Holidays Amendment Bill

I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. I draw your attention to the fact that you have closed down both Part 1 and Part 2 with some dissatisfaction from this side of the Chamber. This bill appears to be getting through the Committee with the support of United Future. However, not only were its members not on the select committee, they did not hear any submissions, and, as far as I am aware, they did not speak to any of the submitters on this new bill. It is causing quite some concern that you are chopping the debate a little short, might I suggest. Therefore, I am asking you to be a little more tolerant concerning the debate on the title and commencement.

The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson): I understand, and I thank the member for his points. I will certainly give them consideration.

I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. We now have a situation where a senior member of the National Party has raised this issue, the junior whip has raised this issue, a member of the ACT party has raised this issue, and now New Zealand First has raised this issue with you. In the 5 years I have been here I have not seen that occur before in the Committee stage of a bill, where separate parties together have raised this issue with the Chair. I would urge you along the lines indicated by those who have already spoken to take very serious account of that.

In speaking to the title, I intend to range as widely as I will be allowed over the whole Holidays Act, because I am really perplexed about the support for it. We heard tonight in the debate on both Parts 1 and 2 of the bill from the United Future party that it opposed the original bill, and I am pleased that it did. I thought that the original bill was wrong. For the life of me, I still cannot understand why what someone is entitled to with regard to holiday regimes is not something that is a negotiable part of his or her contract, at least at a certain level. I can understand why a general workforce worker who is reasonably low in an operation, who does not have much bargaining strength, and who needs the union to support him or her maybe does need a back-up bill like this. But what happens when one gets into the senior management levels and people are quite senior in a company—and as we have heard, right up to the level of the chief executive of the biggest company in New Zealand—in terms of pay? Does this bill apply to such people? We have not actually been able to get that clear, but my colleagues are quite adamant that this legislation will apply to everyone. Someone can be on $2.something million a year and be the chief executive of a massive corporation, yet it is the Minister and the Government that will decide what that person is entitled to when he or she either works on a public holiday or is sick when he or she was scheduled to be working on a public holiday—and there are a number of permutations and combinations of that.

I go back to United Future, because I think its support for this legislation is most perplexing. United Future opposed the original bill, and its members came along tonight and said that they were not quite sure. They could not make up their minds, so they voted eight abstentions. United Future is obviously now the party that abstains on a regular basis. It had eight abstentions, and even had to take special calls later in order to get more abstentions added. Then United Future made the ridiculous claim that this bill was like eating a whole elephant by just taking one bite at a time. So we have an absolute white elephant on our hands. That is what United Future openly admitted the original bill was, and it voted against it. Now that its members are able to take one bite out of one piece of the elephant’s anatomy—and God knows whereabouts in the elephant’s anatomy they are getting to take that bite from—somehow they have a whole new lease on life. United Future’s argument is that because it can take a bite out of the elephant, it will support this absolutely pea-brained legislation.

I really, really want the Minister to take a call to tell us about the level that this legislation stops at within the workforce. If my colleagues are right when they say that it applies right throughout the entire working population that works for an employer, that is an outrage. I know that in a lot of companies the employment contract of a senior management person will have a range of specific provisions. The company may want to give such people a substantial amount of vacation as part of the package. It may want to give them a phenomenal level of remuneration as a straight, flat rate, and to say that that is it. The company may not even want to define how many hours such people are to be in, but to have a contract based on outcomes or outputs. But no, that cannot apply if we are to read this legislation according to the way it is worded. This Government thinks it knows what is best.

This legislation was all the creation of Margaret Wilson, who, by any stretch of the imagination—

💬 Dr Wayne Mapp: She’s on the right.

She is not on the right. She is not even on the left. Those on the left cannot find her, because she has gone so far off. Margaret Wilson’s views of the world in terms of Eastern Europe have been stamped “Best before 1990”. Even the Eastern Europeans do not believe in the stuff that Margaret Wilson believes in. I think that Kim Il-Sung, or whatever his name is, still does believe in it, and I think that Fidel Castro still does. They are the only two people who do.

💬 John Key: No, Fidel Castro doesn’t.

Has he given it up? All right, we are down to one. Margaret Wilson has one country supporting her view. It is no wonder the Prime Minister had to pull her out.

