Bennett Paula: Employment Relations (Probationary Employment) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Bennett Paula: Employment Relations (Probationary Employment) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
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PAULA BENNETT (National) 
: 
 First I acknowledge my colleague Dr Wayne Mapp and I am privileged to have the opportunity to speak to this bill. The bill supports people who want to work. I completely agreed with Dr Sharples when he said that everyone had the right to work. 
Probation is a process of close supervision monitoring and assessment of new appointees’ work performance during their first 3 months of employment. When we start a job many of us cry out for a bit more feedback and more opportunity to see how our performance and our fit with the company is going. This bill will promote that. The general consensus is that with the skills shortages we have we need to tap into those people who are not currently working or who are in jobs where they are not upskilling. They may be new to the workforce lack qualifications and/or experience and have a poor work history or they may even have been in some sort of trouble. They may be new to New Zealand. 
They need a break. They need someone to take a chance. We all deserve another go. I know I got one once. After many attempts I managed to persuade someone to take a chance on me. I was a classic example: I was young I was a solo mother I was Maori and I had a very poor work history. But I was damned if I was going to be another statistic. I knew that to turn my life around I needed meaningful employment. I knocked on doors I got interviews but I did not get the jobs. Most people told me—it was about 18 years ago as my daughter is now 19—it was because I had a young baby and they did not know if I would actually turn up again the next week if she was not well. They also told me that it was because I was young and because I did not have a great employment history. There was actually nothing in my work history that said I would be a great employee. But damn I wanted that go and I wanted to turn my life around. After a lot of knock-backs I finally convinced a guy to give me a job and I said I would work for 2 weeks without pay. That was illegal and it is certainly not something I would advocate but I was willing to do anything I could to get a foot in that door. He took me on. I worked the 2 weeks he paid me for them and 2½ years later I left knowing that I had contributed not only to the firm’s growth and productivity but to my own growth as well. My own inner sense of self-worth had grown tremendously. This bill will help people who find themselves in a similar situation. 
Prior to coming here I worked in employment in a recruitment consultancy I managed. But I always liked to call myself a recruitment consultant because it was the consultancy part of the job I loved. It was my job to match companies’ vacancies with the right people. We were constantly explaining to organisations that they would not get exactly the right person for the job and that with our skills shortages there was no person with exactly the same skill match they were looking for as well as the right qualifications and experience. We would say to them that what they needed to be employing on was attitude and aptitude. So if the people they took on had the right attitude and the right aptitude those people would get up to speed quickly and would benefit their businesses. But that was risky. Businesses were lean. They had cut back. They did not have the fat in them they used to have. They would say that they could not take the risk. 
I find myself agreeing a little with Peter Brown. There is no doubt that there is a casual workforce out there. We had situations where people were going into casual jobs so that they could get a foot in the door and actually have those opportunities. That made them more vulnerable. That is not what we want to see. We want to see a bill like this that gives people the opportunity with the right attitudes and the right aptitudes to say: “Give me a go.” 
On the employees’ side this bill works for so many reasons. It is about people who are unsure about their match with the company they are going into. They want to get in there for that first 3 months and see if it works for them. The bill opens up communication between employer and employee. If I am going for a job and I am not sure if I am going to quite make it I can say: “How about we give it a 3-month probation period? Either one of us can say no to the deal at any time and walk away all the better off.” I commend the bill and I think that it has a great future for New Zealand and for workers in this country.