Young Jonathan: Third Readings —Text is incorporated into the Bound VolumeYoung Jonathan: Third Readings —[Sitting date: 10 March 2016. Volume:711;Page:9611. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JONATHAN YOUNG (National—New Plymouth): Can I just acknowledge the speeches so far in this very important debate. This legislation has been touted as a great victory for workers in New Zealand. I am not going to speak on that but I want to say that it also shows the great response of the select committee process that works in this Parliament. A bill went to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee it had aspects that submitters disagreed with and through the process of submissions the committee’s 11 members heard the views of employers and employees. The committee came to some great discussions and with the assistance of some very intelligent and very balanced officials came up with recommendations that by and large as the Minister has said addressed this issue around zero-hour contracts.I acknowledge my colleague on the other side of the House Iain Lees-Galloway. He brought further amendments to the Committee of the whole House which the Committee supported and which have taken what the select committee did one step further. It is important for us to understand—and I make my remarks today to acknowledge its work—the select committee process. Mr Lees-Galloway’s description given on Tuesday evening of a zero-hour contract as being “a permanent part-time agreement with no fixed hours” is something that I added a further dimension to in my speech on Tuesday evening when I said that a zero-hour contract is a “permanent part-time agreement with no fixed hours and a requirement to be available to the exclusion of other employment opportunities.” It is this definition that our select committee addressed and in my mind brought an end to zero-hour contracts according to the definition that I have talked about this afternoon.A casual employee can have an agreement or an understanding with an employer to be a permanent part-time employee with no fixed hours of work on an “as and when needed” basis. They can simply agree to that and it can become a casual employment arrangement which fulfils Mr Lees-Galloway’s definition but they are still free to pick up other employment as it is available. There are many many thousands tens of thousands of casual employment agreements that work for not only the employers but the employees in our nation. But as soon as the employer says “You are to remain available in case I need you and that means you can’t accept any other employment but you’ll only get paid for the hours you work for me.”—as soon as that is stipulated—it becomes a zero-hour contract. There is no mutuality of obligation certainly from the employer to the employee.It is that definition that expression of an employment arrangement that I believe everybody in this House completely disagreed with. Everybody on the select committee also disagreed with it and we worked hard to ensure that it was changed. In fact if you read the commentary on the bill as reported back you will see the committee’s comment that “We do not believe that availability provisions should be banned. Employment situations exist where these provisions are used appropriately and benefit both employer and employee. Maintaining flexibility in employment relationships is a legitimate policy goal. However we agree with submitters that the bill could better express the policy intent of upholding mutual obligations in these relationships.” It goes on to say: “We therefore recommend amending proposed subsection 67E(3) to require genuine reasons based on reasonable grounds for including an availability provision in an employment agreement.”The crux of a zero-hour contract is the availability requirement. So what we did is we altered the bill we deliberated on it we agreed on it and we brought it back to the House. We said an availability provision must not be included in an employment agreement unless the employer has genuine reasons based on reasonable grounds for including the availability provision and the availability provision provides for the payment of reasonable compensation. The reason we wanted that is that we wanted to ensure that employers were very very careful about actually genuinely needing to have the availability of a worker and that if they genuinely did need that—and it was not because they were lazy in rostering and lazy in managing the workflow but that the job actually required some extra availability—they would ensure that there was reasonable compensation for that.So there was never ever going to be a time when somebody would be held back from doing any other work would not be paid for it. So I think we did some great work on the select committee. I want to congratulate the officials. I want to say thank you to the members of the select committee. Andrew Little the Leader of the Opposition made a comment today that I think is worth noting—that this Parliament has done a good job for the people of New Zealand.