Lees-Galloway IainHon IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety): Thank you Madam Chair. I thank the member Simeon Brown for his contribution and for his questions and I note a number of members have raised the question of the 90-day trial period so I'm happy to address that aspect of Part 2 of the bill. The member had a key question which was: why 20 and why is it employees rather than full-time equivalents? The answer is pretty straightforward actually: the National Party. When the National Party introduced—[Interruption] No hear me out. When the National Party first introduced 90-day trial periods they were only for small and medium sized businesses. They set the cut-off point at 20 employees and so for simplicity's sake we decided to return to the original way these were introduced. So we took our lead from the way the National Party in Government introduced 90-day trial periods. Now I have heard from members opposite and as I'm sure members can imagine I've heard from a number of submitters and people that I've had conversations with that they see 90-day trial periods as something that helps them to hire people and it helps people in a vulnerable position to get employment. Unfortunately there isn't a huge amount of research into this. It would've been very helpful to the cause of 90-day trial periods and the people who support them if the previous Government had done a little bit more research on this but what they did do is they got Treasury—got Motu—to do a piece of research. I'll quote Isabelle Sin who I think is Dr Isabelle Sin—who's a Fellow at Motu—saying My research shows that the 90-day trial period isn't helping people get jobs … However it also doesn't make people less likely to leave secure jobs and doesn't make employment relationships less stable. Overall my research suggests the 90-day trial policy isn't doing much at all." The press statement goes on to say "The study discovered no evidence that the policy increased the probability that a new hire by a firm was a beneficiary a recent migrant a youth under the age of 25 Māori or Pasifika under 25 or a recent education leaver. On the other hand it did not substantially increase short-term hiring or make workers less willing to change jobs." So the upshot I take from that research is that 90-day trial periods failed in their intended purpose which was to provide employment opportunities for people who are more vulnerable. But by the flip side it also makes the point that the negative consequences don't seem to be that obvious either. So one might ask the question quite reasonably: if there's no harm why remove them or restrict them as the National Party originally introduced them to only being available to people who employ fewer than 20 people—that is it creates the opportunity for people to be unjustifiably dismissed. That is a risk in our employment relations policy that this Government is not prepared to stomach because we have seen examples of those poor employers—the ones who are on the fringes and are not representative of the majority at all—who see a loophole in the law and exploit it and the vulnerable people who are affected by that are those working people that the National Party claimed to be supporting in introducing 90-day trial periods. So obviously people know that there was some conversation across the Government about exactly what the right formation for this policy would be. Where we landed was that we would keep 90-day trial periods in place for small businesses. We do accept that smaller businesses are not going to have an HR department so they're not necessarily going to have access to HR resources. They might need a little bit more support in their recruitment practices. But if those larger businesses—those who employ 20 people or more—don't have an HR department of their own they ought to be able to get the advice and support they need to run robust employment processes to be able to find the people that they need and to put them in and continue their employment. We're not opposed to probationary periods on this side of the House. Probationary periods are still included in the Employment Relations Act. Employers have the ability to put people on a probationary period to test their ability to do their role and if they're unable to complete the functions of their role it's absolutely justifiable for them to be able to dismiss that person. But what they cannot do under the probationary period is unjustifiably dismiss someone and that is the risk that lies with 90-day trial periods. That is why this Government is restricting the use of 90-day trial periods."