Legal minefield in fixed-term contracts

Employment law requires good reasons - such as a finite project - for fixed-term contracts, to prevent employers using them as an easy means of getting rid of staff, an employment lawyer says.

Doug Alderslade of Chapman Tripp said the Employment Relations Act meant that if contracts of other television presenters such as Judy Bailey did not meet the criteria, they could argue that TVNZ needed other grounds, such as an unsatisfactory performance, to dismiss them.

"Depending on her contract, if Bailey wanted to say, 'I have benefits from this judgment' or that 'there are not genuine reasons for my contract to end under the act', then there are arguments there."

Fixed-term contracts could be valid for programmes with a limited run, but it was harder to argue this for ongoing programmes.

Mr Alderslade said that although fixed-term contracts might be difficult for TVNZ to justify, the other option of open-ended contracts was also tricky because presenters could be removed only through redundancy or a bad performance.

"You could partly link ratings to performance, but not completely because the reasons for a drop may not be because of who is reading the news."

Employment Relations Authority member Leon Robinson had asked TVNZ's head of news Bill Ralston why the contract did not say it was dependent on good ratings.

Mr Ralston said it was unfair to base a presenter's performance on ratings because many other factors were at play.