Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Thank you Mr Chair. That's precisely the opportunity that I was hoping for. I hope that I can make a contribution that will further enlighten the committee because the question is not whether or not personal grievances are a good thing—that's a version of the question—but it's actually whether or not we as a Parliament should make them mandatory because it's quite possible in contract law that people will have personal grievance provisions and that they will enter into those kinds of arrangements without Parliament making them mandatory. So it's not even about whether personal grievances are a good thing but about whether or not they should be made mandatory in law and the funny thing is that what we have is a situation where people are voluntarily entering into a labour law arrangement where you don't have to have a personal grievance availability. So we actually have two types of employment law. That's what this bill ostensibly would seek to fix. The question is: would it be better if we actually gave everybody the option of going to a workplace where they didn't have personal grievances against the person operating the workplace—not just some people who happen to be in what the member in charge of the bill would describe as a loophole but where everybody could actually choose to be in an employment relationship that didn't have personal grievances? The question really is: why do people believe that there is a power imbalance between employers and employees? I know what the Labour Party's answer is: Oh you're from Epsom. You don't understand. You don't know what the working people go through." and blah-blah-blah. It's all totally untrue and quite an unfair mischaracterisation of myself having grown up in Whangarei where my first job was at TDC Sawmills. But putting that aside they miss a perspective which is that of the employer. If they think that workers and employees seek desperately for jobs then they should see how hard employers seek for employees. If it's the case that employees and employers are equally desperate to find each other and form relationships that are productive and where they can work hard and generate new wealth then it would seem that actually there is no asymmetry in the relationship. If that is true then we can get back to the question of whether or not personal grievances or at least whether this Parliament should be making them mandatory is something that is necessary at all because if it's true that employers and employees are both equally invested in trying to find jobs and trying to find workers and there's no asymmetry of power then actually it's not clear why this Parliament needs to screw the scrum and make sure that one side has to have a different level of power than the other. You certainly as an employer don't have anything like the same sort of rights to stay in the working relationship when you'd like to get out of it that employees have. Why should this House put that asymmetry in place? I'd ask the member in charge of the bill and some of the members opposite that are scoffing why is it that they think there's an asymmetry of power between employers and employees when both of them report that they're desperate to find the other one with equal measure as far as I can see. Maybe they think that employees are less intelligent—you know is it a question of their ability? Do they think that as a group there's some sort of inherent difference—Marja Lubeck: Yes yes—that's it. That's the word here: "inherent". DAVID SEYMOUR: —that makes them in greater need of protection from the State? Are they actually saying—I think Marja Lubeck was just saying that employees are somehow an inferior group of people. Well that's offensive and on a day that we're trying not to bully each other to say that everybody who's a worker or employee is inferior—coming from the Labour Party of all parties—is a disgrace. So it can't be that employees are inherently inferior people. So why is it that the Labour Party believes that employees need additional protections and can't work out how to enter into a labour arrangement just like everybody else? If that's true and if personal grievances it turns out are not something that this Parliament needs to enforce on employment relationships then it would seem we don't need clauses 6 or 7 and that would be a reason to dump Part 1 and abandon that part of the bill. Thank you Mr Chair for the opportunity to properly run out an argument—[Time expired]"