I have heard from the business community—from a number of people at the Employers and Manufacturers Association, and so on—that there is a bit of respite now. Paul Swain is quite sensible, they said. I said: “Yeah, right.” [Interruption] It is “Swainy and the boys”—yes, there were going to be more people than just Paul Swain involved. Like the Tui advertisement, I said: “Yeah, right—sensible.” John Tamihere told the business community that the Labour members would not let the left take over their caucus, and that they would fix this legislation up. I asked people whether they really believed that, and the answer was: “Absolutely. These guys are committed. They will not have the lunatic fringe running the place any more.” The Prime Minister has taken Margaret Wilson out of the play because the business community is so discontent.

💬 John Key: She’s a liability.

Yes. The Labour members said the legislation would be fixed, but what do we see? We will see exactly the same sort of legislation sitting on the statute book, with one bite out of an elephant that is the difference. I do not know how that is supposed to fix the situation. How could it have been mucked up so badly in the first place? The Minister will not tell us that. How does this bill fix it? It does not. Why is the Minister not leaving businesses to negotiate it themselves?

This debate is quite interesting. When this bill was referred back to the House, New Zealand First started by wanting to support it. It wanted to correct the anomalies. It wanted to tidy up the Holidays Act. I want to make New Zealand First’s position clear on that Act. We support low-paid people getting time and a half when they work on a public holiday. We are strong on that. We also support Matt Robson’s bill, proposing to give 4 weeks’ holiday to low-paid people, being amalgamated into this bill. We thought those were moves in the right direction. So we supported the first bill, but we got it wrong.

We got it far more wrong than we ever envisaged at the time. This bill was the opportunity to correct the anomalies. New Zealand First approached it with that in mind. We wanted to correct the anomalies, but we have failed to do that. The bill corrects some of them. It corrects the non-payment of time and a half when a person volunteers to work on a public holiday but for some reason he or she does not and is then no longer entitled to get time and a half. That was a good move. It also corrects the anomaly of the blank-cheque approach to sick leave. Now the employee will have to see a doctor if the employer is worried or wants proof. That was a move in the right direction, although we would like to see it a little tighter.

But Wayne Mapp’s amendment, which addressed the problem of relevant daily pay, was ignored. My understanding was, and I am sure it is shared by my New Zealand First colleagues, that United Future members were concerned about the problems of relevant daily pay. Here was the chance to address it all, and they said: “No, we abstain.”, and they said that this is taking a bite out of an elephant. All that United Future is doing is licking the elephant’s rump. It does not even have a mouthful of flesh—

💬 John Key: That’s not a good mental picture.

It summarises its view. United Future also ignored my proposed amendment, which would have addressed the problem of salary earners getting time and a half when they work on a public holiday. Earlier we heard John Key talk about Theresa Gattung, who, under this bill, could work on a public holiday and get time and a half for the time worked.

💬 John Key: And a day in lieu.

And a day in lieu—and she gets only $2.8 million a year!

💬 John Key: She gets 15 grand for working on a public holiday, and a day in lieu.

I do not know how she will cope. It will be a struggle. Clearly, United Future has taken that on board and is saying to Theresa Gattung: “We’re not sure that you’re getting enough, so here’s a bit more just in case.” This is pitiful.

United Future has let the side down today. It did not have a representative sitting on the select committee. It did not show any interest in coming along to the committee and, as far as I am aware, it did not even ask for a copy of the submissions. Yet it comes here today and supports a bill that it knows in its heart of hearts addresses only one small part of the problem.

💬 Paul Adams: One bite.

No, it is not just one bite. It is a long way from that. One cannot even see the teeth marks. That is how small a bite it is. Here was the opportunity to tidy up the whole thing once and for all. If United Future had said: “Let’s get together and tidy this up, and then we will support the bill.”, New Zealand First would have supported the bill. Today I have listened to United Future’s contributions, small as they may be, and they have persuaded me that this is too far wrong to give it any support to at all.

I am disappointed with the Government members. Apart from the Minister, nobody from the Government side has taken a call, at all—not one single call. The chairman is rushing this through, and the Government members have not taken one call. Poor old United Future is waving the flag for the Government, and, when a crucial point is reached, it abstains.

💬 John Key: Are there any other parties in this Chamber that abstain?

I cannot readily think of one.

