Employment Leave Bill

I move, That the Employment Leave Bill be now read a third time.

Today marks an important milestone for New Zealand’s workplaces. With this bill, we are delivering long-overdue reform to one of the most complex and problematic areas of our employment law: the Holidays Act 2003. For too long, both employers and employees have struggled with uncertainty, compliance costs, and repeated payroll error. The status quo was not acceptable, and this Government has taken action to fix it.

This bill delivers a simpler, fairer, and more workable system. First, it introduces an hours-based accrual system for annual and sick leave, with leave now being earned, taken, and paid in hours. Employees will now accrue annual and sick leave in direct proportion to their standard hours of work from day one of employment, with no need to wait months before accessing their entitlements. This removes the need for confusing conversions between hours, days, and weeks, and better reflects the reality of modern work practices, especially for those with variable hours.

Additionally, bereavement and family violence leave will also be available from day one, in recognition that life’s most challenging moments do not wait for length-of-service requirements.

Second, the bill improves fairness in the sick leave system. No longer will a part-time employee receive the same amount of sick leave as someone working full time. The hours-based accrual model is designed to make the system more equitable and better reflect the actual leave needs of part-time and full-time employees. Unused sick leave can still be carried over up to a cap of 160 hours, which is the equivalent of the current 20 days.

Next, this bill reforms the way annual leave is stored. Leave will be banked in hours as it is accrued and balances will no longer need to be recalculated when an employee’s working hours change. This is fairer, more transparent, and easier for both employers and employees to understand.

We are also simplifying how leave is paid. Instead of multiple overlapping calculations, a single hourly rate based on the employee’s current base wage will apply across all leave types. This removes unnecessary complexity and ensures that people can be confident that they’re being paid correctly.

For those who work casual hours or additional hours on top of the hours in their employment agreement, the bill introduces a practical alternative: a leave compensation payment of 12.5 percent on top of the hourly rate. This means they receive leave entitlements upfront, while still being compensated for leave for every hour they work. Employers will be freed from the complexity and administrative burden of tracking and calculating leave for variable hours of work.

This bill also resolves a longstanding inequity affecting parents. Employees returning from parental leave will no longer be penalised and have their annual leave paid at a reduced rate simply because they choose to take time off to care for their child.

Next, the employees will have increased visibility of their own entitlements. Pay statements will clearly show leave balances, helping employees understand what they’ve earned and what they can access.

Just as important as the changes themselves is how we implement them. This bill provides for a careful and manageable transition period of 24 months to move to the new leave system, with additional time for the more complex education sector.

Finally, I wish to acknowledge and thank all stakeholders who have contributed to the development of this reform and who rose to the challenge of turning this bill into a reality. I also acknowledge those who have made submissions to the process, whose considered input has helped ensure this legislation is practical, workable, and fit for decades to come. I also wish to thank my senior adviser Jenesa as well as the officials at the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, who have worked tirelessly on this reform with me over the last 2½ years.

When I assumed this role, I was acutely aware of the long history of Holidays Act reform—a piece of legislation marked by repeated delays and growing public frustration at the lack of progress. Today, I’m proud to commend a milestone that successive Ministers have sought but until now have been unable to achieve. This bill delivers what the Holidays Act has failed to provide: a clear, balanced, and forward-looking solution that gives people confidence in their leave entitlements and in the systems that support them. I commend this bill to the House.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Well, I wish that I could say that it’s a pleasure to stand and speak on this bill, but it’s not. Like so much of what this Government does, it takes from those who can least afford it. From all of the documents, from all of the debates we’ve had in the House, all the submissions we heard at select committee, all of the exchanges with the Minister in the committee stage, it’s clear that she and this Government have chosen to prioritise administrative efficiency for employers at the expense of part-time and casual workers, who lose money and lose time off as a result of this law.

Where we agree is that the Holidays Act was a mess. It was complicated and unclear, and that led to a lot of unnecessary time and cost being wasted in firms, unpaid holiday pay, and some humongously expensive and long-running payroll fiascos in some of the country’s biggest governmental agencies—namely, in health and education. It had to change. We agree on that. In fact, work was advanced under the former Labour Government, which this Government chose to throw out and start again. My point? Not to defend their earlier work, but I will say this: this Government consciously and deliberately chose a policy design that sacrifices the economic interests of part-time and casual workers. They sacrificed the interests of working people.

At the heart of this bill is the definition of so-called “standard hours” and “non-standard hours”. Standard hours are those that are regular contractually committed hours; non-standard hours include overtime and casual hours. Under this bill, annual leave and sick leave accrue from standard hours, and non-standard hours generate what the bill calls a “leave compensation payment”.

It’s been established, beyond doubt, through this entire passage of the bill, through the Parliament, that employees with proportionately higher numbers of non-standard hours are going to lose time off and lose money when this bill becomes law, notwithstanding the payment of the leave compensation payment. That alone would be enough for us in Labour to oppose this bill. The Government had any number of policy design options. They knowingly chose one that will weaken the position of workers who have the least power in our economy—part-time and casual workers. According to the Household Labour Force Survey, there are 588,000 part-time workers in New Zealand. That’s one in five workers. These are the people who will be adversely affected by this National Party - ACT - New Zealand First law.

