Smith StuartSTUART SMITH (National—Kaikōura): Thank you Madam Chair. What an excellent choice—it really is. It gives me great pleasure to follow Jan Logie the previous speaker. Actually I have had experience as an employer and I've had an experience in utilising the 90-day trial—quite extraordinary. I'm not sure anyone else from the other side has but anyway. I tell you doing research like that is really very very useful. You find out how difficult it can be. Actually you would think by the rhetoric that employing a person is some way just to be mean to people to take them on and then employ them for 80-odd days and then just burst their bubble at the last minute—far from it. It costs money to take people on. Every time you turn over an employee there's a significant cost to that—Hon Member: You're not getting anything in return. STUART SMITH: —and people will only take that step when they have to. Yes they do need a return. That's absolutely right—they do. It's a symbiotic relationship. It's ironic that indentured labour has been outlawed for many years but it seems from some of the speakers that they want the reverse of that: indentured employers where they have to keep people on when they are poisoning the well often and that can be the case where it is making it very difficult to retain other staff because those staff are not functioning well. So I can't understand why people would be averse to that. In most cases that I'm aware of where 90-day trials have been used—and that's very frequently when you had the opportunity—it has given far more people choices and chances that they would not have had otherwise and I think it's a great shame that this bill seeks to reverse that. Speaking in support of Supplementary Order Paper 115 in the name of the Hon Scott Simpson those two clauses—clauses 29 and 29A—absolutely need to be deleted because it's a significant impost on business. I say that the 50-employee number that was suggested by many employers who submitted is actually quite an elegant solution and the Minister's rationale for having 20 or 19 was that it was the National Party's idea. Well we did know that Labour is not keen on or capable of extending good work further but you know it was a good idea at the time it was extended and that number was lifted up. Going to 50 is an elegant solution I think. It is a significant impost on businesses to have an HR department to manage these things and you do need to do that. Once an employer gets up to a certain level of employees it's a significant cost to operate that business. Being an employer is a difficult situation to be in at times as is being an employee but I think there's no experience in life like having to fill out your own GST return or like having to lie awake at night wondering how you're going to pay all the bills and how you're going to pay for your employees and that is what business is about. That often happens. Often it's another business that is not paying you on time or you've got shipments going overseas somewhere and you're having an issue getting payments back into the country and having them held up in the banking system. All of these things happen and it causes a cash-flow bind but you've still got to pay your employees. So the 90-day trials have nothing to do with that but you have enough things on your plate when you're an employer. The last thing you want to do is take on people that are not suitable for the job. Often it's the probation period that the Minister mentioned earlier where if the person is not capable of doing the job for whatever reason then you're able to dismiss them or send them on their way. That is only part of it. It's also about a culture and a team and it's incredibly important that you have people that will work together and be far more productive and happy in an employment situation. That means picking team members that will work together and you don't always know that when you do the interviews because people do change during that period. Sometimes it takes three or four weeks to really see what the person is really like and how they operate in that team environment. Some of these jobs are quite difficult. Quite often I know in the wine industry situation I see people turning up to work outside without clothes—Hon Members: What! STUART SMITH: —suitable for the day—not warm enough for the day—in case the weather changes—[Time expired]