I do have to worry about the naming of this bill. Part 2 deals with the sick leave provisions. Half of the bill is about sickies. This bill, rather than being called the Holidays Amendment Bill, could be called the “Sick Leave Bill”, because it seems clear to me that this Government considers sick leave and holidays to be exactly the same thing. Therefore, the “Sick Leave Bill” may well be a more appropriate title.

I want to spend a short amount of time speaking about the effects this bill will have on the health sector. I would like to have spoken about sickness and injury in the Part 2 debate, but I will address it briefly now. In the 2003-04 financial year, district health boards had four public holidays under the new Holidays Act that they were not funded for under the Budget at the start of the year. At the end of the year they were still not funded for them. District health boards are big employers. In small towns, and particularly in the provinces—the Timarus, the Invercargills, and the New Plymouths—the district health boards are the biggest employers in town. As a result of having the Holidays Act imposed on them, they have had significant increases in their costs, with absolutely no recognition of this from the Government.

One might say that the district health boards are, in fact, the Government and that along the line they will probably get some more money. I do not think they will, certainly not for the 2003-04 year, and in the 2004-05 year, which we are already well into, that seems to be in question, as well. Let us cast our minds further afield to the private hospitals. I am not talking about the surgical hospitals, like Southern Cross hospitals, although, obviously, they are also affected; I am referring to the aged-care hospitals, the private rest homes and the private aged-care hospitals. They have absolutely no power over reimbursements of costs for these holidays. They are dependent on the district health boards for receiving their funding. Their funding used to come directly from the Ministry of Health but has been devolved now to the district health boards. So these private hospitals—the rest homes and the aged-care hospitals—and the district health boards suddenly find themselves between a rock and a hard place, because they do not have adequate funding to pay the increased costs that the Holidays Act has imposed on them. They really have no redress, at all.

I have visited several of them recently. I spend a lot of my time going around the country visiting both the district health board hospitals and some of the private hospitals, and I have found that this is one of their major concerns. Their biggest concern is the lack of funding they are getting, and the impact that the Holidays Act has had on them. They know where to go. They have talked to both Minister Dyson and Minister King about this. They get words saying that things will be addressed, that they are looking at the problem, but they get absolutely no redress for the 2003-04 year when this Act was imposed on them.

I think that the Government is telling the health sector, the district health boards, the private hospitals, the employers of this country, the hospitality sector, other sectors that are involved, and the people on this side of the Chamber that we should be grateful that the Government has looked at this. It has amended the Holidays Act with Part 1 and has addressed some of the sickness problems that have arisen—things they were told at the select committee would happen the moment this legislation was put in place, and they did.

We are supposed to stand here and be grateful for this amendment bill—this misnamed amendment bill. I ask the Minister exactly what we are supposed to be grateful for. Why does the Minister not stand, take a call, and tell members why we are supposed to be grateful that he is addressing these things? This amendment bill goes absolutely nowhere towards addressing the problems that have been imposed upon the employers of this country, including those that the Government pays: the district health boards, the teachers, and whoever else. We are all supposed to stand here and be grateful for this legislation. I have to say that I too am very surprised by the stand that United Future has taken on this. I stood in the Ohariu-Belmont electorate last election, and I will be standing there again.

National is fundamentally disappointed with this effort. It is very much a missed opportunity. The Government knows full well that there are numerous defects and deficiencies with the Holidays Act 2003, but it has chosen to fix up the most trivial issues within the Act. This is truly an example of “Government of trivia”. The Government says that it has five problems—three of them are really big; two of them are really small—and has chosen to fix up the small ones, knowing full well that all in the business community want the major problems fixed.

I guess the Government actually thought, because it certainly proclaimed it at the time, that business would welcome this bill with open arms, saying: “What a responsive Government. Isn’t it wonderful that the Government has appointed Mr Swain as Minister, instead of that terrible woman Margaret Wilson.” That is what they expected business people would say—

💬 John Key: Well, they did.

They did not say that. When business people had the opportunity to make submissions, they consistently referred to the Government’s complete and total failure to get to grips with the real problems—the three big problems, not the two trivial problems. That is why they are so disappointed with the Government, and that is why Mr Swain is such a failure as a Minister. If he goes out to the community trumpeting this kind of legislation as an example of his success, it will be an epitaph of failure. The bill was, and is, a missed opportunity.

