Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): I rise on behalf of the ACT Party in opposition to this bill. I have to commend the member who has just resumed his seat Iain Lees-Galloway and the member in charge of this bill David Parker for the intentions that led them to bring this bill to the House and to advocate for it. I think that everybody in this Parliament broadly shares the intention that people who work in New Zealand should be well remunerated that their work should be safe and ideally enjoyable and that it should give them the money required to live well. There is no question that that intention is broadly shared by every party in this House and by every MP including myself. But where the differentiation begins to occur is when you start assessing the bill—or any policy for that matter—on the basis of its consequences and its outcomes rather than merely its intentions. Although I commend the soft hearts of the Labour Party members that led to their bringing this bill to the House I worry that the softness has extended to their heads. It is possible that the member in charge of the bill being from very very cold Dunedin where they have very very cold winters has not been able to think rapidly enough as the cold temperature has got to his brain. The issue at hand is that a good piece of legislation should address a well-defined problem. One has to ask oneself: What exactly is the problem that this bill seeks to solve?". The problem appears to be if you take the bill's author at his word that not everybody is earning quite as much as the minimum wage when they are contractors. It is interesting to see that they have not included taxi drivers in the list of professions. The problem that they have it seems is not actually a natural problem or a market failure. It is just that there is a wide range of different types of work that people do and not every kind of work is remunerated on an hourly basis for a wide range of reasons. In the case of taxi drivers the reason is that they spend a large amount of time waiting for trips. People who choose to make themselves available waiting to do a job might not be able to do that if they require the minimum wage amount of revenue for every hour that they spend doing it. So ultimately you have to ask what the Labour Party is saying to those people. Is it saying that they should stop working or that working should become illegal? It simply does not make sense and that is when we come to the unintended consequence of this bill which is that if we are going to require all contractual work to be done on a minimum wage basis then what should be said to the many small-business people out there who often have very few employees and who are actually often unable to pay themselves the minimum wage? I have been in this situation myself—technically breaking the law when I started hiring myself out as a consultant at one point in my career. I spent a huge amount of time at the beginning attempting to get busy and I did not actually get paid anything for all of that time. Under this bill technically I would be breaking the law. Of course eventually the members will be pleased to know I did actually get some very lucrative contracts and paid myself out in the end but for a time I like many small-business people would find myself actually breaking the law if this bill was to pass because when you own a small business when you start a small business when you are busy trying to get busy and bring in work to contract with often you actually cannot pay yourself the minimum wage. So this bill does not apply to taxi drivers. It cannot apply to people in any kind of small business if it is in one of the 16 types of work that are scheduled. But what about those who it does apply to? Labour seems to believe that the Government can costlessly raise the amount of income that people have. I thought it was very interesting to hear what Iain Lees-Galloway said. He said: "We believe on this side of the House that if a person is working then they should get the minimum wage." The key word there is "if" because the reality of this bill is that by trying to require higher wages than people are currently earning in many cases their employer will go out of business. Mr Lees-Galloway said that would happen and he seemed to almost relish the thought that a business owner would go out of business. But if he was to complete the thought he would ask himself what would actually happen to the person presently doing that work. Is it the case that when the Labour Party asks whether a person is working it would rather a person currently contracted under these provisions stopped working altogether? That is the real trade-off. Because we have not got a properly defined problem for this bill to solve it is not actually bringing any good. But to the extent it is effective it is also going to reduce employment and that is before we start talking about all the additional compliance costs. It was an observation funnily enough by an Auckland University economist whose name is going to escape me—Tim—that one of the things that has happened in the New Zealand economy in the last 30 or 40 years is that we have an enormously greater amount of compliance transactional management activity and far less activity in actually producing valuable stuff as a proportion of the economy. This is one of the reasons why productivity growth has been a bit weak lately. Once you start to look through the select committee report and think about what the bill would mean it would mean that a whole lot of types of work in which people are paid to deliver a service are going to have to effectively become employment and that people are going to have to start measuring how many hours they spend on the job—Andrew Little: Shocking! Absolutely appalling!DAVID SEYMOUR: —so that they can divide their income by that amount of time. Once they have started doing that you are going to have to be able to verify whether it is actually true. Of course the Leader of the Opposition says that it is shocking that you would have to do that and I understand he is being sarcastic. He is right at one level that of course it is perfectly plausible that people could adjust to that extra cost if this law passed and if they were required to do so. It is perfectly plausible that it could be done. But you have to ask yourself how many more costs business people and employers—people who in many cases at the start of their business do not even earn the minimum wage themselves—should have to take in order to comply with a law that does not have a clearly defined problem to be solved and a law that if anything will have the more damaging unintended consequences of making it harder to start businesses and making it illegal to do many types of work that people are currently gainfully employed in. And for all of that it will put on additional compliance costs for those meagre benefits and in some cases negative unintended consequences. This Parliament I hope can find far more productive things to debate than simply trying to add additional compliance costs for what really from the Labour Party's point of view is more of an exercise in my view of political branding than actual policy improvement. For all of those reasons I proudly oppose this bill."