Williamson Maurice: Holidays Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Williamson Maurice: Holidays Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:620;Page:15979] 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON (National—Pakuranga) 
: 
 That was indeed an amazing speech. When the Minister started he said that he would only be brief. He actually was not brief in terms of my clock but his content was incredibly brief. He talked about a bill that has nothing to do with this. This is about a “Holidays (Fixing up the Botch-up) Amendment Bill”. It has nothing to do with the 4 weeks. The botch-up was created by this Government and by the Minister but did he tell us that? No. Did he then get on to what this bill is trying to fix up? No he talked about the 4 weeks stuff. Let me tell that Minister what is wrong with this bill Let me tell him in no uncertain terms. I will give him a nice little easy example and I will take him through it carefully. Unfortunately I do not have any pictures which would have made it easier for him to understand it better. However I will take it through slowly. 
The Government has introduced something called relevant daily pay so that when workers go on holidays instead of their holiday pay being a week of ordinary pay for each week they are on holiday this genius Minister has decided he will try to aggregate up all the payments that workers have been getting—that is overtime bonuses penal rates and all sorts of extra pay—and then work out what is an average daily pay they have been getting while they are in the workforce and that is what workers will get as an average daily pay when they are on holiday. 
Members of the public need to think about this because it is bizarre. I thought about it for myself. While I was at university I drove a truck for Wattie’s and Refrigerated Freight Lines. I could not believe it: I got a job as a truck driver and within a few days of being there I was told that not only did I get my wages as a truck driver but there were all the extras. I would get wet money trailer money cover money and rope money so that when the pallets are not put on and locked with bolts one could get extra money for having to put ropes on to hold them. If it was raining I would get extra money even though as a truck driver I would have expected at least half the days to be wet and certainly in the case of Wellington three-quarters of the days to be wet. Yet what is so bizarre is that the Government is now saying that instead of holiday pay being based on the number of days of a person’s ordinary pay it will aggregate all those special things that that person got for the circumstances of the day. For example when it was wet when one had to put covers over pallets and when one had to rope them down and do all those extra things the Government would make that part of a person’s holidays. 
I tell Government members that when a person is on holiday he or she does not have to put ropes or tarpaulins over things and get wet money. Most people would be on holiday at a beach resort somewhere enjoying the sun. What is bizarre about that? I will tell members. If workers at the trucking company have a fine day and do not need to put tarpaulins ropes and covers on they will not get a special payment. However their colleague who is on holiday for the day will get a higher rate of pay than they would get because of the accumulated equivalent rate of daily pay. How stupid is that? A person is on holiday and the rate at which he or she is being paid is higher than the rate some of his or her mates who are working are getting because it happened to be a fine day covers did not need to be put on or the pallets are containers and they are not carrying palletised stuff that would need to be roped down. How bizarre! 
Another issue members of this House need to address carefully is to do with one of the worst diseases that has spread across this country. I know that my colleague Lynda Scott would have seen this disease a lot closely through her medical practice. It is called “Mondayitis”. It is a shocking disease. When I was at Air New Zealand I talked to people in the human resources department who had graphed by the day how many sick-leave days there were—that is by the day of the week Monday to Sunday because Air New Zealand is a 7-day operation. 
Members should get this. A big chunk of Air New Zealand staff work on the 7 days of the week so weekends do not mean a lot if one is a pilot and is away and so on. It applied only to a percentage of the staff at any rate. There was a gigantic tower on the bar graph for the number of people who were sick on a Monday. Then it just dropped dramatically to Tuesday down to Wednesday Thursday and Friday. To be fair it did tick up a little bit on Friday. There could easily be a “Fridayitis” disease as well but it was nowhere near as severe as “Mondayitis”. Clearly the penicillin had been working but “Mondayitis” had been sweeping across that company. 
Employers keep saying to us that they are just not prepared to carry the cost of all that over and over again and what are we seeing with the legislation the Labour Government put in place? I have to say that my colleague the Hon Roger Sowry has just presented me with some tables from the Meat Industry Association submission to the select committee that one simply needs to look at and I wish I had a big overhead projector and a big screen to enable members of this House to see it up close. However members can see it from a distance. 
They can see how the tower on the left in each of these graphs is so small and how the tower on the right is so huge. I shall tell members what those graphs are. The first graph is sick days taken and the cost. The yellow line is the actual number of days taken and the blue towers on the graph are the cost. They compare what happened last year before the legislation was passed with what happened in the same period this year. What was interesting was that I went two pages over and I thought I saw the same graph but the numbers were slightly different. I thought that that was the same thing—sick days taken and so on. But no it states in brackets “This data is adjusted to create identical employee numbers.” In case the Government turned round and said that there was a different number of employees then so of course one could expect that this is corrected. It is normalised data corrected to base it on the same number of employees. 
If members look at this graph they will see it is worse. The number of days taken as sick and the cost is of the order of 70 percent up on what it was for the same period of time last year. How can the Minister hold his head up in this House without absolute shame written all over his face because that is a cost he has imposed upon the nation? 
But it gets worse. I suddenly wondered what the second graph down the bottom of the page was for. There are two. The top is sick leave. The second graph is bereavement leave. It is unlikely that one would have many relatives friends or neighbours die more in one particular time frame than another on average. I understand that someone might have a bad trot and might lose two or three members of the family within a couple of years but on average over the workforce one would expect the same number of deaths to be occurring over a reasonable period of time. Again this graph is adjusted to normalise it to get to the same comparative data—and I wonder whether Sue Bradford could answer this—so how could there be such a huge leap in the number of bereavements between one year and another simply because some legislation was passed? Did the legislation make a lot of people die? Let us hear from the Minister. Is that what happened? Once the Labour Government passed this legislation did a whole lot of people die? I do not think so. 
However there has to be an explanation for that and it is quite clear. It is shocking legislation and now we are trying to patch it up. When I say “patch it up” I mean that. I know that a lot of employer groups said that they would rather that than nothing. I tell you what—they would probably rather have 15 years’ solitary confinement than the death penalty. But it is not a terribly good choice. One would rather not serve any time at all. The employers begged the committee to take time to fix it up properly but it was quite clear why that would not happen. Every Government member on the select committee was ex - trade union. They were not going to give a damn about the facts they were not going to give a damn that the graph showed that things were now absolutely out of control and they were not going to give a damn about the poor old employer who has to try to foot the bill. No they realised that they had made such a botch-up that people were being paid treble time just when they were off sick. They realised that that was a bit much. 
I repeat to this House: even when this legislation is passed the Government would have created dramatic anomalies and it would have created dramatic incentives for people to take time off sick. Because as I said before there will be examples and we have given some already and we can give plenty more where people will get for that specific day more money than if they went to work. How can any Minister stand in this House and justify the sort of regime where this legislation is saying to people that if they want to take these days off they will be paid more than their colleagues who have turned up to work? No wonder this legislation is opposed! No wonder it is seen as an outrage! I am really happy to say the National Party is going to vote 27 votes “No” to this bill.