I proposed a Supplementary Order Paper that was intended to be a compromise. I took clauses 7, 8, and 9 of the Holidays Bill of 2003, which provided the definitions of ordinary pay, and I compacted them into a single Supplementary Order Paper that gave the Government an opportunity to fix that problem, based on the bill it had introduced into Parliament just 12 months ago. What did the Government do? It just ignored it.

Even more serious, a party that proclaims itself to be a common-sense party did the craven thing. The craven thing in this House is to abstain. People vote parties into this Parliament to express a view. We either support something or we oppose something, so the public can judge us by the record. The public will judge the failure of this Government on this bill. How will it judge United Future, which simply abstained? Frankly, I think that that is a travesty and a betrayal of their electors. United Future will be judged accordingly.

I know that Mr Adams goes around the North Shore proclaiming himself to be friendly with business, and stating he understands the experience of running a small business. He talks to people up and down the North Shore, because I have seen him do it. He betrayed those people today, and it will get back to them that when United Future members had the opportunity to fix a problem, they failed. That is the sort of thing that parties are judged on.

It is with a degree of sadness that National finds itself having to vote against this bill. While the bill fixes up some things, we cannot support a bill that ignores serious and major problems. It would be fundamentally wrong to give an endorsement to a bill that is actually a failure—a failure to recognise serious problems. Every single submitter from the business sector said that the Government had failed—and it has.

As this debate draws to a close, we find that quite—

💬 Hon Richard Prebble: If you want a call that is no reason to close down the debate.

Well, I am standing, just in case the member did not notice. This is a serious matter. I have been astounded to hear this evening that a party that is meant to stand for small business, and says that it is the party of common sense, will vote against a bill on one occasion, vote for it the next time, and on occasions decide to abstain. That is the United Future party.

💬 Simon Power: What does the member say?

He said: “Yep. That’s what has happened.” Well, I say this to the United Future party: “It is your party, Mr Adams, that could stop this nonsense here tonight.”

I want to quote what the member said on 16 December last year, in Hansard, Volume 614, at page 10742, in respect of the Holidays Bill: “If we accept that 99.9 percent is good enough, then members should consider this, which I found on my cereal packet—it always pays to read one’s cereal packet when having breakfast, because one may learn something. … I do not believe that close enough is good enough.” That is what he said.

💬 Hon Maurice Williamson: Did he know what that meant?

I do not know whether he knew what it meant, but his party voted against the legislation. What is it doing tonight? It has come round and is now saying: “Ah, there have been some minor changes, so we will sacrifice the business community.” The United Future party will sacrifice the workers who are employed in the small businesses of New Zealand—600,000 employees in 292,000 small businesses—yet it is meant to be the party that advocates and champions small business.

Let me just continue to quote, and this refers to some of the other businesses, which have been mentioned tonight, which United Future said that it supported. The member said: “I mentioned that the Government was comfortable basking in the glory of The Lord of the Rings films, but that it was not prepared to listen to the five companies involved in the films, all of which have said that the bill will make it harder to make movies in New Zealand.”

💬 Hon Maurice Williamson: Are you from Hobbiton?

I am from Hobbiton. I’m the “MP for Hobbiton”. The member continued: “I touched on Federated Farmers’ warning about increases in costs. I touched on the Hospitality Association’s calculation that the bill will add $63 million to the operating costs within its industry. Does this Government care about the work-life balance of wage-workers only, and not bosses? How many here stand up for what I believe is one of the most neglected sectors of our nation—small-business owners, the small-business men who work long and hard and have families to support? … This legislation is not a good Christmas present for those small employers.”

That is what United Future members said, so how can they come round now and say that they are going to vote for it and for those changes? In Part 1 the member stood up and said he was voting for Dr Wayne Mapp’s amendments, but then he had to stand up and seek leave from the Committee because he had got it wrong and wanted to abstain. If one does not believe in something, one votes against it; if one believes in it, one votes for it. But what has United Future done? It has sat on the corner and wants a piece of each pie. At the election, on the hustings next year, I will be saying, as my colleagues will be saying, that United Future is the party that sold out the business sector.

