Estimates Debate — Vote Labour

It is a pleasure to take a call in the estimates debate on Vote Labour. I will start my contribution tonight by acknowledging the staff of the Department of Labour for their hard work and contribution, particularly in Christchurch and the tragedy at Pike River. That has been very challenging for those staff and I just want to put on record my appreciation. That is despite the endless restructuring and the low morale that has come about since this Government came into office and the Minister took charge of the Department of Labour.

This debate is an opportunity to have a look at the record of the Minister of Labour, Kate Wilkinson. It is fair to say that her record as Minister of Labour is less than distinguished. In her time as Minister we cannot see anything that she has done to show leadership in this very important area of labour. Earlier on Minister Paula Bennett talked about employment. If I may say, Vote Employment is a very, very small part of the Department of Labour, so I think she overstated that issue. This debate was a chance for the Minister of Labour to talk about her achievements, but I have seen nothing from this Minister, in her 2½ years in the role, to motivate or encourage better employment relationships, higher skills development, productivity improvements, and higher wages. That is one of the critical roles of the Department of Labour. However, unfortunately the Minister’s approach has been one of a race to the bottom, as fast as John Key’s Government has let her. She has made working people the target of change, and it is unproductive change. It is backwards-looking change.

Sadly, when we look over the tenure of this Minister, in what we know will be her last term as the Minister of Labour—thank goodness—and her last term in charge of the appropriations of the Department of Labour, and we look ahead, we see nothing but deficits. I am not talking financial deficits; I am talking a deficit of imagination. We heard it earlier in the debate from the ACT Party member, who talked about youth rates. That is a deficit of imagination—

💬 Hon Steve Chadwick: From ACT.

—from ACT—but we get it from National as well. The truth is that John Key’s National Government has given up on trying to improve Kiwi wages. He is now trying to attract investment to New Zealand by saying that having wages that are 30 percent cheaper than Australia is a competitive advantage. That is what Bill English said, and that is what he told the Australia New Zealand Leadership Forum earlier in the year.

What we have seen, under the tenure of this Minister of Labour, is a pretty disgraceful record. Not only has she done nothing to try to improve critical areas like productivity and skills but she has done a whole lot of other things. She sold out a whole lot of New Zealand workers. That started with low-paid workers, but last year we had the disgraceful exhibition of her Government being subjected to Warner Bros control. That multinational company came to New Zealand to take away the rights of New Zealand workers. If we look at the statement of intent for this year’s estimates, we will see that one of the jobs that the Department of Labour is doing is having a look at other groups of workers who are called contractors, and providing clarification. What I read into that is that their rights will be on the chopping-block, as well.

Next on the wonderful record of this esteemed Minister: from 1 April every New Zealand worker lost their rights to justice if they get the sack, the right to be able to challenge an employer—a fundamental right—when a worker loses their livelihood because an employer made a decision. The Government made it easier for workers to be fired for no reason and without recourse to justice. It did that on the basis of arguing that this would create jobs. I will get on to that in a minute, and then I will talk about the miserly minimum wage increase.

When I talk about financial deficits, I talk about a particular worker called Sam. I will talk about Sam in relation to the minimum wage. Sam is an invention of the National Government. He is an invention that is still on the website. Sam works as a store-hand at a supermarket, earning the minimum wage. He is 19. He flats with friends, and blah-blah-blah. He gets a tax cut of $13.82 a week and pays an extra $7.46 in GST. Overall, he is $6.36 a week, or $330 a year, better off, in theory. What we know is that, actually, since Sam was invented by the National Government the value of the minimum wage has gone backwards. Sam is now actually worse off by $16.80 a week. He is worse off because of the rising cost of living, the cost of accident compensation increases, the cost of GST and other things, and also because of this Government’s miserly—miserly—25c an hour increase in the minimum wage earlier this year.

What we know about this Minister is that she had advice from the Department of Labour, from her own department, and it went to Cabinet. It said that she could have given a bigger increase to workers on the minimum wage. She could have put up the minimum wage to $13.50 an hour from 1 April this year and that would have had almost no impact on employment. She decided that that would not happen. Of course, what happened to Sam—and not only Sam but also a whole lot of other workers; people and families who rely on the minimum wage—is that he is $16.80 a week worse off. The extra 25c an hour that those people got on 1 April this year was wiped out in the first 3 months of this year. But those members do not care.

💬 Hon Nathan Guy: The same as your $5,000 tax cut.

No, it has been wiped out. That member should have a look at his own figures. Then we saw the sad spectre of this Government, of John Key, raising the issue of labour market reforms yet again. We have had some of that in their term of Government. The Minister would like to claim that it has created jobs. The 90-day trial period for employers with fewer than 20 workers apparently created 13,000 jobs. That is such poor research that the Minister keeps relying on. There is no evidence that that will make any change. Now we hear from the Prime Minister that his response to the global market downturn is: “Here we go again. Let’s have a go at the workers. Let’s cut some more things. Let’s go back.” This is an ideological burp. It reminds me of Bill Birch and Ministers even before him. Here we go again. When a Government has no answers to the economic situation, what does it do? It goes after workers’ rights. It goes after those, and it means cut, cut, cut. This Prime Minister has made it very clear that the Minister of Labour has no influence on him, so he will just do what he wants.