As many submitters said at the committee, and the Government’s own officials advised them, the other big downside risk with this bill is that it makes part-time and casual workers cheaper for employers. In a competitive market economy, that will undoubtedly act as an incentive for more employers to casualise their workforce. The insecure and precarious work that is a feature of life in New Zealand, with few guaranteed weekly hours and the source of a kind of soul-sapping stress on so many working people, will become even more pervasive under this bill.

The apparent nonchalance of Government MPs about taking time off away from part-time and casual workers during these debates makes me wonder if they consider part-time and casual workers to be real workers—proper workers. Do they think that part-time work is something you do when you’re at uni or something that you do as a kind of hobby? Because it’s not—not for most people. There are a lot of people in this country right now who are struggling to survive. It is hard getting to the end of the week and having enough to feed your family and pay your bills. People cannot find full-time work, and they end up working multiple part-time jobs to try and make enough to get to the end of the week. And part-time work, combined with raising kids or looking after dependent family members, is bloody hard. These people cannot afford to lose time off and lose money. They are the ones who can least afford it.

There’s another way that this bill attacks working people: it undermines the principle of rest and recreation that is vital to people recovering from the stress and exhaustion of work. Whether you’re in a job that’s high stress or physically demanding or both, you need rest. But this bill converts the annual leave or time off into a cash allowance. On top of that, the conversion of so-called non-standard hours into a payment allows workers to cash up 25 percent of their entitlement. I ask members: who do you think is going to do that cashing up? Who are the people who are going to do that? In the committee stage, the Minister mused that it would be people who don’t like taking holidays, which speaks volumes about the narrowness of her life experience.

I’ll tell you who’s going to be the people who cash up their holidays: low-income workers, because they don’t have the money to survive. They are the ones. That is a form of economic coercion. They can’t afford to live on what they get paid, so if you offer them a chance to cash up their holidays, they will sadly take it.

This Government is the most anti-worker Government that New Zealand has seen for a very, very long time. This bill, which takes money and time off away from New Zealand workers—more than half a million New Zealand workers—is only the latest outrage. This Government abolished fair-pay agreements that would have allowed several hundred thousand New Zealanders in low-paid jobs to better bargain and negotiate fair pay. They restored the right of all employers to fire at will during the so-called trial period. They legislated away the right of gig workers, like Uber drivers, to go to court and get the court to decide whether they are independent contractors or in fact employees with the rights of employees. They paid for their tax cuts for the rich, for landlords, and tobacco companies by taking $13 billion that had been earmarked to level up the pay of workers—low-paid workers—in female-dominated industries.

Who does that? Who balances their Budget and pays for tax cuts for the rich by taking away the money that was set aside to level up the pay of low-paid workers? Who does it? They do it—they do it. Most recently, they weakened the health and safety protections of 673,000 workers who work in small and medium enterprises. They weakened the health and safety protections, and they have allowed the minimum wage each year to fall further and further behind inflation during a cost of living crisis.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): The member’s time has expired.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of the Greens to oppose this bill. This bill is another example of a pattern of behaviour from that side of the House, where they trample on the rights of workers. We have seen that since the beginning of this Parliament with the cancelling of fair pay agreements, the bringing back of 90-day trials, etc., etc., etc.

Just a reminder to the House that a number of us were on those steps of Parliament when the Pike River families came to this Parliament and asked members of Parliament across the House to oppose the ACT Party’s health and safety reforms. But just as a part of that pattern of behaviour, every single one of those Government parties supported those reforms. So my key message tonight to the workers is to remember all of those Government parties that supported all of these anti-worker pieces of legislation.

In the committee of the whole House stage, we talked and had a number of discussions, working our way through the bill. In the beginning of Part 1, we discussed the purpose of the bill. I found the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety’s responses to be Orwellian doublespeak, because when you look at the purpose of the bill—and I’ll read it out to you here: “The purpose of this Act is to promote a balance between work and other aspects of employees’ lives and, to that end, to—(a) provide employees with minimal entitlements to—(i) annual leave to give them the opportunity to take paid time away for work and for rest and recreation: (ii) public holidays for the observance of days of national, religious, or cultural significance: (iii) sick leave … (iv) bereavement leave … (v) family violence leave”.