What an interesting speech that was, from Lindsay Tisch. He obviously has trouble understanding the intelligence that comes from United Future, because we clearly recognise that this legislation, originally, was flawed. But let it be understood that United Future is a party that has unashamedly set its stance in a centralist position. Therefore, that is exactly what we are doing. When we saw what was obviously bad legislation, which was the original holidays legislation, we voted against it. But then we see that there is room for improvement, and some clauses come along. Yes, I agree; we would have liked to see far more amendments in this bill.

But let us be blatantly honest here, and pick up on what Peter Brown said—[Interruption] Yes, that is us; we are the honest party, too. He said that he could speak to United Future, and its members could stand against the Government and get these amendments defeated. Who really thinks that with all the amendments we want, we would even be dealing with this legislation tonight? Well, we would not be, and this legislation would not exist, were it not for these clauses that improve things. There is not one member from the Opposition who has not stated tonight that this bill improves the original bill. But they have stated that they will not support it because we do not have enough improvement. The fact is that they are greedy, but United Future is not. It will take it a little bit at a time.

This bill we are dealing with tonight makes it better for the business community. I notice that Maurice Williamson asked which businesses support it. All the ones that I heard going through the select committee process were from big business. I want to tell Wayne Mapp that on the North Shore there are hundreds of small-business people who are appreciative of this legislation that is going through. It will improve the Holidays Act, and I have not heard one member from the Opposition not agreeing that this bill is an improvement.

United Future members, sitting in our centralist position, say that if we can take some legislation and improve it, we are big enough and have enough backbone in us to do that—to make it better. That is exactly what United Future is like. If we are dealing with just the bill we are dealing with tonight, we see that there are far more positives in it for business than there are negatives. I am not talking about the amendments that Opposition members have tried to have put in the bill, because that is not the bill. What we have to deal with tonight is the legislation that is before us, and anybody who has half an interest in business would see that the legislation before us is making an improvement. As I have said, we will be able to improve it only one step at a time. I commend Maurice Williamson, who has obviously had his eyes opened tonight. When he first came into the debate, he thought the legislation was a rat. But now he has promoted it in his own mind, and now recognises that it is the elephant after all. It is not a rat; it is an elephant, and we are taking another bite out of it tonight. So United Future proudly supports this legislation.

I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. That was just remarkable!

The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson): No, that is not a point of order.

I am about to seek leave. I seek leave that the member be given an extension—

The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson): No. The member, seeing that he is now a whip, might like to look at Speakers’ rulings 1/5 and 1/6. He cannot seek leave for someone else.

Listening to United Future members reminds me of that old nursery rhyme, which members know, about the grand old Duke of York, who marched his men up the hill and then marched them down again. When they were up, they were up, and when they were down they were down, and when they were only halfway up, they were neither up nor down. That is United Future! Its members are either for the bill or against the bill, and when they are in the middle they are neither for nor against. And that member calls that being the centre party, because he can go to the people of New Zealand, look them straight in the eye, and say that he supported their position on this bill. It does not matter who it is. He can look the trade unions in the eye and say: “We were right with you, brothers!”. He can go to the boardrooms of New Zealand and say that United Future was there, saying that it was useless legislation, and he can go to the media and say: “Like you, we didn’t understand what we were doing, so we did nothing.”

Well, of course, what we are doing in fact is huge damage. I thought my colleague Heather Roy made a very good point, and I would like to hear from the Minister. When he was considering the unintended consequences, I ask whether it was an unintended consequence that every health board in New Zealand was not funded for the Holidays Act. How many operations does that equal? How much longer are waiting lists as a result of that underfunding, and is it the same with the education sector? Is it the same in social welfare? Heather Roy tells me that she has actually put in a written question to every Minister, asking what the impact is, just on the Government. Not one of them has been able to reply.

I would like to know from the Minister whether that was an intended consequence. He said that the Government was only fixing up the unintended consequences, so it must have intended to cut health funding by this bill. Perhaps that is what it should be called. I ask United Future, as that party is supporting it, whether its members think that cutting the health vote by 4 days is intended. I remind the Committee that that is very, very significant. If we look at the latest Department of Labour statistic, we see that it shows that wages in the last quarter have gone up 1.8 percent, but actual wage costs have gone down—the reason being that Anzac Day fell on a Sunday. That just shows what 1 day does to the whole economy. But there are 4 days as a result of this bill, which means extra costs that are not funded.

