Anderton Jim: Employment Relations Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading 
Anderton Jim: Employment Relations Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading 
[Volume:651;Page:349] 
Hon JIM ANDERTON (Leader—Progressive) 
: 
 If the Employment Relations Amendment Bill is such a reasonable sensible and incredibly good bill then why does the National Government not put it before a select committee and show the rest of New Zealand how good it is? The National members should be proud to put it into the select committee process and let every New Zealander know exactly what is in it and have a say on it. Then they could show people how good the bill is and trumpet it all around New Zealand. But no here we are under urgency with a party now in Government whose members previously said when members on this side of the House were in Government we were usurping democracy right left and centre yet the first act those members do with a bill is to remove it from the select committee process.  
Earlier in the debate I heard the exchange between the Minister of Labour and Mr Mallard about the Exclusive Brethren and illegal representation. As a Christchurch member of Parliament all I can say is that I hope one of the constituents or clients the new Minister of Labour then had was not the one who took up a fictitious address in my electorate and a fictitious name and who took out full-page advertisements in local newspapers including the Christchurch  
Star 
 on the day before the election accusing me of murder and mayhem at the Christchurch Hospital. I hope that person was not one of the new Minister’s clients then.  
The proposal for a 90-day trial period is by its very nature a complex idea. That is because it changes the basic relationship between employers and employees. I heard someone shout across the Table: “Where are the employers?”. Well I have been one of them for 15 years in my own manufacturing and engineering company. Around 700000 people change their jobs every year and two-thirds of them work for small businesses so literally hundreds of thousands of people will be affected by this bill. That is one of the reasons that it should be referred to a select committee. Because so many people will be affected the law will almost certainly have perverse effects and unintended consequences. If the Government does not allow full scrutiny of the bill by a select committee it will almost certainly fall into the trap of causing such consequences to come into effect. Let me give members a couple of examples of that. 
I just heard the previous speaker say that this measure would especially be of benefit to immigrants. Let me give members the example of an immigrant who gets a 2-year work permit to come to New Zealand and part of the reason the person gets the immigration approval is that he or she has a 2-year work permit. The immigrant goes into a job and after 30 days he or she is fired. Where does the person go then? He or she will end up at the social welfare department claiming an unemployment benefit. The members of the party that is now in Government used to rail against that happening yet they are now telling us this bill is great for immigrants. I ask who in their right mind would move their whole family to New Zealand with a 2-year work permit under a law that says they could be fired within 30 days? And what would a migrant do then? That makes a mockery of the immigration laws for a start. We can see the scamsters lining up with schemes right now. They will be handing out job offers by the hundreds and letting people take up those jobs. With full legal authority they will then fire the immigrants who will pop down to social welfare offices and register for the dole. That is just one thing.  
Let me give members another example. What happens to someone who has been in a job for 10 years and who switches jobs and is fired after 40 days? That will be a disincentive for people to change jobs. One of the things we want is productivity in New Zealand. Sometimes people are in the wrong job and would be much better in another one but if they were to leave that job they would leave the sanctuary of having any kind of protection under the law for the first 90 days of a new job. I ask how that helps productivity. It will not happen all the time—of course it will not. There are many many good employers; they are the overwhelming majority. But I lay odds that it will happen all right and we will see examples of that as we go along. That contributes to a stagnating economy not a productive one.  
I can think of better ways to achieve the Government’s ends without getting such perverse outcomes as that and so would many other people if they had the chance to make submissions to a select committee. Those are the sorts of details that come up when there is an adequate opportunity to scrutinise bills in a select committee. I thought we had moved past this situation. This is probably one of the benefits or disadvantages of having been here in the House for a long time but I can remember when Governments used to ignore select committees. They used to tell members not to worry about submissions to just get a bill back here to the House without change and we would press on. This Government is actually short-circuiting that process by not even referring bills to the select committee in the first place and that is going back to the really bad days. There are details that as I say come up when bills are examined carefully through a select committee consideration process. When we make laws unnecessarily under urgency in this way we very often make mistakes—bad ones—and everyone knows that. I am sure members opposite do too; such mistakes are well proven in our parliamentary system.  
We have one of the best select committee systems in the world. I have been in a Commonwealth parliamentary group that wrote a book about select committees and public consultation in Parliament and New Zealand came out at almost No. 1 in the Commonwealth in terms of its select committee process. This is not one of the great days for supporting that process. We have that select committee process firstly because we have one of the flattest legislative systems in the world. It is a unicameral Parliament. There is no second Chamber and we do not have separately elected executives and legislatures so our checklist is the select committee process. That is our constitutional protection and this Government is avoiding it. It is avoiding it for no good reason because this bill presumably does not come in until 1 April so even a peremptory period of consideration by a select committee is possible. In its first act in this Chamber the Government is denying that.  
We have a select committee process secondly because we have strengthened it over time not because Governments have discovered some pixie dust of select committee scrutiny but because Governments have recognised that we make better law and get a better political process by doing so. Select committee hearings allow bills like this one to be changed in order to fix unforeseen problems—and I will bet members there will be some in this bill. I have named only a couple of them but I bet there will be other problems that have not been mentioned and would have been if the bill had gone to a select committee. If Governments do not refer their legislation to select committees they are back here in a month or two or three either amending bills after they have been passed or defending the indefensible. Those Governments are put in a position where bad things start to happen and because they do not want to admit they have made a mistake they start to defend the indefensible. If that happens within months of being elected that is a slippery slope that you will go down—I mean to say the Government not you Mr Assistant Speaker.  
One way or another the Government will regret not sending this bill to a select committee. In my view it is a mark of a mediocre and weak Government that it is so lacking in confidence in its ideas that it is too frightened to put them before the scrutiny of a select committee. The more that Government members say how great this bill is the more we wonder why they are not prepared to open it for scrutiny. There is no reason why this bill needs to be passed under urgency—none whatsoever. There is no reason why it needs to be passed without select committee hearings and that raises the question of why on earth the Government is doing that. Has some kind of secret commitment been given to somebody? There is no reason to do this. If the bill returned from a select committee without amendment because it is such a brilliant and flawless piece of law the Government would be able to take great credit for that. So why does the Government not refer the bill to a select committee? I think it is because this process admits to an arrogance and a weakness on the part of this Government that augurs pretty poorly for the outcome for it.  
I raise one more issue. The bill requires that those people who are in KiwiSaver get their employer contributions on top of their existing pay. People who opt into joining KiwiSaver could face being fired under the 90-day rule when they tell the boss they want a superannuation contribution. Do members think that will happen often? No I do not think it will. But I certainly think it will happen and we will be staring down the barrel of that. That is what we have employment laws for not because most employers are bad employers. In fact bad employers are relatively rare. But bad employers do exist and we need to protect people from their exploitative behaviour. The beauty of the select committee process is to raise those issues.  
This bill is further evidence if we needed it that the Government is focused not on the business measures we need in order to increase our economic performance—because this bill will not help that; actually it will make it worse—but on mean-spirited ideas that are all about shifting around the way the cake is cut up instead of growing it. If the Government was really serious about productivity it would be encouraging employers to do everything they can in the first 90 days of employment to make sure that people are trained educated and helped to do a good job. Then they would not have to worry about the silly nonsense we have here. This bill is all about the balance between employers and employees not about growing a pool of prosperity from which both can draw.