Mallard Trevor: Holidays Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Mallard Trevor: Holidays Amendment Bill — First Reading 
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Hon TREVOR MALLARD (Labour—Hutt South) 
: 
 I think one should probably start by looking at the regulatory impact statement for the Holidays Amendment Bill. That is probably the reverse of the way that it is done on occasion but if we look carefully we can see what a nonsense this bill is. We see the statement from Treasury and the Ministry of Economic Development that the proposed changes may not improve the functioning of the legislation. They note the balance of cost to benefit of the package of the proposed changes is not clear. At a minimum amendments are likely to impose transitional costs on both employers and employees and the extent of other potential costs is unclear. They say that the cost of implementing it is likely to be so high that most employers will not use it and that the proposal will create new tensions between employers and employees. 
I think the fairly described ideologically right-wing agencies of the State are basically saying that this will not work and this is nonsense. These are the very agencies that one would think would come in behind the Government to provide the Government with an argument to back up its nonsense. I think it is fair to say that for big parts of the legislation the Department of Labour said either there was not enough research or it did not have enough time to spend on it. In some cases the Minister did not even ask the Department of Labour. She wrote the legislation and did not ask the department for a view or ask what material or what facts were in its possession in relation to the legislation. 
Hon Steve Chadwick 
: They don’t care. 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD 
: And maybe National does not care. Maybe National does not care about the effect this legislation has on Kiwi families and that is something that I am beginning to see. 
An interesting comment was made a couple of years ago by someone about the New Zealand situation. He said that spending long hours at work having both parents in employment childcare shortages growing interest rates and rising bills can be a far from ideal environment for good parenting and healthy family relationships. 
Hon Steve Chadwick 
: Suicide rates. 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD 
: Well no suicide rates were not mentioned by John Key when he talked about the pressures on families. 
Grant Robertson 
: When did he say that? 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD 
: It was just before he became the Prime Minister. It was at the point when he was pretending that he was supportive of a high-wage economy rather than the introduction of measures that are deliberately designed to drive down wages and to reduce the conditions of New Zealand wage and salary earners. 
He dresses up these measures as an attack on unionists and union members. But all of us know that his secret agenda is to very quietly undermine the wages and salaries of middle-income New Zealanders on behalf of the people who give very big donations to the National Party. That is what he is doing. He will never admit it but that is what he is doing. He is not only attacking those people at the bottom of the heap but with this legislation he is putting the pressure on middle New Zealand in a number of ways that I would like to get into. 
National members in the past used to be more honest. They used to say that they were opposed to 4 weeks’ leave. They voted in this House against 4 weeks’ leave. They said that they did not want it. Now they are pretending to say that they really do support it but if one is poor one should not have a fourth week of holiday. If one is a vulnerable worker and does not earn enough to keep one’s family one can cash up one’s holiday and not have the holiday. We know that low-wage earners are the ones most likely to do that. They are the very people who are under the most pressure in their households. They are the very ones who struggle the most which causes all sorts of problems within their families and they are the ones whom this National Government is attacking. They are the most vulnerable people and they are being attacked by the National Government. 
Kate Wilkinson said that employees will not come under pressure. Employers will not be able to pressure people. She said that cashing in annual leave cannot be a term or condition of the employee’s employment. It cannot be part of what is advertised for the job at the beginning. But is that not what she said about the 90-day trial legislation? That is exactly what she said. She said that it was the employee’s choice. It was not going to be one of the conditions when people were employed. I notice that Kate Wilkinson is not replying. She is not focusing; she is not listening. I think it is pathetic that a Minister in this House this early in a debate is not focusing on the inconsistency and the hypocrisy of someone who claimed that the 90-day legislation could not be part of the conditions of employment. She is making the same claim about this. We know that is not true and that she has no way— 
Hon Steve Chadwick 
: Hold their heads down in shame. 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD 
: Those members over there are holding their heads down in shame. It is interesting that as soon as the noisy Maori Paul Quinn and Tau Henare leave the House those members put their heads down. They look ashamed—so might that particular pair look ashamed. 
Already in the first 12 months of this Government being in office wages in Australia increased by 2.5 percent more than in New Zealand—2.5 percent more in average weekly wages in Australia than in New Zealand. National is the Government that promised to close that gap. What it has done as National Governments have done consistently right through the 1990s is open that gap. Under the employment contracts legislation the gap opened up massively during the 1990s and this Government is true to form. This is what it believes in. National believes in lower wages; it is part of its raison d’être. National does not believe in high wages and good skills. It does not believe in decent capital investment. It believes in this spiral to the bottom and in competing for low-wage jobs with China and India. That is the sort of approach that this Government has to drive wages down in New Zealand and this is the sort of legislation that is designed to do it. 
As far as holidays are concerned New Zealand workers have fewer holidays than the vast majority of like countries certainly around the OECD. We are holiday starved in New Zealand. The Minister of Labour might well hang her head in shame as she is doing now. She should be ashamed of the fact that New Zealand is a country that has one of the fewest number of holidays in the OECD and she is taking them away. 
There is only one other point and it relates to the provisions to stop sickies. The only thing I want to say about that is that Peter Dunne has got it right. I agree with Peter Dunne and I welcome his support for the Opposition on this legislation. It is good to see a Minister who is prepared to stand up for his principles and to abandon the Government on this. He says that the sickie provisions are unworkable. Any of us who live in low-income areas who see long queues at doctors’ surgeries would ask Kate Wilkinson whether she really wants someone who has the flu for a couple of days to go and infect everyone else at doctors’ surgeries. Does she really want someone with gastric problems to go to the doctor? Does she really want someone who has been given leave to look after a kid to drag that kid out of bed in order to go to the doctor? In my view we do not want that. I think it is fair to say that when Labour was in Government we got a little bit of criticism from some of our friends and colleagues in the union movement for not going far enough but the objective in that legislation which was introduced by the Hon Margaret Wilson was to get a balance that could be sustained because it was fair. Kate Wilkinson is undoing that balance and that is unfair.