I also have to ask United Future members, who are greatly interested in this bill, why they did not put a representative on the committee. Then they would have known that the Government refused to hear from small business—the Government that the previous speaker is now supporting. It is United Future’s view that it is all things to all people, but I say to that party that I thought it portrayed itself as being a party of principle. If United Future is a party of principle, then it follows that that party cannot be all things to all people. I believe that a myth the Government has is that by passing laws, somehow it can create extra money. There is not another dollar for the health vote. This legislation did not suddenly create 4 more free days. No, they still had to be paid for. Just as we can see that that has a huge impact on the health industry, we also see that it has exactly the same effect on every single business in New Zealand. It has also made a whole lot of unallocated costs.

I say to the House that I think, again, that those in the bureaucracy who normally serve us well, on this bill serve us very badly. I thought that the papers we got from the Department of Labour were shockers. But that department, as the most politicised department in the whole civil service, is prepared to support the Labour Party, because under the National Party when we did not have any strikes or industrial relations, who needed a Department of Labour?

💬 Hon Bill English: It had nothing to do!

It had nothing to do, and it was a department that fell in size and influence. Of course, under a Labour Government, those bureaucrats have gained enormously. They have had increases in salaries and in the size of their department, and they are quite willing to support the Government on this type of bill.

I move, That the question be now put.

Now I know why the party of those members is called United Future. If some members are for something and some members are against something—and some of those members are neither for nor against something—then they have to be united, because there is nobody else to disagree with them. That is why it is the United Future party!

Here is a little tip for United Future members: they will know they are in trouble if they are in there supporting the Government on industrial relations policy when not even the Greens are voting with the Government. They know they are in trouble now, because this is very sloppy legislation.

That is why we are here. We are here because despite the fact that it took about a dozen years to have the Holidays Act rewritten, the Government has made a complete botch-up of it. Those members made a botch-up, because they would not listen to the people who came to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee. They would not listen to the employers who came, and they would not even listen to some of the employees who made valid submissions, so they made a botch-up of it.

When the winter of discontent came around, when Labour focus groups went out there and pulled out a picture of Margaret Wilson, and when the worm went into free fall—it thought it was on a bungy-jump, but with no bungy attached—Labour members said: “We have to find somebody else.”, and they rolled out the friendly face of Paul Swain. United Future said it was neither for him nor against him—it was sort of for and against him—but it would vote with the Government.

And lo and behold, here we are tonight, ramming through something that is, frankly, a disgrace. It is legislation that is absolutely shoddy and that nobody believes in. About the best United Future can tell members is that it is botched-up legislation, but somehow that makes it slightly less bad than absolutely terrible—and that is a reason to vote for something.

We in the National Party did not come into this House to pass legislation for employers and employees of New Zealand that is, frankly, a botch-up. That is not the future for New Zealand, and if the future for United Future is to be holding up legislation that is simply bad for business in New Zealand, then I think that its members have to go back to fundamentals and ask themselves why they are here—or maybe that is the issue. They should not be voting for this legislation; they should be making the Government go back and listen to the select committee and to those employers who came here and said that it would be bad news.

I want to focus on one important element of Part 2 in this speech, and to make a few comments about the issue relating to the need to get a medical certificate and the question of who should pay for that medical certificate. This botched-up legislation says that an employer has to pay for it. That is the way Paul Swain sold it to the other 47 members of his left-leaning Government. He said: “This is the way we can do it: we’ll get the employers to pay for it.” Can some member tell me why the burden of proof has to fall on the employer? It is not the employer who is asking for the day off, or claiming that he or she is sick. Why does the burden of proof—that proof the employee is unwell—have to fall on the employer? If United Future members can answer that, then maybe they can say why they are either voting for or against, or abstaining on, this bill—I am not quite sure what position they currently have. It is probably moving around the stratosphere as we speak.

💬 Simon Power: Give it another 5 minutes.

Give it another 5 minutes. This is not good legislation. This is legislation that was welcomed when the review was to take place—welcomed because it was an opportunity to fix up what had been quite a troublesome area for the people of New Zealand. What did the Government actually do? Its members passed a nebulous term called, I think, relevant daily pay, which even they could not understand. Even they could not work out what that meant. All they knew was that there had been years of negotiations, when employees had finally come to agreement with employers—in harmony, working together—on what ordinary pay meant, and when a decent day was a day off. Now all those negotiations have to be ripped up.

I also make the point that employers who do not pay their salaried staff time and a half or give them a day in lieu when they come into work on a public holiday, are breaking the law. If a small employer does that, and an employee leaves his or her employment and goes and makes that point to somebody else, someone will come after them. So I just want to know whether that is what is happening to Telecom, and whether Theresa Gattung will be paid $15,000.

I move, That the question be now put.

I want to talk about one issue that has not been touched on yet, and I want to indulge the Minister, if I may, on an issue about the commencement of the bill. When the Minister announced the working party that was looking at this bill, made up of the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions and the business sector, he said that the bill would be fixed before Labour weekend—hence the rushed timetable; hence the inability to hear people who wanted to be heard on the bill; hence the Government ignoring the overwhelming majority of submissions from anyone in the business sector who said the bill simply would not work; and hence the Government stitching up the deal with United Future, whose members are saying that they do not think it will work but, as Peter Brown has phrased it, it is the sort of lick—

💬 John Key: The slurp.

Hon ROGER SOWRY:—the slurp of the elephant to see if that will fix it. However, the one thing businesses said was that even if the Government passes this bill before Labour weekend, they cannot adjust their payroll systems to cope with it for Labour weekend. So the bill will not make one jot of difference. I ask the Minister whether he is aware of that. I think he is. So given that the bill will not make any difference to Heinz-Wattie, whose officials no doubt told him that; given that the manufacturing sector appeared before the committee—companies like Heinz-Wattie and Carter Holt Harvey—and given that Air New Zealand is before the court this week in respect of the Holidays Act, I ask the Minister why he does not say: “I am sorry, businesses, but you will have to suffer paying the extra amount for Labour Day on the Monday”, because everyone will have to as they cannot change their systems. I ask him why he does not get it right.

I guess my appeal to United Future is: have its members thought of that? My appeal is for them to pray on it, think about it, see whether it will work, and see whether they can say that they will get it right for Christmas—not for Labour Day, but for Christmas—because this bill does not get it right for Christmas. The costs for Christmas and New Year are huge.

I tell the Minister I understand that even the union movement has said that this bill does not fix all the issues, and that there are still some problems. Late in the day after the select committee process, Ross Wilson came to the Minister and told him: “No, it’s still not right.” But the Minister said to him: “No, no. I’ve promised a Labour Day fix, and fix it we will, even if it’s wrong.”

I know that members may have a wide-ranging debate on these clauses of the bill, but I ask when the clause that deals with the bill’s commencement will be signed—on Friday? The Minister nods. It will be signed on Friday by the Governor-General. It will come into force on Friday with businesses, according to the law, having to pay new rates just 9 days later on Labour Day Monday—and they cannot do it. They physically cannot do it.

That is the sort of botch-up we have had from the Minister’s own colleague around the STV thing when the votes could not be counted. At the end of the day, there has to be less spin and more substance, and there has to be a Minister who is prepared to listen. When he is not listening, someone in Parliament needs to be the conscience. Some party that has some influence needs to say: “Yes, we will stand for what is right, not for what is convenient.” I wonder if there is a party whose conscience would lead it down that road.

💬 Lindsay Tisch: It’s a big ask.

It is a big ask. It requires putting a stake in the ground, and for a party that should support stakes, I think that that is a position it could take.

I am worried that the Minister has ignored business. People who work on Labour weekend will, of course, be paid under the old law. Businesses will shut. This bill will solve nothing.

I move, That the question be now put.

I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. I think it is appropriate to do this while voting is taking place. I have not before seen a party take instructions from another party during a vote. I have heard Speakers rule in the past that members approaching people in a threatening way and telling them how to vote is out of order. I wonder whether it is any different when a member does that in a jovial way. At the end of the day, voting is something that is quite responsible. For a member of a party—even a party as tiny and insignificant as the Progressives—to wander into the Chamber as the Progressive member did, to say: “Just a minute, before I vote I have to find out what I am meant to do.”, and to take that instruction from another party, I think is probably a breach of the Standing Orders.

The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson): I thank the member for drawing that to my attention. I did not see that the member was being intimidated in any way. If he wishes to discuss the matter with someone else, I think that is entirely up to the member and the party he represents. Members might like to look at Speaker’s ruling 61/2.