The Mike Hosking Breakfast

Mike's Minute: The employment law changes are fine

18 Feb 2026

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This time around the Brooke van Velden-led employment law changes have been described as a shake-up, even a major shake-up. But as someone who well remembers the Employment Contracts Act and Bill Birch, what is being offered is merely a righting of a badly out of whack employment market. The usual whining from unions has ensued. In a nutshell, there is a limit on personal grievance procedures. It defines what a contractor is, as opposed to an employee, and the 30-day trial rule is gone. If you earn a lot i.e. over $200,000 you can't go to an employer for wrongful dismissal. I have experience in this area. I was effectively sacked by TVNZ about 25 years ago and I was on over $200,000. Under this new law I couldn’t have gone after them. But guess what? I didn’t go after them anyway. Why? Because who wants to work for people that treat you that way? And in that is a lot of what the workplace is about. There are bad employers and good employers and a lot of employers in between. Rules are based on worse-case scenarios. It has never been a better time to be a worker in this country. Yes, jobs are tight as of late. But if you're good and determined you can get work, because good people are hideously hard to find, and you can succeed quickly. Most people, and I cite 45 years in the workplace here, at the very least mean well. Many are actually quite good. Work should be about enjoyment and learning and development of skills and the climbing of ladders. If you are bogged down in worse-case scenarios, you go nowhere. Equally as an employer, how do you grow your business when you are ankle tapped by a mindset that infers you are bad news, so all sorts of guard rails need to be enacted in law? Bill Birch's law was not the end of the world. Brooke van Velden's won't be either. The workplace recipe should not be complex; if you work hard, you do well. If you're slack and entitled, you need to be sacked. If you're young and inexperienced you don’t get to be the boss in your second week. Not all your personal problems are your employers' problems, and not all employers are out to get you. By and large unions are trouble, negative, and potentially ruinous and I have yet to see one that has the country's best interests at heart. We're all in this together. Too much employment law pits us against each other, and no one wins. Brooke van Velden's laws are fine. No one is going to die. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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