The funny thing is that when we start to look at what modern economies are doing and what the IMF and the OECD—never particular friends of the Labour Party—are saying, we see that they are looking back at history. They say that one of the things that really made a difference to the global economic downturn was the collapse in collective bargaining. When workers cannot get their fair share, they cannot pay their bills. That means they cannot pay their mortgages. That means banks go broke. So now we have the interesting situation where we see the IMF and the OECD saying that collective bargaining needs to be strengthened. This Government is planning to weaken it—it is planning to weaken it.

Phil O’Reilly was on Radio New Zealand this morning. It was so depressing and we have heard it all before. He said something like “We’ve got to end the union monopoly on collective bargaining.” For goodness’ sake! I think the Minister and the Government do not understand that the workers of New Zealand have done their bit. They have pulled in their belts, they have coped with the increases to the cost of living, and they have accepted poor pay increases.

The Department of Labour is responsible for workplace safety in New Zealand. I could have a speech of my own, but all I need to do is read from the very sad and very long transcripts of the royal commission inquiry on Pike River in Greymouth. I will quote from them, because some of the statements are quite profound, and they affect the Department of Labour—what it should be doing, what it could be doing, and what it is not doing.

The head of workplace health and safety policy management, Mr James Murphy, admitted in two statements that insufficient funding is going from this mean Government—the same Government that gave away $14 billion in tax cuts—to a department that is responsible for workplace health and safety not only in mining but across every industry. Mr Murphy admitted that inspectors were “coming up short for lack of resources and lack of training”. He also told the hearing that mines inspectors’ inspections would require resources to be taken from another area of the Department of Labour if they were going to up their ante. Well, that is very sad, as I said. On page 641 of the transcript, one of the inspectors said that there is, effectively, a lack of audits of mines. At another place on page 641, he said there is no structured professional development in place. On page 645 he said there is no plan for the training of inspectors, and no unannounced mine visits—presumably because of a lack of resources.

There are 29 dead men still in a mine; there is no recovery operation, because the Government refuses to provide funding for that recovery. There is a seal on the mine now. Families are waiting—waiting for action. When the Government came down, it made a song and dance. It promised everything to everyone, but it has now walked away from the Pike River mine.

💬 Chris Tremain: Oh, that is rubbish.

No, that is not rubbish. There are no resources. There has been no commitment from the National Government—no commitment—to provide the funds to continue with the recovery of those bodies. I say that the front—

💬 Hon Christopher Finlayson: You’re a disgrace to the name O’Connor.

Well, that Minister says that; I would not like to get into some of the “h” words that I could apply to him. When he can front up with the right money, not for his mates in tax cuts but for the Department of Labour to run a proper mines inspectorate, then I will judge his true commitment to humanity. That is right, I say to the Minister. I say “Put the money where your mouth is.”

There have been comments from a person in New Zealand who provides advice to the Chinese mining industry, and he is horrified that the Department of Labour, this under-resourced department, has been telling its dwindling bunch of mines inspectors—in fact, there is only one now—that they should not give any advice to mining companies in case they incur legal liability for the department as a result. What sort of under-resourced, stingy mines inspectorate does the Department of Labour support? Well, I think that the next two phases of the royal commission hearings will expose that even further.

I have to say that it is a sad state when in this First World country our mines inspectorate is inferior, has no legal obligation, and in fact has been advised by senior people in the department not to go out and help to raise the level of safety in mines. That person also said that nowhere else in the developed world would the mines inspectorate give such nonsensical advice. Although I do not expect the Minister in the chair, the Acting Minister of Energy and Resources, probably to answer these things, it is imperative that she passes on to her Minister the fact that the mines inspectorate at the moment is totally and inadequately resourced and unskilled to carry out the role of the inspection of mines and the upholding of safety in underground mines in New Zealand, as of this day. The Minister of Labour refuses to resource the mines inspectorate, to increase the number of inspectors, or to do anything about safety standards in underground coalmining.

It is bordering on immoral that the Minister and the department will sit on their hands until the end of the royal commission hearings. I accepted the need for us to give the commission clear space, and it has all the information before it now. But it would be immoral of me to sit on my hands, having heard the information and the evidence at the first round of the royal commission, and not to push the Government to increase, upgrade, and properly resource the mines inspectorate in this country. I ask the Minister in the chair, because she is a very reasonable person, whether she thinks—not needing any knowledge of mining—that the current Minister should refuse to do something that is so glaringly obvious. The senior policy person from the Department of Labour has admitted that the department—

💬 Hon Maurice Williamson: Labour had 9 long years.

💬 Hon Christopher Finlayson: 9 years.

