Simpson Scott; Dean JacquiHon SCOTT SIMPSON (National—Coromandel): Thank you Madam Speaker. On a day when I thought the Minister would come to this House humbly apologising for the way that his Government has treated and thrown under the bus the Public Service and told them that there will be no pay rises for those hard-working civil servants I'm surprised that he should be here arrogantly professing to understand how business works and how it operates and what motivates and what goes for a high-trust model. What does need to be learnt within the Government within the Labour Party and within the trade union movement is what trust means and what a high-trust model could look like because on that side of the House most of them come from a trade union background and they know that in the Finance and Information Workers Union which the Minister used to be an employee of they had very little trust and that was reflected in the way that they engaged with their employers and the way they conducted themselves as union officials. So this bill members will remember was introduced under urgency very early on after last year's election under urgency and then sent to a select committee for a truncated hearing period of time in which submissions were to be received during the Christmas holiday period. And I think that that was callously designed so that there would be not many submissions. Well in fact there were lots of submissions; I think the Minister said there were over 400. And apart from the pro forma trade union submissions that all sounded exactly the same and were probably generated from the same word processor there were a large number from small businesses and from business organisations who clearly understood that the good intentions of this piece of legislation would have significant negative unintended consequences on not only the businesses but also the people who work so diligently and hard in those businesses.It was during the select committee hearings process that we heard about some of those unintended consequences. The primary one of course was that this measure of itself according to the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment regulatory impact statement will cost New Zealand employers something close to a billion dollars a year near enough to 1 percent of the country's total payroll without a single ounce of extra productivity being generated as a result of it no extra productivity.So for those on the other side of the House what happens when you get extra costs added into your business and you get no productivity added into your business that's just a cost that the business has to absorb. And when businesses have to continually absorb extra costs as they have done under this Government's administration and look likely to continue to have to absorb they do one of two or three things. First of all they will do whatever they have to do to remain competitive and profitable because if those businesses don't remain competitive and profitable then there are no jobs there is no business and those employees who work in those businesses end up having no sick leave because they are no longer employed! What happens is that businesses will then adjust and modify and reconfigure their businesses to accommodate those increased costs. So what they might do for instance is put up their prices and it will be consumers end users who end up paying the price for this well-intentioned but costly feel-good piece of legislation. Then what they might also do is they might reconfigure their business into a way that means that their costs of employing people are actually less. And by that I mean they will employ fewer people. We heard from a number of submitters at select committee who said that they would do exactly that that the unintended consequence of this piece of legislation and a raft of other pieces of legislation that this Government has pushed through means that businesses will be actually employing fewer people. Because guess what? They'll be automating. They'll be changing the way they operate their business. And one only has to look at retail supermarkets and all sorts of places like that to see how it is changing and it's changing dramatically. I talked to a large employer a supermarket operator who told me that yes of course they are putting the minimum wage up. Yes they're going to give people an extra week's sick leave and yes there'll be an extra public holiday and all those sorts of costs. But what will happen is because of automation he's actually going to be employing his people for fewer hours. Now that surely can't be the intent or the objective of this Labour Government's grand plan to punish business and actually by unintended consequence punish employees. So that's the kind of thing that will be happening up and down the countryside.I wanted to just talk a little bit about something that came as a bit of a surprise to me and it was the submission from the Children's Commissioner Judge Becroft who actually when we started questioning him started to understand the implications for people who may be employees with children. And where we got to and the judge was very clear on it was that effectively what this legislation means is that the employer will be effectively underwriting the healthcare of his employee's or her employee's children. So let me put it to you this way Madam Speaker—well not you personally but let me put it to the House this way. So if an employer is hiring new staff and there are two candidates both with equally comprehensive and good backgrounds CVs experience and talent but one of the candidates has no children and one of the candidates has say I don't know four five or six children guess which one the employer is going to employ? It will be as Judge Becroft succinctly and clearly understood a negative impact on employees with children because employers simply don't want to take the risk of underwriting the good health or otherwise of those children. Now the Minister spoke—the Minister spoke—[Interruption] Now I know on the Government side the trade unions they forget that they're now in the Parliament. [Interruption] They're not in the Trades Hall now. They're in the Parliament of New Zealand and they have to actually get beyond the trade union rhetoric and start thinking positively and concisely about the impacts of their legislation. This is not the Trades Hall; this is the Parliament of New Zealand. And what it means for instance when the Minister talks about his reluctance to pro rata is that part-time employees will be disadvantaged as well. Here's why. If you don't pro rata—and this legislation effectively gives a part-time employee 10 days' sick leave a year. So let's think about an employee who works one day a week for an employer. They get 10 days' annual sick leave. That's potentially about 20 percent of their working year on sick leave but it gets worse than that. So if that one employee then works for a separate business another entity another day of the week they get another 10 days' annual sick leave. So it's not 10 days per employee; it's 10 days per employment. And that is I think a matter that this Government has clearly not understood. The potential there for part-time workers to be disadvantaged will simply mean that businesses will structure their businesses in a way that means that they won't put themselves at that kind of risk. I don't think that was what was intended. I want to just refer to one submission and it was just one that I picked at random from a small-business person Deirdre Morgan who came to the select committee and said and I quote On a practical level if an employee is earning $20 per hour and working 40 hours per week the potential additional cost to employ that person is $800 per annum in sick leave. In addition to that the company may need to employ a temp worker to cover that period and that could cost another say $1400 for the same period. Therefore the total cost is $2200 per year in extra sick leave. But if there are 10 employees in that business then the potential added cost is some $22000." So one gets an idea how quickly this escalates and snowballs in terms of the cost to small business. Why is this a problem particularly for small business? Because small businesses don't have the capacity to cover in the way that large businesses do.And so here we have I think a probably well-intentioned piece of legislation straight out of the Trades Hall straight out of the union playbook using the cover of COVID as an excuse to bring it to the Parliament and using that as a rationale as an excuse for actually bringing forward their agenda but with unintended consequences that will actually lead to significantly less productivity in the country significantly fewer people actually employed and businesses not wanting to take the risk.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): The member's time has expired."