Sabin Mike: Employment Relations (Statutory Minimum Redundancy Entitlements) Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSabin Mike: Employment Relations (Statutory Minimum Redundancy Entitlements) Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 15 May 2013. Volume:690;Page:10011. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]MIKE SABIN (National—Northland): It is a pleasure to follow the previous speaker that luminary of economic prosperity and business growth the member Darien Fenton.Darien Fenton: “Dah-rien” Fenton.MIKE SABIN: Darien—oh I most apologise. I most apologise. Let us not take these things personally. The member Sue Moroney talks about the tsunami of something else and oh I could not really make much sense of it other than the fact that I felt like I was drowning. However the ironic factor in this which is not actually lost on any New Zealander is the fact that that party—in fact everyone on that side of the House—virtually vote against everything that we are trying to do to create the business environment from which jobs will grow. We cannot just put seeds in a pot and miraculously make jobs grow; you actually have to do things to get the economic settings right.The Employment Relations (Statutory Minimum Redundancy Entitlements) Amendment Bill is another very good example of how the Labour Party seems to think that businesses are some sort of bottomless pit of money and that they should just shower it around their employees regardless of the relationship effort and engagement that those employees have had with the employer. Labour misses the fundamental cornerstone of business and that is that businesses must produce a product or provide a service that no one else is providing that is either cheaper than someone else’s or is of better quality than someone else’s. They must provide it in a way in which they can actually make a profit. So they must sell it for more than what it cost them and they must grow their market to have some sort of scale. That means they must invest and take risks. None of this seems to make sense to anyone on that side of the House or the people over there in the old “watermelon patch”. At the end of the day if a business does not do those things it will not succeed. It is as plain and simple as that. It is not just the case that the employer can get out the old xerox and run off a few $100 bills just to take care of the needs of the sort of Labour Party fantasyland stuff. Of course if the employer was the Green Party it probably could because we all know that Russel Norman is gearing up his photocopier because as soon as he gets his hands on the Treasury benches he wants to push “Go” on the old photocopier and fire out those $100 bills all the while being supported by its friends in the Labour Party.This sort of bill is really the economic business equivalent of pushing water uphill with a rake. It just does not make any sense whatsoever and you end up with a big mess on your hands. I understand that this bill was actually formerly introduced by the member Darien Fenton—Darien Fenton the economic luminary of business growth and prosperity. It is no surprise to me that it lacks the ability to stand up to any economic scrutiny whatsoever. It is full of socialist sort of union ideology. Unlike my colleague David Bennett I will not stand here in defence of the unions but what I will stand in defence of is their ability to negotiate with employers for what is right for the employer-employee relationship. I will stand up for that. That is exactly what this bill does not doso that member’s list ranking is plummeting through the floor as we speak. That is a terrible shame.This bill would have employees receiving redundancy after 12 months of employment. If anything if there is going to be a tsunami there will be a tsunami across the small to medium sized enterprises in this country that just simply cannot sustain that sort of crazy talk. It just does not make sense—it just does not make sense. This is the loony Labour Party sort of nonsense that we have become so used to. New Zealanders love it. They lap it up. This disincentivises the hiring of staff. This is what the Public Advisory Group on Restructuring and Redundancy said: “It disincentivises the hiring of staff reduces wages and it will mean that there will be more temporary contracts and contract workers.”Hon Tau Henare: What are the unions doing anyway?MIKE SABIN: What would the unions say about that—what would the unions say about that? It puts additional stress on businesses it will run some businesses out of work altogether and it reduces their competitiveness. That is my wingman—my wingman—Tau Henare over there. This bill undermines businesses and does not make any sense whatsoever. It is just another effort from the Labour Party that I think really expresses and sums up what the Labour Party of today is all about and that is that it actually does not know what it is about. This bill will not be supported by the National Party.