Neil Sands
Workplace Relations Minister Brooke van Velden says it was “impossible” to ensure no workers will be worse off under proposed employment leave reforms without creating a convoluted, confusing new regime that was worse than the current system.
Van Velden said when she began work on replacing the widely criticised Holidays Act 2003, she tried in good faith to meet a goal agreed in three-way negotiations between employers, unions and the government that “under no circumstances could a worker be worse off due to any new legislation”.
But she said the resulting draft bill was unworkable.
“The feedback that I had back on that draft was ‘Stop! This is worse than the current law,” van Velden told a parliamentary select committee on Wednesday.
“So we had to go back to first principles and start again… The drafting, to ensure that no worker could be worse off, in any circumstance, led to such technically difficult and impossible-to-implement clauses [that] many payroll providers said it would be worse for them.”
After starting from scratch in December 2024, van Velden developed the Employment Leave Bill, which is currently before Parliament.
The minister described the bill as a “balanced policy proposition”, which met the needs of both employees and employers, making leave easier to administer without impacting the bottom line for the majority of workers.
“The bill aims to do three main things: make the rules easier to apply to modern working arrangements; give employees...
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