechanism.So this is just another example of impractical ideas that have been brought before this House backed by an ideology that there is central control that really—Hon Member: Command and control.Dr VANESSA WEENINK: Command and control from above—that you know there's no real examples of any problems that actually exist for it. It is a piece of legislation looking for a problem to solve. There isn't one to solve. There were no examples that were able to be brought. The Finance and Expenditure Committee heard excellent submissions but very few submissions and the only one really in support that I could see from the papers was from the unions.So this is a bill that is really counter to everything that National believes in. We believe in free choice and this bill will not do anything to improve that. I do not commend the bill to the House."