But, instead, what we’ve got is a bill which will significantly punch down on part-time and casual workers and will impact 200,000 workers. This was a number that I put to the Minister during the committee of the whole House stage to see whether she had done any work at all on the impact that this would have on the workers. It had been recorded in the media quite far and wide, work done by the Public Service Association in terms of the analysis that they did on the impact on workers—over 200,000 workers is the number they came up with. They had a few more specific details: it will negatively impact manufacturing of meat, seafood, dairy, fruit and vegetables, wood, chemical, and metal workers, which is an estimated 24,000 affected workers; electricity supply, an estimated 1,500 affected workers; heavy and civil engineering and road construction, an estimated 1,500 affected workers; retail of supermarkets, motor vehicles, electronic goods, and furniture, an estimated 11,000 affected workers; road, bus, rail, water, and air transport, an estimated 13,500 affected workers; newspaper publishing, broadcasting and telecommunications services, an estimated 1,500 affected workers; financial and insurance services, an estimated 6,500 affected workers; Police, Corrections, Inland Revenue, the Department of Internal Affairs, the Department of Conservation, and local government, an estimated 35,500 affected workers; in the health sector, allied health, health administration, doctors, nurses, midwives, orderlies, care and support workers, ambulance officers, social workers, an estimated 106,500 affected workers. That is a lot of workers negatively impacted by this bill.

As we have moved through the stages, I’ve actually bumped into people who have actually done the new calculations on how their leave will be impacted. None of it is good—none of it is good at all.

I do take the point around the previous system and the need to make sure that there is clarity and simplicity. That is something I think both sides of the House would agree on: making sure that something is clearer, making sure that something is more simple, making sure that something is more accessible is a good thing. But here’s the thing: there were options. If you look back at the regulatory impact statement, there were three options that were canvassed—three options that were canvassed. Option one was the status quo. Well, nobody wants that; nobody wants an overly complicated system—acknowledging that there has been work they’ve done to make sure that we’ve sorted and worked through that. Option two was weeks-based accruals. This option reflected the proposal presented in the exposure draft bill, which was largely based on the 2020 Holidays Act Taskforce recommendation. So a whole lot of work that had been done to actually sort this stuff out. The key change here was to move it to a weeks-based accrual model for annual leave with a focus on—and this is the important point—providing clarity and certainty. And option three was the option that the Minister opted for.

We heard through the debates and also through the committee of the whole House stage, again and again, the Minister wanting to focus on clarity, wanting to focus on simplicity. Well, you actually had two options there that could’ve done that, but that Minister chose the option that would take away rights of workers, that would punch down on part-time workers, and punch down on casual workers.

We also asked specifically about a case that was brought as a part of the submission from the Workers First Union, and it was an example that was used to actually try to get a sense of what the changes would be to this particular worker. The example that Workers First brought to the Education and Workforce Committee was workers as a part of Cotton On. They had three standard hours, but these workers were working around about 20 hours. So the question that we put to the Minister, and she affirmed it—or my understanding was that she affirmed it—was that under these new changes, those full 20 hours that previously would have counted to the annual accrual of this worker’s leave would in fact be impacted in this way. That is, under this definition, the Cotton On members would only accrue annual leave for three hours per week. So, over 52 weeks, these members would receive less than 12 hours of annual leave. Could you imagine that? You work for a whole year—for a whole year—you get 12 hours. A whole year, you get 12 hours. That makes a mockery of the purpose of this bill, and that is just one example of the way that workers will be negatively impacted by this bill.

What it will do is it’ll force workers to make those types of calculations. Do I take the time off work? Do I transfer my sick leave to my annual leave, or do I go to work? Now, we are in a cost of living crisis, and I know that for many of these workers, many of these low-paid workers, the calculation that they will make is “I will go to work. I will go to work even if we are sick.”—even if they are sick.

Just a reminder, because we also asked, around the connections to the other reforms that this Minister has put out: what does that mean for health and safety reforms? We heard just recently, a couple of weeks ago, laws that were passed where non-critical risks will no longer be covered and be the responsibility of persons conducting a business or undertaking, of small-business owners. So we could have the scenario where workers are sick, can’t afford to be sick, will go to work, and other people will get sick. This makes a mockery of actually what this bill should’ve really been about: if you’re sick, you stay home; you get better. If you need bereavement leave, you take that. Your annual leave should be used to make sure that you have the ability to rest and get that work-life balance properly. But that has not happened.

So the Greens do not support this bill. It is another example of this Government punching down on the workers. It’s another example of this Government not listening at all to the workers. It is another example, and a pattern of behaviour, unfortunately, of every single one of those Government parties, and one of them in particular, cosplaying like they pretend that they care about the workers, going around pretending that they care about the workers, but my message to the constituents and to New Zealand out there is to judge them by their words. Judge them by the way that they vote on this bill. Judge them on the way that they’ve voted on all of the other bills. From the cancelling of fair pay agreements, to the bringing back of 90-day trials, to the rolling back of health and safety protections, to the misclassification of gig economy workers, this is a Government which I can only think despises the workers. It’s no wonder that workers are getting up and getting on a plane and getting out of here, going to greener pastures where there are better pay and conditions. The Greens oppose this bill. It will disproportionately impact women workers, and Māori, Pacific, and disabled workers. This is another example of a terrible bill.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. As part of the National Party’s focus at the moment on parental leave and ensuring we really support parents that are on leave and when they return to work, one of the things that this bill will do is ensure that new parents, when they return to work, will receive the full value of their annual leave. It’s a major shift from the status quo, and, therefore, I commend the bill to the House.

