Coddington Deborah: Holidays Bill — First Reading 
Coddington Deborah: Holidays Bill — First Reading 
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DEBORAH CODDINGTON (ACT NZ) 
: 
 I rise on behalf of the ACT party to oppose this Holidays Bill going to the select committee. This is not simply a tidying up of the old Holidays Act; this is a sop to the unions from a Government that is terrified of reform. It is anti-Maori anti-consumer anti-business and it is anti-people.  
The preamble to the bill says it recognises the need to maintain a balance between work and life outside the workplace. Well thank you very much Labour Government but I would like to maintain my own balance between work and life. Not content with pushing us around inside the workplace this Government now wants to push us around in our leisure time as well. I am sure that 3.8 million New Zealanders do not want the bureaucracy to tell them what they should do in terms of how much time they spend with their children how much time they spend on leisure etc.  
This bill is not a great reform. As I said it is a sop from a Government that is terrified of reform. The reaction from the Council of Trade Unions hails this bill as a huge reform for workers. That indicates just how paralysed this Government is in terms of staying in office. It is caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand it tries to pretend it cares about small business. On the other hand it has to please the unions from whence it is driven. It throws a small crumb to the workers but in the short term and over time it will hurt workers because it will do serious damage to medium-sized business. Business in New Zealand is already hurting. Just before Christmas Business New Zealand released results of an analysis that showed a disturbing trend in compliance cost. United Future says that Business New Zealand is happy about this bill but Business New Zealand is definitely not happy about it. Simon Carlaw the head of Business New Zealand wrote an article in the  
Dominion Post  
just this week in which he said: “New holidays legislation will require time and a half to be paid for staff working statutory holidays as well as a paid day’s leave. That could add 1 percent on the wage bill for a full year—about $7000.” Business New Zealand asked just one simple question when it did its analysis: how much is the Government hurting business? The short answer is heaps.  
This bill has already had a stifling effect on economic growth. We will never get to the top half of the OECD by 2010 despite the Finance Minister saying in  
Metro  
magazine last March that that goal was still on the agenda. Last week the Prime Minister said it had actually been pushed to the side of the desk so who is correct; what is going on? We know what is going on with this bill. This bill will seriously damage 80 percent of the businesses in New Zealand which are small businesses employing five or fewer people. Who owns those businesses? Mums and dads—ordinary working New Zealanders; people who mortgage their own houses to open a business. How many members of the Government have ever risked their own money on a business or on anything more than a Lotto ticket?  
This bill contains lethal clauses for employers. Take the changes to statutory holidays for example. We will now have 11 statutory holidays a year—not nine because we will add Waitangi Day and Anzac Day. All employees whether they are wage or salary earners will be paid time and a half for working on public holidays plus they will take a day off in lieu even if that public holiday falls on a weekend. So in effect there will be something like 22 extra holidays a year on top of the 3 weeks’ holiday that this bill will give—and two of those weeks have to be given 2 weeks in a row.  
If the member’s bill proposing 4 weeks’ holiday goes through what will we see with workers who already get 3 weeks’ holiday? Contrary to what this Government thinks there are many good employers out there who already give 3 or 4 weeks’ holiday. They will have to increase that to another week to maintain relativity. This Government wants to put all employers into the bad corner. What would an employee who already gets 3 weeks’ leave do? He or she would go for four. This will affect thousands of employers all over New Zealand. As I said there are only two ways for employers to deal with statutory holidays and minimum time and a half plus a day off. They either absorb the extra costs and pass them on to customers or they reduce staff. Either way consumers will suffer. Staff are consumers; they are not separate.  
This bill reflects the Government’s total ignorance of matters relating to the tourism industry. It is already hard for employers to get staff in the tourism industry. I have worked extensively in the industry—as an employee as a waitress and bartender and as an employer as the owner of a restaurant in a tourist town. What can one do? If the Government increases the cost of wages for an employer he or she has to absorb those costs. One cannot pass them on to consumers. One cannot charge tourists who walk in on Christmas Day New Year’s Day or Waitangi Day one and a half times more for a drink or a meal. There would be no customers. One would get terrible reviews for providing a different menu according to what day of the week it was. This Government is absolutely dreaming if it thinks that businesses will survive the extra costs. As I said it is already hard to get staff. There is no way that there will be differential pricing for statutory holidays. It is up to the employer to agree with the employee as to the conditions for working on public holidays. It is not for this Government—or for any Government—to dictate an agreement between an employer and an employee. This bill leads to less choice for employees employers and customers.  
As I said at the beginning this bill is also anti-Maori. I draw members’ attention to bereavement leave which will be a huge problem for employers. This Government thinks it is being culturally sensitive but in clause 62 there is a definition of the purposes of bereavement leave and details as to when employees can get it. It refers to “any cultural responsibilities of the employee in relation to the death.” We all know what “any cultural responsibilities” means—it means virtually whatever some judicial activist would take it to mean. What employer would employ Maori when he or she fears that all his or her Maori staff could take bereavement leave—which will now be granted on top of sick leave—because they have to go to a tangi? There will be severe detrimental effects for Maori employees throughout the country from that very loosely defined clause in the bill. With things like that employers and employees have to deal with each other in good faith; otherwise as my colleague in the National Party has said they will face draconian penalties. What is “good faith”? Who knows. It is like “cultural responsibilities”. It will be whatever a judicial activist takes it to mean.  
ACT is totally opposed to this bill. Anyone who thinks that it will be cleaned up in the select committee has to be absolutely dreaming. If this is what the New Zealand First Party thinks of as tidying-up I would hate to have seen the bedrooms of its members when they were sent there by their mothers to tidy them up. I imagine every drawer would have been pulled out and up-ended on the floor.