Bennett David: Employment Relations (Breaks and Infant Feeding) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Bennett David: Employment Relations (Breaks and Infant Feeding) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 02 September 2008. Volume:649;Page:18190. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
DAVID BENNETT (National—Hamilton East) 
: 
 We have just seen a prime example of what the Labour Government has been doing in the last couple of weeks. It has been doing sneaky little tricks to pass through things that it knows it cannot pass through under the conscience of the public gaze. 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: I raise a point of order Madam Chairperson. The member is now referring to a ruling that you have given and to a motion that has been agreed to by the House as was made absolutely clear. This was not sneaky; this was something that was agreed to unanimously. The member’s whips voted for it. 
DAVID BENNETT 
: Madam Chair— 
The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Marian Hobbs) 
: You are not speaking to the point of order? 
DAVID BENNETT 
: No it is the speech. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Marian Hobbs) 
: I will rule on the point of order. Can we just settle down on the issue. Members may make points of order about it but they cannot say that the House has been sneaky. The House agreed to this. 
DAVID BENNETT 
: I never implied that the House was sneaky; I just implied that Labour was sneaky. There is a subtle difference there. 
The Employment Relations (Breaks and Infant Feeding) Amendment Bill is an attempt by the Labour Government to put through a couple of pieces of its policy in a bill under the guise of something that politically most members of the public want to see happen. The infant feeding portion of the bill is something that is not really a debatable issue. Most members of the public perceive the need for that and for some regulation in that area.  
The meal breaks portion of the bill is not such a public issue and has not required such attention. It was quite obvious in the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee that this idea was not thought through. The meal breaks component of the bill could have taken away workers’ rights. There was the potential that many workers may have engaged in contracts that gave them greater meal breaks than the mandatory ones in this bill. The bill had to be amended at the select committee once the National Party members brought it to the Government members’ attention that the bill they put forward would hurt workers. They were putting forward legislation that would take rights off workers. Can members believe that? Only the National Party members of the select committee brought that up and it was only the National members’ good conscience at the select committee that enabled workers to retain the rights that they got in their individual agreements rather than get Labour’s quick-fix solutions to these idealistic programmes that did not take into account the reality of contractual arrangements between employees and employers. 
Today and yesterday we have been aghast at seeing that the Minister has included a portion in this bill in respect of the KiwiSaver legislation. There is a problem in respect of the KiwiSaver side of it. That programme was another piece of legislation the Government brought forward that it did not think about. It did not follow due consultation and it did not look at what the options would be in the marketplace. One of the problems with the KiwiSaver legislation has been that employers may be able to not give a wage rise in the year following the implementation of the legislation and to say that the KiwiSaver contribution is the pay rise. That is something that a lot of employees would naturally feel quite aggrieved to see happen. This is why that change has been brought about to the legislation—so that elements of the law in which employers could potentially take advantage of employees are able to be rectified.  
But this is not the appropriate place to do that. It is not the appropriate place to put in a sneaky amendment to legislation that would mean that this part of the KiwiSaver regime had been fixed up through a Supplementary Order Paper in respect of the Employment Relations (Breaks and Infant Feeding) Amendment Bill. If the Minister had liked to do the process properly he should have put forward an amendment to the KiwiSaver legislation and put it through the appropriate political processes not use this method of trying to get the fix-up measures done in time for an election in a few months’ time. 
Those fix-up measures are something that the National Party is now seeing and that the public of New Zealand will see over the next couple weeks. We are seeing this Government attempt in any little way it can to change legislation to its advantage in its last dying days in office. We will see it put up a lot more Supplementary Order Papers and amendments. The National Party will be vigilant in looking at those because it now sees the agenda of this political party in its dying days in Government. Its agenda is to change the focus of legislation.