I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to support the Employment Leave Bill. It is a change in how leave is accrued. The Holidays Act is an absolute dog’s breakfast. Our own Government departments could not navigate it. I think the nurses were up for a big whack to compensate them because Government departments weren’t able to comply with this law. Small and medium businesses and those of us that have employed people will attest to that.

We’re moving to an hourly-based accrual model. There’s a clear distinction here between standard and required hours, additional hours, excess work, and casual hours, and the 12 percent leave compensation payments for part-time and casual-based workers, and, of course, the elegant solution that’s been found for maternity leave. This had simplicity, clarity, certainty, and proportionality. It’s a significant improvement on the status quo, and New Zealand First commend the bill to the House.

Let me begin from a place of balance. There’s no serious dispute that the Holidays Act needed reform. Employers, workers, unions, payroll providers, and submitters all recognise that the current law has become too complex, too uncertain, and too difficult to administer well. The question before this House is not where the change was needed; the question is what kind of change we’re prepared to accept and whose wellbeing sits at the centre of that change.

In te ao Māori, mahi is never separated from the person who does the mahi. A worker is not simply a unit of productivity. A worker is a mokopuna, a matua, a parent, a caregiver, a partner, and a member of a whānau. Their labour carries mana, because their life carries mana. That is the lens through which Te Pāti Māori approaches this bill—mana, whānau, whakapapa, manaakitanga, and the responsibility we all carry to uphold the dignity of those who work.

This bill may may make some calculations easier. It may offer certainty to payroll systems. It may respond to genuine problems created by the old Act, but simplicity is not the same as fairness. Certainty for systems must not come at the cost of uncertainty for workers. The concern is that leave is being shifted from a protection into a formula. Annual leave and sick leave exist because people are not machines. Rest is not a bonus. Recovery is not a luxury. Time with whānau is not an administrative inconvenience. These are the things that keep people whole, and Matariki, which we all celebrated nationally as a country, as a whenua, should have reminded every single member in this House of that. For Māori, wellbeing is collective. When one worker is exhausted, it’s not only that worker who carries the burden; their tamariki carry it, their partners carry it, their communities carry it, their kaumātua even carries it, and their whānau does. A law that weakens rest really does weaken more than an individual entitlement; it weakens the fabric around that person.

That is why the leave compensation payment troubles us. We support increasing the pay-as-you-go scheme, but we do not support the elimination of rules that enable some casual workers to get leave, and the overriding of leave entitlements for overtime. Money pays bills, and many of our people know the pressure of needing every single dollar and cent that they can get, but you can’t cash out exhaustion. You can’t spend a percentage payment on your tamariki if you’re too tired to be present. Burnout does not disappear just because it arrived on a payslip. This is not an abstract concern. It reaches the people cleaning our hospitals, caring for our kaumātua, driving the trucks, working shifts, working weekends, taking extra hours because the rent is due and kai still needs to be put on the table. Those carrying the heaviest workloads should not receive the lightest protections.

We also hear the concern that a three-tier system of standard, additional, and casual hours may not deliver the simplicity that is promised. If even those who build payroll systems say that the framework remains complicated, then we must ask who this bill has truly become simpler for. A Māori position does not require us to reject reform; it requires us to ask whether reform is tika. Does it uphold mana? Does it protect whānau? Does it recognise whakapapa, including the obligation we owe to those coming after us, our mokopuna? Does it build a workplace system where people are cared for, or one where people are simply calculated? On that test, this bill falls short. It fails.

We can modernise employment law without reducing the restorative purpose of leave. We can make payroll workable without making workers bear the cost. We can create certainty without diminishing dignity. Every generation is remembered for the choices it makes. Today, this House can choose to build a leave system around people, not around payroll. Te Pāti Māori will not support this bill.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise to oppose this bill. Before I begin my speech properly, I just wanted to thank my colleagues who’ve been holding the fort on this bill during the committee of the whole House stage: Teanau Tuiono, Ricardo Menéndez March, Mike Davidson, and, of course, the indomitable and formidable Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan, who, contrary to the assertions of some in the House, probably understands democracy more than any other person, because of how much they’ve spoken in the House.

Look, the Greens oppose this bill for three key reasons. They’re interlinked, and they’re really cut into the mythology of what this Government claims to stand for. The first is that this bill is deeply anti-worker legislation, especially the provisions around sick leave. The second is that this bill creates, contrary to the assertions of many people across the House and evidenced by the numerous submissions against it, more yellow, blue, and black tape. It creates an increasing amount of complicated rules and bureaucracy, and it actually creates uncertainty for business. The third reason is that, contrary to the frequent assertions by many in the Government benches, it actually goes backwards on building a modern, productive Aotearoa that everyone in this country needs.