—and the Ministers opposite know this—did take a more hands-off approach, and that the department is now thinking that actually it was too hands-off. But in the same submission it admits that if any resources are to be put into the mines inspectorate to upgrade it, then the resources will have to be taken from somewhere else in the Department of Labour.

Well, we are debating the estimates, so I ask where the money is. Where are the resources both to uphold standards across other industries and to boost the mines inspectorate when there is a desperate need as of today? Tomorrow men will go underground, and incidents are happening. A report, a late report, has been done on one of the major underground mines, which shows that the department is full of holes, and which clearly indicates that a lot of work still needs to be done and a lot of guidance needs to be given by experts in the mines inspectorate.

💬 Hon Christopher Finlayson: What was done over 9 years?

This is about today, I tell the Minister. This is about the estimates, moving forward. What is that Minister’s Government going to do to try to prevent deaths in underground mining tomorrow? What will he do today to prevent the accidents of tomorrow?

The reports, the information, the submissions, and the hearings at the royal commission all point to inadequacies, a totally under-resourced mines inspectorate, and people in the job who do not have the skills to know whether they are Arthur or Martha when it comes to some of the gaseous, high-risk underground mines. So that Cabinet Minister and his friend there should get off their butts too, and encourage their colleague the Minister of Labour, whose colleague is in the chair today, to explain why she will not properly resource the mines inspectorate to move forward from tomorrow. If the Ministers want any reason to support that, they should just go and read the transcripts—just go and read about the gaping holes in a department that not only fails to uphold the wages and conditions of a huge number of New Zealanders and allows slavery on foreign fishing boats in our waters but also allows underground miners to work in an unsafe environment, because the department refuses to properly resource a mines inspectorate or to uphold the standards that people warned about right back in 1994. I can say—because it is about the estimates, moving forward, and about how much resource the department has—that inadequate resources have been given to the Department of Labour, and it cannot uphold mines safety.

Tēnā koe. Everyone knows that the Labour Party was born in the coalmines of the West Coast, so it is only appropriate and understandable that we have a Labour member of Parliament from the West Coast, the Hon Damien O’Connor, speaking with some passion about the events that occurred at Pike River.

I know that the whole country and the whole House are upset about what happened at Pike River. It is imperative that this Government creates the conditions that prevent that sort of tragedy from happening again. Whether workers are working in a mine or in a McDonald’s they know that the Labour Party is their party, and that we are here to stand up for their rights and their conditions. Contrast that with the Government opposite, which is there for the employers and not the employees. We know that the Government’s prevailing belief is that employers are the benefactors and employees are the beneficiaries, and that workers, the employees, are the people who should just do the work and be grateful; they should be grateful that they have been given an opportunity to earn a bit of money. The benefactors and the party that supports them tend to forget that businesses thrive and make money because of the work of the employees, the people who are there doing the hard work.

One of the worst pieces of legislation to be passed by the House as a result of the National Government is the 90-day trial period legislation, which my colleague Darien Fenton touched on. One of our concerns about the 90-day trial period for businesses with fewer than 20 employees was that the 90-day trial period would then be changed so that it affected all employees of all businesses, and that was exactly what came to pass. Now our fear is that the 90 days will soon be extended out to 180 days, and after that 180 days it will be extended out to 365 days, and before we know it all employees at any time will be able to be sacked for no reason whatsoever, without any recourse available to them at all.

Trial periods are meant to be voluntary, and employers can make an offer of employment that includes a trial period of up to 90 days. Trial periods are voluntary and must be agreed to in writing and negotiated in good faith as part of the employment agreement. That smacks of—what is it? It implies that there is some sort of even power between the employer and the employee, that there is a relationship based on equality. The reality, we know, is that when somebody walks into a job—and in the situation the country faces at the moment, there are not too many jobs, so people are desperate—they will go in and they will be too scared to negotiate anything. They will just take what the employer says and live with it. We know that that Government over there likes that.

Remember that that is the Government with a Prime Minister who was caught by a reporter before the 2008 election up in Kerikeri when he was addressing a business function. He said that he would love to see wages drop. Then the reporter, by the name of Greg Robertson, who works for the Bay Chronicle in Kerikeri, had pressure put on him to retract that statement. This is the Government that would love to see wages drop. This is the Government that says that our wages being 30 percent less than Australia’s is a competitive advantage. That is a disgrace. That is saying the Government over there is happy for our people to earn less in order to make it feel good.

💬 Carol Beaumont: What does it mean? They all go to Australia.

That is exactly the problem—that is exactly the problem. It is why towns such as Kaitāia and towns such as Whangarei are emptying out of employees. They are all heading across the Tasman. There is a rugby club up near Whangarei called Hikurangi that could form two rugby teams in Perth more easily than it can form one rugby team up in the north, because all of the players over the last 2 or 3 years have moved over to Perth. They are getting jobs there, because the employment and the labour laws over there are a lot friendlier to workers. I have spoken to the freezing workers up north. I have spoken to them, and I have heard how experienced workers of 12, 15, and 20 years are being laid off.

Vote agreed to.

Vote Energy