Parmar Parmjeet: Employment Standards Legislation Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeParmar Parmjeet: Employment Standards Legislation Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 08 September 2015. Volume:708;Page:6369. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr PARMJEET PARMAR (National): Thank you for the opportunity to speak on the first reading of the Employment Standards Legislation Bill. I can tell the House that this bill shows the Government’s commitment to ensuring that employment law is fair and supportive for the diverse work requirements of both employees and employers. We are trying to fix various issues that are concerning employees. I was surprised to see the previous speaker Andrew Little getting so angry about us trying to fix those issues that workers are concerned about.To make employment law fairer and supportive for employees and employers this bill aims to amend various employment-related statutes. The amendments proposed in this bill are wide ranging. These measures are to strengthen the enforcement of employment standards like the minimum wage annual holidays and written employment agreements. To support that enforcement employers will be required to keep records to demonstrate compliance with minimum employment standards.In general our labour market is functioning well. Our employment relations framework is aiming to strike the right balance between flexibility and certainty. We want flexibility for employers and employees but we also want to provide them with certainty. This bill is also about addressing the issue of agreements called zero-hour contracts. Zero-hour contracts are where employers are not required to commit to any number of hours of work for employees but they expect employees to be available all the time employers can cancel any shift without reasonable notice or compensation to the employee employers can make unreasonable deductions from employees’ wages and employers can prevent employees getting into secondary employment. To me this is unfair because employees cannot plan their finances and they cannot plan their personal lives. To me both parties are important: employees and employers. It is about having that mutual agreement.This bill addresses the zero-hour contracts issue by making it a mutual agreement between employers and employees. For example if an employee agrees to work for 10 hours for an employer then that will be put up front in the agreement. Then the employee can decline to work for that employer for more than 10 hours. On the other side the employer will not be obliged to offer more hours to that employee. Also the employer will not be able to prevent the employee from getting into secondary employment unless there are real grounds for it. However they will be still able to ask employees to disclose information about their secondary employment which is fair because businesses need to protect themselves and they need to know whether there is any conflict of interest and whether there are any intellectual property issues.Finally as I said this bill addresses wide-ranging issues. The other component is the paid parental leave scheme extension and increased flexibility. This bill is to change the definition of an eligible employee and will be extending paid parental leave entitlements to more workers including seasonal workers casual workers and employees who recently changed their jobs. Paid parental leave will also be extended to primary carers. Primary carers do not include biological parents or formal adoptive parents but for primary carers to qualify for paid parental leave they should be in employment before taking up the role of a primary carer.This bill is about balancing the relationship between employees and employers and is also about meeting the needs of both employers and employees. It is a great bill. I support the bill. I commend the bill to the House. Thank you.