Now, let’s go through it one by one. The first is the sick leave provisions. We’ve heard from submitters, like Workers First Union, about what this bill might do to people who work in our ambulance sector. I just wanted to tell a story, because in the last campaign, one of the volunteers from my campaign was an ambulance worker. The sorts of shifts they work are pretty brutal. They tend to work 12 hours a day in four blocks of four. They do four days off and four days on. I really admired this volunteer, because even though they were working really long hours, they still found time to help out with my campaign. But because they’re working such irregular hours, the nature of the proposals in this bill would make it so that—in the current regime, they’re currently eligible for 10 days of sick leave every year. Now, the regime that the Government would change this to would shift it to seven days a year. That’s a 30 percent cut to the people who are working some of the longest hours and doing some of the most difficult jobs in Aotearoa, doing really essential work right at the front lines. And they’re being exposed to not just diseases, not just potential for injury, but also—and we need to recognise this, and I do want to applaud the steps that this Government has taken in terms of mental health—recognising that, actually, mental health injury can be just as valid as an actual physical injury. A lot of these ambulance workers are encountering potential mental health injury because of their workplace. The shift from 10 to seven days of sick leave means that they’re potentially not being able to take as much sick leave as they should be.

Now, the second concern is the potential for this to create—and I want to quote from one of the submitters—“complex and disjointed regimes”. This has the potential to actually increase the complexity that’s currently in our legislation. I’m sure you’ve gotten really familiar with the bill as you’ve presided over parts of the committee of the whole House, Madam Speaker, but this bill is really thick and really complicated. It’s over 168 pages of legislation. Now, I really struggle to imagine that a bill of this length is actually any less complex than the regime that it proceeded. In fact, from the submissions and the submitters that submitted to this bill, they’ve told us, in fact, that it increases complexity. So how could this bill be of benefit to business when it’s increasing the complexity?

It also increases the potential for uncertainty, because in theory you would want some broad consensus around labour laws in this country so that it’s not shifting from Government to Government. Now, when we make this Government a one-term Government, businesses will face the potential risk that this bill might be changed. So how could that not be disruptive to them?

And the third and final point is that this bill is supposed to be advancing the Government’s agenda of a modern, productive economy. But tell me: how is forcing ambulance workers to take less sick leave leading to a modern, productive economy? Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It is a pleasure to speak on the Employment Leave Bill. This has been well-traversed this evening and we’ve finally made it through. People who have had to deal with all of the hassle of the Holidays Act and all of those huge bills that have had to be paid will be relieved to know that relief is on the way. It is much more sensible to accrue leave on an hours-based rather than just on a set number per year. So I commend the bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Well, it gives me no pleasure at all to talk on this bill, for a few reasons. This issue has been around in New Zealand Parliament for a long time. It’s not a straightforward issue. It involves calculations on entitlements for people that have different lives and for businesses that work differently. So this is never going to be a straightforward piece of legislation, but various Governments have attempted to address this, and the previous Labour Government did attempt to address this.

The way that the previous Labour Government addressed this differs from this Government in one really fundamental way. The way that we sought to address it was by recognising that the single biggest thing that is helpful to businesses in terms of holiday pay or employment leave is certainty. The way that you get certainty for a bill like the Employment Leave Bill or the Holidays Act is you build consensus. Building consensus is not easy. Building consensus on such a complex issue and making sure that people did not lose entitlements is very hard. Trying to prove something that people derive personal entitlements for, that are connected to their employment contracts, it’s tricky and it is hard and it’s difficult work.

What we saw from this Government and from Minister Brooke van Velden is that the bipartisan consensus mode of trying to achieve certainty for businesses in New Zealand was thrown out the window in exchange for getting this bill through and ticking off her to-do list. I think that that is a shame, because it means that the bill that we are discussing and debating today is a bill that takes away people’s employment rights and limits their entitlements to leave. That is the one rule when you are reforming the Holidays Act that you should not break is you should not leave the country and leave the legislation and leave the people that rely on this for their wellbeing worse off. That is what the Minister has done. Shame on this Government for giving up on that noble work to try and give businesses certainty and build consensus up across trade unions and businesses and political parties in order to be able to say, “We ticked off the Employment Leave Bill box.” My goodness, it certainly hasn’t been something that they have been shy about crowing about either, has it?

But the sad thing about it is that while they crow about this achievement of getting this bill through the House, the people who are paying are the people who can least afford to pay: the people who need their employment leave, the part-time workers. This Government recently has announced policies around supporting working mothers. Well, I’ll tell you who the greatest percentage of part-time workers who will lose out under this bill are: working mothers. If you work part-time, you will lose your sick leave. What is the single most important leave that you need as a working parent? Sick leave, not for yourself, but for your family, to be able to actually do your job as a carer. This bill takes that away. It does so in a way that distrusts people from actually being able to say the types of work that they usually do and the structure of their work that usually occurs. The modification to part-time workers’ sick leave is based on distrust of part-time workers and it makes me sick.

The other thing that this bill does is it changes the way that calculations are made to an hourly basis. Now, we’ve heard from the other side: “That is way more sensible. That makes a lot of sense.” But when we actually look at the facts, they don’t marry up to that. We’ve got a submission here from the Law Society—a notably nonpartisan organisation that assesses laws and submits to Parliament based on the facts of the actual workability. They have said, “while the hours-based framework might be simpler in principle, we are of the view that the classification of hours in rostering must continue to account for complex working arrangements”. They say that “These can be difficult to accommodate within an hours-based system”. So we will still have complexity around holiday pay. Simply changing it to an hours-based system is not the fix-all that we’ve heard from the other side. So there is still going to be complexity.

I had a particular perspective on this which I will share with the House, which is the reason we had so many problems with the Holidays Act was not, in fact, of the inherent problems associated with the Holidays Act; it was the fact that we kept buying and promoting and using software from payroll companies in Australia that had a different system to us. So when we tried to get the Holidays Act—which isn’t based on an hours model currently—with an hours-based system in Australia, it didn’t work. That is because it was not designed for our system. That is why we had so many issues with Government departments and other organisations that have been mentioned about why the Holidays Act ended up with having a deficiency in the amount of pay that it was paying out—that is the reason. The actual law itself, if it had software that worked to back it up, could be utilised in a very similar way that this law is going to be utilised. So it’s a great day for the payroll companies in Australia, because they can now sell their products to us without having to change anything fundamental about their system. But I can’t say there are many other winners in this bill.

This bill, it has been predicted, will mean that 500,000 New Zealand workers get less leave. That means less pay and that actually means less time off with friends and family. From my perspective—and I’ve worked here and overseas in relation to workplace leave laws, and I’ve worked with the EU directive on employment leave—one of the fundamental purposes of annual leave is actually a health and safety purpose. We do not want to be a country where everyone cannot take any time off and burns out and has bad mental health and has a life that is not worth living because of the fact that they can’t take leave. That is why it’s a health and safety—[Interruption] That’s true, Simon Watts, actually. If you look at the International Labour Organization and you look at the reasons that annual leave was initiated, it was a health and safety reason. So when we have provisions that make it easier to cash up leave, that is a direct disincentive for those on low incomes to actually take annual leave. That means that they’re not spending time with friends and family, they’re not taking care of their health, and it means that they are constantly at work. It’s not about having a break or going on an expensive holiday; it’s actually about valuing workers as people.

This bill takes a step away from that, especially for casual workers, who are only entitled to a payment. Well, some people may argue, “Well, they receive a payment, and therefore they shouldn’t be entitled to annual leave because it’s a 12.5 percent payment, so it’s more generous than they would have otherwise received.” Well, they deserve to be able to take leave, because they are human beings. That is the thing that is missing from this bill: the fact that people are not just a calculation; they actually have entitlements and they have lives, and even if they are casual workers, they deserve to be able to take paid leave. The reality all around the world is, if you can’t take paid leave at the same rate that you would usually get paid, people will not take it. Why wouldn’t they do that? Because we are living in a situation where the economy is totally tanked, the cost of living crisis is out of control, and people don’t have spare money. So if they are going to get paid less on annual leave than they would if they were at work, they’re going to decide to stay at work instead. That is a real shame.

I don’t have much time left in this call, but I really want to emphasise the fact that it’s deeply disappointing that we were unable to have a Government courageous enough to do the work of finding a consensus and finding a way of not disadvantaging people. Now, that is hard—I don’t say that it’s not hard—but the fact that we have just turned our backs on this and just put in place a piece of legislation that actually takes leave away from the hardest hit, our most vulnerable, our lowest paid, our people in the least stable employment, is a real shame. It means that this bill is not sustainable long term. It has a two-year implementation period—for people in the education sector, it’s 10 years. So if there isn’t a way to build consensus around these reforms, they will not give the business the certainty it deserves. That is the entire call that businesses said to this Government: “Give me certainty.” They have asked the Government for that, and the Government has taken the easy way out that disadvantages our most vulnerable.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): Members, the time has come for me to leave the Chair for the dinner break. The House will resume at 7.30 p.m.

Sitting suspended from 6.02 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): Good evening, members. When we broke for the dinner break, we were debating the Employment Leave Bill in its third reading. We were up to call No. 9, which is a National Party call.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Well, it’s great to take a call in the third reading of the Employment Leave Bill. The Holidays Act has been a problem for quite some time and it’s caused real challenges for workers and for employers, and so it’s great to have a piece of legislation that will help sort that out. I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Something I agree with the previous member on is that the Holidays Act did require a tidy-up, but this is a lot more than a tidy-up. In reality, it makes things a lot more difficult for employees and, in my view, will add some real confusion to how employment leave is calculated and applied across New Zealand. There are some particular concerns that the Labour Party has with this bill, which is why we’re not supporting it throughout this stage.

I’m going to talk mostly around the need for workers to be able to build up proper time to have leave for proper rest and relaxation. In New Zealand, the principle is that workers should have access to a minimum of four weeks’ annual leave. That is a principle that we abide by.

