Patterson MarkMARK PATTERSON (NZ First): I too commend Mr McAnulty on bringing this bill to the House and I see he's one of the rising stars of the Labour Party as I saw him on the breakfast telly this morning in his regular gig. It's good to see him though rolling his sleeves up and actually doing a little bit of work and this is classic Labour Party legislation. Of course as the party that came out of the Blackball mine in 1916 this is exactly the sort of legislation you would expect a Labour Government to be bringing to the Parliament. It's important when we look at employment that we aren't doing so through a backward lens because we have a lot of disruption coming up in our workforce. Again I think it is the Labour Party that has led the way on this in the last Parliament. The Hon Grant Robertson had the Future of Work Commission which looked to address and looked forward at some of these issues that are coming at us. This bill here looks to amend the Employment Relations Act of 2000 and 2000 is an age ago in terms of where we're going at the moment. Many issues are with us now that were never even envisaged back then. New Zealand First gives qualified support I might say to this bill. We will support it through to select committee. One of the things that New Zealand First takes great pride in is being a voice for small and medium sized enterprises particularly in our regions. We have stood up within this Parliament for the rights of small employers to retain the 90-day trial period. We have won concessions within the food safety bill for those small cafes and food businesses. We are looking out for their interests and this will be the lens that New Zealand First looks at this bill with in the select committee process. My colleague Clayton Mitchell who is our official spokesperson on this bill—our workplace relations spokesperson—is doing quite a lot of work at the moment on this with employer groups looking at some of the international best practice on some of this. We totally accept that this is an area that we have to look at. We're looking at some of the examples in Australia. Their casual loading provisions—there's some stuff around there on percentage of time worked some detail around that that we would like to bring to the table in the select committee process. So we look forward to doing that and Clayton will be a constructive contributor. I think as legislators we need to be cognisant of these changes that are happening in our workforce. We are no longer—look there's so many occupations that just will not exist in 10 or 20 years' time. I think as politicians we will be pretty safe because we'll make the rules that we are here for ever but for the rest of society they don't have those safeguards so we have to keep looking forward. There are technology disrupters out there they abound and we just have to look as best we can into the future at what those challenges are going to be. So I think this bill gives us the opportunity within that select committee process to do just that because I don't know what the numbers are but there will be vast numbers of people that are employed under these casual triangulated contracts and probably as we go forward there will be more and more. So we need to make sure that the safeguards are in place. This is a bill that affects people as Mr Jackson said. We need to inject fairness into the balance of workplace relations and New Zealand First totally accepts that. But we also have to accept that a job is often only there because employers have taken a risk to create that job in the first place. We don't want to be stymying those employers—people that are risking their own capital—so we've got to make sure we get the balance for the employers as well as for the employees. We have to ensure that there is flexibility so that the unintended consequences of these good intentions are not that people actually don't get employment or miss out on opportunities in the first place. So these are the questions that New Zealand First will be looking to address and address constructively at the select committee. Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker.