Adams Paul: Companies Amendment Bill Insolvency Amendment Bill — Third Readings 
Adams Paul: Companies Amendment Bill Insolvency Amendment Bill — Third Readings 
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PAUL ADAMS (United Future) 
: 
 I rise on behalf of United Future which is also not supporting this legislation. This is bad legislation and it is a bad-news bill as far as I can see. I will pick up on a point made by Peter Brown that concerned me. It was that there seems to be only one type of worker in this world and that is a worker who is on wages. That is so sad because in United Future’s book everybody who puts a hand to the plough to earn a dollar in this country is a worker. I respect the workers who want to work for a wage because there are many types of natures and personalities and some people are adverse to risk. I do not have a problem with that. I am someone who was a failure in the school system because I was not interested in study but I was interested in working with my hands. What I have discovered over these many years is that in many ways those people with an academic background have a disadvantage because they are taught that life is either pass or fail and they therefore tend to avoid failure whereas many who leave school earlier such as myself are probably too silly to recognise that life can be a great risk so we press on anyway. We take chances and we learn by our mistakes. 
What concerns me about bad legislation is that if it is brought in to deal with a problem that is not fair and just we have another more serious problem. Peter Brown also picked up on whether I have staff and whether I have a redundancy agreement. Yes I do have staff and no I do not have a redundancy agreement. But in the motor industry where I have been working for many years of my life I have seen much bad legislation come through. Let us look at road safety and at all the laws that were brought in whereby we had to replace seat belt after seat belt that worked fine in many countries of the world where there were absolutely thousands of cars on the road. Yet somehow the cars come to this country and the seatbelts have to be replaced. The question I ask is: how many people have died on New Zealand roads because the cars failed? It would be very few but there would be many instances where the drivers failed. 
We are talking about legislation that deals with when a business fails. It has been brought up that people do not have to choose to have a redundancy agreement and I concede that point. But what people fail to recognise is that employers not only have to compete for the jobs they are tendering for—and let us look at the number of small businesses in this country which everybody in this House acknowledges are the backbone of this country—but likewise they also have to compete for the workers who will do those jobs. If many of the large companies choose to put in redundancy agreements it will not be too long before those same small businesses if they want to attract staff will be forced to put in those same redundancy agreements. But if these large companies go belly up and they have been so wise as to put in a redundancy agreement I would wonder about that wisdom when they can easily go into redundancy. 
The main reason we are voting against this legislation is that I heard somebody ask—and I forget which speaker it was—if members had ever spoken to the wife of somebody who has been made redundant. I would ask whether they have ever spoken to the wife of a small-business owner who has put her signature on the form for the bank and her home on the line because she has an entrepreneurial husband who chose to take a risk. What many people do not recognise is that most of these small-business owners have a heart and real compassion for their staff as I do. There are many times in the week when a small contractor is looking at those businesses that have not paid for services and the contractor knows it is a Wednesday and there are five or six families that are relying on that little business to pay money so that the workers can feed their families. 
Yet this legislation is standing against the risk-takers in this nation by saying that we will pay workers who have chosen to work for wages and not to take the same risk in life—which I do not have a problem with. However this legislation states it will pay workers for work that has not yet been done before the small contractor gets paid for work that has been done. I cannot vote for legislation like that. I cannot stand with a clear conscience in front of men and women who have laid everything on the line to take a risk build a business and to contract out for a job then through no fault of their own when the work is complete and has been done according to plans and specifications they will not be paid because the money will be taken from them and given to somebody who has the inconvenience of having to find another job. 
As I understand it—and it has been said during this third reading debate—because the workers will have been paid a redundancy they will now have to stand down and wait for the unemployment benefit. If they did not have a redundancy agreement they would be able to apply for the unemployment benefit. But if a self-employed contractor goes bankrupt let me assure the House the process before the contractor sees his or her next payday is considerably longer than for anybody who is working on a PAYE basis. 
For these reasons United Future believes that this bill is discriminatory. As I said in my earlier speeches it discriminates between workers which we would not support. Because someone has chosen to be one type of worker rather than another this bill discriminates against that. Therefore United Future is voting against this very unfair legislation.