Boyack RachelRACHEL BOYACK (Labour—Nelson): Thank you Mr Speaker. I appreciate the opportunity to take a short call on what is a terrible piece of legislation the Employment Relations (Trial Periods) Amendment Bill. Not only is it a terrible piece of legislation but it is terrible that we are considering this under urgency and without the scrutiny of a select committee.During the committee stage last night there were a significant number of questions many of which were very relevant particularly those raised by me and my colleague Camilla Belich about the process around an unfair dismissal. I have a prediction which is that employers will go ahead and use these 90-day trials just like they did the last time it was available to all employers and they will get it wrong. They will get that process wrong. It's quite interesting because they're heckling over there and saying Oh that's what they'll say." It's actually what happened last time under the exact same law. So just go and look at the Employment Relations Authority decisions website and you'll find all the examples. So I predict that we will see employers use it. They will get it wrong and they will ultimately pay a price. And the winners with apologies to colleagues on both sides of the House in all of this will be lawyers. The winners will be lawyers because employers will get it wrong people will take a case and we will end up in the same situation we were in last time. It's all to do with the fact that we didn't take the proper amount of time to have a scrutiny period through a select committee process.In many of the contributions we made we came back to the real impact that this law has on real working people and I want to reflect on the contribution made by my colleague Jan Tinetti which was a far worse example than the example I used from my family member. But I will bring that back again because my family member was dismissed under a 90-day trial. It happened in the most humiliating of circumstances. He was on day 88 or 89. He had had no issues raised with him. He was taken into the middle of a busy cafe and told to take his knives and leave. He was in his early 20s. That had a real issue. We talk about mental health a lot in this House and in this country. He ended up in a significant mental health state for a long time—years. The big issue for him in that situation was we had people suggesting that people should just ask their employer why they were sacked but people fundamentally do not understand the power imbalance in the employment relationship. It just goes to show that people have not actually put themselves in the shoes of other people.It was always very interesting—and there are going to be heckles but whatever—when I worked for a union that one of the things that new managers in supermarkets would often say to me is "Why did that person not come and talk to me about this thing they were concerned about?" But the very title "manager" meant that a 19-year-old was actually scared of that person. They were scared of that person with the title "manager" who was in their 40s or 50s. We have to take ourselves back to when we were kids and we thought "Oh my goodness!" Going to the manager to raise an issue freaked the heck out of me—I mean my father was a chief executive and he used to freak the heck out of me when I worked for him briefly. We need to think about these things. There is as I said in the House last night in the object of the Act not a perceived but a very real inherent power imbalance.I believe that this law is inconsistent with the object of the Act and I'd actually love to see someone take a case on that matter. It would be very interesting to see if they actually said this law is inconsistent with the object of the Act because there is no process involved. Another prediction that was made last night which I thought was a very good prediction is that electorate MPs are going to have people coming in who've been sacked under these situations and I as an electorate MP had a number of people come to me about employment matters. It's a regular type of constituency issue that you're faced with. So I'll be very interested to hear what electorate MPs will do when someone comes in and says "On day 89 I was sacked. I'd been turning up to work on time. I was sacked and the next day they went and hired someone else because they didn't want to continue"—Carl Bates: I'll meet with them I'll engage them—I'll do my job.RACHEL BOYACK: Well good. I hope you'll help them and I hope that you'll properly consider repealing this terrible law that will harm New Zealand workers—our most vulnerable workers—and I do not commend this bill to the House."