Tisch Lindsay: Holidays Bill — Instruction to CommitteeCWH In Committee 
Tisch Lindsay: Holidays Bill — Instruction to CommitteeCWH In Committee 
[Volume:614;Page:10540] 
LINDSAY TISCH (National—Piako) 
: 
 I want to draw the Committee’s attention to clause 36A in new Subpart 1A “Entitlement to 4 weeks’ annual holidays from 1 April 2007”. The point that Muriel Newman has just made is that this provision has been put into this bill without any discussion or any referral to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee. It is a straight-out bribe. It is an election bribe of a desperate Government. There was no opportunity for the select committee to hear this part of the legislation. This measure was not in the original bill. This has been taken over from a member’s bill. Incorporated into this bill is new Subpart 1A which provides for the entitlement of 4 weeks’ leave to take effect from 1 April 2007. 
The point I made in an earlier speech on the title identified the down time—the non-productive time—that an employer has to account for. An employee wants to be paid for 40 hours a week for 52 weeks of the year which is 2080 hours. I gave the example that on the current provision of 3 weeks’ annual leave and other entitlements the actual down time is about 280 hours. If one divides that by 40 hours per week it represents 7 weeks of non-productive time to an employer that an employee has advantage of. Under this new clause which takes the annual leave provision from 3 weeks or 15 days out to 4 weeks or 20 days that is another 40 hours of non-productive time in a business. That is 320 hours which equates to 8 weeks in a year that an employer has to carry that person on a full-time basis. The compliance costs of that are quite horrendous if we take into account what the business has to deal with—paying 4 weeks’ leave as opposed to making it a choice. 
Some employees do not want 4 weeks’ leave. In fact some surveys that have already been done in Auckland suggest that employees would rather be paid. The cost of living in Auckland is much greater than in the South Island. So in that case an employee would rather have 3 weeks’ holiday and be paid for the extra fourth week. In the South Island however there is an acceptance that 4 weeks’ leave may be appropriate. But what does this mean at the end of the day for the employee? It means two things. It will actually put a cap on future wage rises because someone has to pay. It is as simple as that. Who pays? It will be business that pays. Business will pay—not the Government. The Government is telling employees: “We are going to do this for you.” It wants to interfere in our lives. It thinks it knows best. But at the end of the day it is business that will have to pay so we will see a cap on wages. We will see a retrenchment. I have been talking to people in business and in some cases they are saying: “We are not going to expand our operations. We are going to just do what we can do.” 
I was dealing with a person who operates a fast food outlet in the Piako electorate. He has 53 staff and he has great difficulty getting people to work at the weekends. Under this provision—and the bereavement leave provisions which I want to talk about shortly—he is saying it will be absolutely impossible to be able to staff his sort of operation on a 7-day basis. So this measure actually affects employees. They are the ones who will be affected by this legislation. They will not be able to get increased cost of living rates. They will not be able to get the increased wages or salaries they are looking for because employers will put a cap on wages and reduce overtime provisions. What will probably happen is that employers will look to contract work out. Those are the sorts of things that this bill is starting to identify and which this Government has no concept of—absolutely no concept at all. It believes that it knows best. It is not prepared to let employers and employees work together to come up with a win-win situation. No it will not allow that to happen. What this Government wants to do because it knows best is legislate to impose these extra compliance costs on business.