Little AndrewHon ANDREW LITTLE (Minister of Justice): Thank you Madam Assistant Speaker. It's a great pleasure of mine to take a call on this the Employment Relations (Allowing Higher Earners to Contract Out of Personal Grievances Provisions) Amendment Bill. Listening to the member Christopher Penk who has just spoken he suffers the flaw that so many National MPs suffer which is that they just do not get the reality of the employment relationship and employment law. You see the fundamental problem with this—well there are two fundamental problems with this bill: one is that it assumes that because you are on an income of $150000 or more you have total control over your employment and your daily employment and the way you go about your business. But that is not the case and I could probably give names of fitters and sparkies and tradespeople around the country who earn that or more than that but who are under the instruction of an employer and do not have control over their workaday life.The other failure of the National Party who are promoting this bill in relation to this bill is that they do not get that this bill removes the ability of somebody earning above that threshold or at it—any ability at all—to challenge an unfair dismissal. It removes it completely. It takes away the common law right to take a claim of wrongful dismissal. So to help the members opposite because some of them are new and most of them are ignorant I am going to traverse the history of the personal grievance jurisdiction in New Zealand.Here's the thing: we actually have National to thank for introducing personal grievances in 1970. In 1970 they introduced the idea of the personal grievance because even then—a more progressive time for the National Party admittedly—the post - World War II consensus National Party understood that working people needed to have the ability to challenge unfair dismissal without bankrupting themselves. It was very expensive to take a wrongful dismissal claim and the remedies available to an hourly-paid worker or to a wage-worker were not that great—maybe a month's pay but that was pretty much it. You couldn't pay your lawyers even if you won and you got a month's pay. The National Government at the time was concerned about the growing number of strikes that were being taken to support workers who their colleagues thought were unfairly dismissed and they introduced this law.The Labour Government of 1972 then rewrote the Industrial Relations Act as it then was. They beefed it up a little bit they added a few more provisions in the personal grievance laws but the personal grievance law became established as the basic rule of fairness in employment and we've had it since then—we've had it since then. For nearly 50 years we've had this law and what this bill does is it defines somebody's rights on the basis of their income. Typical National Party value—it's not about the human being it's not about your employment relationship or the level of control you have or don't have over it.The whole reason for the personal grievance law was to recognise that there was an inherent imbalance in the employment relationship: that if you were a worker in addition to whatever statutory rights you had at the time you were still subject to the common law duty of the worker to obey—the duty to obey—and the duty to act in good faith and fidelity to your employer and all those things that were a constraint on the rights of the worker in many respects. The personal grievance jurisdiction was introduced to bring some balance and fairness and to allow workers to challenge unfairness if they got sacked unfairly without bankrupting themselves.Here's the interesting thing that the members opposite might like to know if they haven't already learnt: the personal grievance jurisdiction at that time and until 1991 when thanks to that National Government—it was confined to those who were employees under an employment agreement whether it was collective or individual or whatever. So there was an acceptance that if you were the chief executive you were in a different situation. I have some sympathy for that argument but I do not have any sympathy at all for a bill that says your rights—your human rights your employment rights—are totally defined by the income that you earn and not the reality of your employment situation. That's the fundamental failure in this bill that's why it's wrong and that's why it ought to be voted down and I'm confident that tonight the House will do exactly that.This bill makes it worse than the pre-1970 position that workers—and for that matter chief executives—were in. Even then if you were a chief executive or a senior executive and you weren't a member of a union or part of a collective agreement or an award as they called them in those days and had access to the personal grievance procedure you at least had the right to go to court for a wrongful dismissal claim.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): Please don't bring the Speaker into the debate.Hon ANDREW LITTLE: Sorry Madam Assistant Speaker. This bill takes that away—this bill takes that away—the common law right to take a wrongful dismissal claim. I know the ACT Party will be concerned about that because they are the party of the common law. Members opposite who know anything about the law will be concerned about that as well because one of the fundamental principles of our system of law is that people do not lose rights just because of the status that they have and that's what this bill does—that's what this bill does. This bill takes away any protection at all for the class of people that it defines. Even if it was confined to chief executives and senior executives in its current terms this bill would be wrong because it's unfair—that's how hopeless this bill is. The author of it isn't here to defend it and isn't going to defend it and did not when he spoke tonight provide any defence to it either.You see when you look at the submissions that went to the select committee about this how disappointing it is that organisations like Business New Zealand—of course they welcomed this because they like the National Party want nothing more than just those incremental erosions of workers' rights. Well I say this: the Government has changed. This is a new Government and we are going to restore basic rights and basic fairness to every employee to every worker. They've had nine years of having them slowly and incrementally taken off them and it's going to change. It's going to change tonight when this bill gets unceremoniously dumped because it adds nothing it does nothing it would discriminate against hard-working employees and it does nothing for chief executives and other employers.It is changing. Life is changing and there is no place for a bill that discriminates against working people as this bill does. I look forward to the vote in the House tonight to see this bill sent where it belongs: in the dustbin of history.