What this bill does is it will put the leave that workers receive into two parts. For those workers that have a small, set number of hours, and then have their hours flex, in a casual way, up and down each week. Let’s say they’re rostered for five to 10 hours a week. Members have used the Cotton On example, and those are workers I used to represent when I was a union organiser prior to coming to Parliament. It was very common for them to have one day a week or half a day a week, and then receive a lot of extra hours that fluctuated from week to week. What will happen for those workers is that for those set hours, they’ll be able to build up the relevant amount of annual leave, but for everything they do on top of that, it will have a compensatory payment that, essentially, becomes the holiday pay paid out to them weekly. Unlike now, when they can elect to have that as a lump sum if they decide to save that up for when they have leave, they will actually be paid out on a weekly basis.

Now, members opposite and Ministers have said, “Oh, but workers can just save that money.” We know that workers on low wages are not in a position to save money at the moment, especially with the cost of living crisis that this current Government is presiding over. If a worker is deciding between saving some money each week and fixing the car, paying the increased power bill that’s happened through winter, buying the new school shoes for the children, and making those kinds of decisions that we know working people make on a weekly basis, they won’t be saving that extra compensatory payment. What it means is that when it comes time to having a holiday and when it comes time to having proper rest and relaxation, those workers will not have the appropriate amount of time built up to actually have a proper break.

What this bill is going to do is penalise those workers. It’s going to make their wages look inflated. They’ll be receiving extra money each week that, essentially, makes it seem like they’re earning more than they really are. In this current economic crisis that we face, I can see—because I’ve worked with a lot of those workers, I’ve sat down with them in their tearooms, and I’ve talked to them about how their lives work—that they will be paying those extra bills and those extra costs that they have every week. They won’t be saving that money up for a break.

Now, there are a few other things that we have real problems with inside this bill as well that I’ll just touch on in my last minute and a half. One is that workers won’t be able to take leave in advance and they won’t have a guarantee of two consecutive weeks off. For people who work really difficult, tough jobs that are labour-intensive or that have a large mental load, it’s actually really important for them to have a decent break because it can take a couple of days to actually get through that wind-down period before you can actually start to enjoy yourself and actually relax. We know that having two weeks and having that decent length of time is something that workers really value, and so not being able to have that as a guarantee is a real problem.

There are other issues around the close-down periods, which we touched on during the committee stage, where an employer can basically make an employee use the entirety of their annual leave in a close-down period. What that would do is that if that’s happening over Christmas, which is when it normally occurs, you might then have a worker who needs to go to their child’s graduation, or who may have a sick day when they have used up their sick leave and need to take annual leave. All of these types of things can now actually use up the entirety of a person’s annual leave over that close-down period—you know, if you have a wedding to go to or another significant family occasion to attend, and there’s no leave throughout the year.

It is the Labour Party’s view that this bill takes the application of leave backwards in New Zealand for workers. It is not a tidy-up, it will make things more confused, it penalises workers, and we in the Labour Party do not support it.

Today is a good day for the nearly 600,000 businesses right across New Zealand, because, as has been traversed, the Holidays Act has been an absolute mess for some time. I commend the Minister for taking the bull by the horns on this occasion and actually resolving this through this bill.

This bill is about fairness. It’s about fairness for those that accrue annual leave and sick leave, and I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s almost sad to see the National Party members stand up and parrot off those remarks when I know that they’re not fools—not all of them, anyway—and if they read the bill, they’d understand what it actually does. The National Party that I remember actually wanted to treat people decently, particularly the most vulnerable workers—those who are on part-time and casual contracts. Obviously, here in the Labour Party, it’s in the name, and it tells you what we stand for: we do stand for workers, and—

Andy Foster: Well, what you used to stand for.

Hon Dr DUNCAN WEBB: —one of the things that we stand for, have stood for, and have fought for is decent holidays, because holidays are not some trivial thing. They’re actually something that recognises people’s humanity and that they have a life outside of the workplace—that they can spend time relaxing, doing things that they love with the people that they love—and what this bill does is it erodes substantially the right to holidays, especially for part-time workers and particularly those workers who are on contracts which might have a few core hours of maybe three or five hours a week, and who then pick up additional hours on top of that.

Whilst they’ll get some actual holiday accrued on this hours basis for the hours that they work on the regular contract, any casual hours that they have are just accrued on a per-dollar basis, and so they’re compensated for it. But there’s a real problem there, because to have a proper holiday and to have a period of time where you can genuinely refresh and recharge and spend that time with friends and family, you need to be able to do it for an extended period. If, over the course of a year, you’ve accrued only three full days’ leave, then that’s all your employer has to give you. There is no entitlement to say, “I would like to have a week to visit my family who have gone to get better jobs in Brisbane.”, or those kinds of things.

That’s a real shortcoming of this bill, and, of course, the same can be said of the sick leave provisions. The fact of the matter is that this bill is just one in a long list of pieces of legislation through which this Government has undermined the rights of workers.

