Blumsky Mark: Employment Relations (Probationary Employment) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Blumsky Mark: Employment Relations (Probationary Employment) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:629;Page:1858] 
MARK BLUMSKY (National) 
: 
 There are over 325000 businesses in New Zealand and 280000 of them employ five or fewer people. It is now time for this Parliament to send to the tens of thousands of people who own those businesses a message of support. Too often the Labour-led Government has introduced legislation that inhibits that costs and that hurts those hard-working New Zealanders. It is now time to introduce legislation that makes a positive difference. 
The 280000 small businesses are important to New Zealand. They are the glue that holds New Zealand together. I will give the Government some credit. It understood the importance of small business so it set up a Small Business Advisory Group. But when that advisory group representing those 280000 businesses said they needed to have a probationary employment period did the Government listen? No it did not. This bill is our chance to send a message to small businesses saying: “We will listen and we will talk with you about that issue in the select committee.” This bill is very important. 
In the last 3 years before embarking on my career as a politician I was the founder and chief executive of a Government-funded incubator taking early stage start-up businesses and growing them into global companies. There were 40 young entrepreneurial 20-year-old - plus people who were working 28 hours a day 8 days a week and they were inspirational. It was both an exciting and a very nervous time for those people. It was exciting but they were worried about whether anyone would buy their product and it was a nervous time when people did buy their product and they needed some help and they realised they had to employ some staff. 
We can imagine what it is like to be a 20-year-old employing one’s very first staff member and paying that person. But do members know what happened in those incubators when those young people had to pay their staff members for their first week? They had to get their wallets out. They literally had to get their wallets out and pay some very hard-earned very newly earned dollars to people they had just met and employed. I can tell members that when people have to take out their wallets and give their money to someone else—and it is not a 20-buck loan to a mate to buy a beer—then that becomes a slightly different proposition. 
What was the result with regard to those incubator companies and those young business leaders? They waited before employing staff. They made excuses they procrastinated and they consequently overworked themselves overstretched themselves and burnt themselves out. Why? They were just too scared of getting it wrong. They were too scared to employ staff when all they had was a pile of CVs to pick from. I do not know about other members but to this day I have never seen a bad CV. Those small businesses like many many other small businesses just did not have an HR department. Small businesses do not have a training department so when they get it wrong it hurts. 
This bill will give the confidence to small business to take the risk of employing someone. Parliament needs to show that we are happy to listen to those small-business heroes. Let us hear what they have to say. I recently sent a letter to 5000 small businesses in Wellington and asked what issues were affecting their day-to-day operation. I have had quite a number of responses and I will quote from three of them. 
The first response states: “The major issue we face as a small business is the risk of hiring staff. My wife and I are the only two people in the business and we have deliberately chosen to run it this way because we simply don’t want to run the risk of hiring someone.” The second states: “I am very much in support of the concept of a probation. In fact 3 months would be wonderful. Wage is my biggest cost and I’m very keen to have the right employee in the right job; otherwise we are wasting our time.” And the third states: “We are a small company that creates planning software for sale both here and in New Zealand. Business is going well for us at the moment and I think we will be hiring one or two new people this coming year. You can appreciate the degree of risk entailed in hiring a new person in a company as small as ours. We can’t afford to make a mistake and get it wrong.” 
I think I am like many small-business owners who feel that if the Government will not take the advice of its own Small Business Advisory Group then that is very very sad. I hope that the House will support the bill going to the select committee.