Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Thank you very much Madam Chair. I want to talk a little bit if I can about Schedule 4 of Part 2 which introduces the new Schedule 3A into the Employment Relations Act 2000 and specifically clause 2 of that Schedule 3A.It says Employee entitled to paid time off to be vaccinated." and subclause (1) says "An employee is entitled to reasonable paid time off during their normal working hours to receive a dose of a COVID-19 vaccine if providing the time off would not unreasonably disrupt—(a) their employer's business or (b) the performance of the employee's employment duties." Then subclause (2) says "Before taking paid time off under subclause (1) the employee must notify their employers of—(a) the date and time on 1 or more days on which the employee intends to receive a dose of a COVID-19 vaccine; and (b) "the amount of time that the employee expects to take as paid time off in order …"—and so it goes on.Now what I want the Minister to explain is a couple of things. Number one: how did they get to the decision that it's an employer whose job it is to pay for someone to go and get vaccinated? Supposedly this is a public good; vaccination is to keep all New Zealanders safe. Why has the Government chosen to fund a public good by putting the cost on to someone that happens to be the employer? If you think about the perverse outcomes of it for one thing if somebody's paid more they're effectively getting paid more to get vaccinated even though a highly paid person or a low-paid person getting vaccinated is presumably of the same value to the rest of society. So that doesn't make sense.And actually we know the Labour Party is questioning itself on exactly this issue because just last month a new Labour member one Terisa Ngobi who I think is from somewhere north of Wellington—perhaps Mana—had legislation that said that employers would have to pay employees to go to their parent-teacher interviews. Perhaps the Minister's not responsible for the Labour Party and that's probably a good thing sometimes but the Labour Party has said that actually they wanted to withdraw that legislation. They put it into Parliament then they pulled it out. And I guess there's a reasonable question of why employers should be responsible for paying parents to go to parent-teacher interviews. It's a good thing that you go to parent-teacher interviews but that's irrelevant.Hon Chris Hipkins: It's also not in the bill.DAVID SEYMOUR: Well the Minister's saying it's not in the bill. Well I mean look I know it's not in the bill and I know the Minister's tired but this is called an analogy. It's a comparison a parallel—it's called context. This is a frequently used debating technique in New Zealand and other Parliaments around the world. The question is: why does it make sense to make employers pay to get people to get vaccinated—that's the first question—if it's a public good? And here's something else: I talk to people who say that the difficulty is the vaccination centre closes at 3 o'clock so people finish work at 5—maybe not Labour people; they finish at 4—and the vaccination centre is closed. Maybe it would be better if vaccination centres were open for people that worked different times.But here's the next issue: not only is there the question of why the employer has to pay but why put all this rigmarole—as I read out earlier the employee has the right to take paid time off but it has to be reasonable and it can't unreasonably disrupt the business. Then they have to notify that they're going to take time off and which day and how much time and the employer has to agree to that. And this is a problem that pervades the New Zealand economy. We spend more and more time negotiating and arguing and getting permission to do things and not enough time getting on with it.Now considering the Government is always boasting that 91 92 percent of eligible New Zealanders have already had a dose of the vaccine—we're getting into the 80s as a percentage of people that are fully vaccinated already—why on earth are we putting in another complex rigmarole where you have to have a negotiation under law over whether or not you get vaccinated when the truth is that most people would just say "Look you know you need to get vaccinated. Run down the road and get it done—half an hour—come back."? That would be a much more efficient way to do it but instead the Government is putting this huge bureaucratic rigmarole on to employers and it's the wrong place to put the costs and Labour knows that because they've taken out other similar bills recently. And the question for the Minister is just: why? Why not just take that out of the bill keep lives simple and get the same result?"