I heard someone from the New Zealand First Party harping out before. They now say that they stand for workers, but if you look at their record, they’re the ones who voted in favour of bringing back 90-day trials and they’re the ones who voted in favour of abolishing pay equity. They are actually the master underminers of the rights of workers. Whilst it comes as no surprise to me that the ACT Party, the party of big business, wants to give tax breaks to landlords, New Zealand First claims to be the party of people, but it’s equally as happy to give tax breaks to tobacco companies and undermine the rights of workers, especially working women.

Whilst it’s fair to say, as my colleague said before, that there could’ve been a tidy-up here, this did not require wholesale reform; it required some clarifications. The fact of the matter is that in terms of sick leave in particular, this strips from part-time workers meaningful sick leave. So what we have here is some of our most vulnerable and most important workers—a good example would be some of our care workers, who do go into rest homes or people’s homes and deal with the elderly or the unwell or the disabled. They now, because of the reduction in the number of sick days given to part-time workers—because it’s now accrued on an hours-worked basis rather than on a weeks-worked basis—will be going into those places unwell because they’ve got no sick leave left and if they don’t work, they can’t pay the rent. So we’ve got a real problem on our hands.

We as a country have done well historically in protecting and recognising the rights of workers, and we know that we have come in leaps and bounds since COVID in saying, “Well, look, if you’re sick, stay at home.” And what do you know? It creates a more productive and healthier workplace and a more productive economy because we don’t have people making entire workplaces sick or making the people that they’re working with sick or, you know, our hospitality staff delivering food to our tables being sick—they’re all very bad things.

But this bill is forcing people, people who are on the lowest income—I’ve talked about care workers; students are another class of people who have been in the news recently because there is simply not enough work for students to be able to support themselves whilst they undertake their studies. These reforms, in particular the way holidays, overtime, and sick leave are dealt with, undermine the rights of students. So those students—they’re struggling as it is; they might be able to borrow more money and increase their student loans, but that’s not going to help them. That’s not going to help them in a cost of living crisis. It’s not going to help them afford their first home when they finally get a job that pays enough money to save.

It’s a real tragedy here, because the Labour Party of course wants to make leave and holidays work. We want to get it right, and we accept that there was work to do and we stood ready to work with the Government on that in a way that endured. But this Government doesn’t care about enduring, fair, workable, economically effective, and efficient holiday provisions; it just cares about the bottom line of big business.

It’s alarming that the Government pressed on with these reforms, despite very substantial and worthy and thoughtful submissions to the contrary, from what I understand, from the Education and Workforce Committee proceedings, and has pushed that on, and now we’re in the invidious position, once again, where we’re going to get a pendulum effect, because we want to make sure that workers’ rights are properly protected.

What I would say to the Government is: let’s talk. Let’s talk and get it right in an enduring way, because at the moment we haven’t, and we’re going to run into problems with these most vulnerable workers. We do know that the workers who are affected here—and it’s so fatuous for the Government to come out with a paid parental leave policy and in the same week have a bill passing this House which affects our most vulnerable and precarious workers, who are predominantly women. So here we go: not really giving with one hand, and slapping with the other. It’s really problematic.

So, look, the Labour Party does stand for workers. We’re focused on real jobs, not precarious jobs. We’re focused on jobs that pay a decent wage so that people can look after themselves, can take holidays, look after their health, pay for their homes, whereas the Government on the other side is, basically, happy to punch down on the most vulnerable and to undermine the rights of workers, which, over many years, hundreds of years—the hundreds of years that the Labour Party has been advocating for workers; that’s how long it’s taken to build this up, and that’s what that Government and that party over there, that odd party in the corner, are doing.

So it’s with some consternation that I see this bill progressing in the House tonight. It’s a bill that the Government should be ashamed of, and it’s a bill that this party will have no part of.

As the last speaker on this bill, and to see it passing the third reading, I have to say this is a bill that will fix the basics for New Zealanders and for many, many, many of the small and medium enterprises. In the last two years, we’ve been around the country, we’ve had submissions, we’ve had people who have come to us and said the Holidays Act before this bill was complicated, it created a lot of uncertainty, and that is why it needed to be fixed. That is how the National-led Government is fixing the basics and building the future for all employers and employees. I commend the bill to the House.

A party vote was called for on the question, That the Employment Leave Bill be now read a third time.

Ayes 67

New Zealand National 48; ACT New Zealand 11; New Zealand First 8.

Noes 53

New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand 13; Te Pāti Māori 4; Ferris; Kapa-Kingi.

Motion agreed to.

Bill read a third time.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: I declare the House in committee for consideration of the Crimes Amendment Bill and the English Language Bill.

Crimes Amendment Bill

Committee of the whole House

Part 1 Amendments to Crimes Act 1961 (continued)

CHAIRPERSON (Maureen Pugh): Members, the House is in committee on the Crimes Amendment Bill and the English Language Bill. We come first to the Crimes Amendment Bill. When we last considered this bill, we were debating Part 1, which is the debate on clauses 3 to 28, “Amendments to Crimes Act 1961”. Once again, the question is that Part 1 stand part.