Employment Relations Amendment Bill

Thank you, Mr Chairman. As this is my first intervention of the 51st Parliament, can I just take a little bit of time to welcome colleagues back to the Chamber and to congratulate you, Mr Chair, and acknowledge you as this Chamber’s Deputy Speaker for the 51st Parliament. Can I also welcome those new MPs, particularly those who have had their maiden speeches this afternoon. I think colleagues will agree that the quality of the speeches and the calibre of our new intake on both sides of the Chamber are particularly impressive.

I have the very good duty, I think, as the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety, to continue the excellent work of the Hon Simon Bridges, the previous custodian of this bill. I want to acknowledge the very good work that he has done. I also want to acknowledge the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee of the 50th Parliament, which considered this bill and, of course, reported it back with amendment. I acknowledge the chair of that committee, David Bennett, and want to congratulate him on his appointment today as the chair of the Finance and Expenditure Committee. It is very well deserved after 6 years as the chairman of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee, a committee I very much enjoyed being a member of in the 49th Parliament. It was a rather split-personality committee, where we had such strong and collegial relationships on those things such as immigration and transport safety, and, then, perhaps not quite the same level of collegiality around ACC and employment law. Nevertheless, it was a very effective committee then and I am sure it will be under the able chairmanship of Jonathan Young in this Parliament.

The Employment Relations Amendment Bill delivers on this Government’s manifestos in both the 2011 and 2014 election campaigns. It is designed to enhance and create a more flexible workplace relations environment. It continues this Government’s strong focus on reduction and compliance costs and unnecessary burdensome regulation. It does some very small but effective changes to flexibility in bargaining, to entry into collective agreements, and to the ability of employers to opt out of multi-employer collective agreements, and it has a number of other technical changes. It adds some flexibility to an employee’s opportunity to request more flexible working arrangements. That ability is currently available to employers of people who have caregiving responsibilities. I note that 70 percent of employers have actively considered and allowed some form of flexibility under that. So this is something that I think will be appreciated by employers and employees alike as we extend that to a far wider range of reasons to have flexibility. It provides, I think, a very sensible opportunity for employees and employers to agree on flexibility in work breaks and meal breaks.

I want to acknowledge the many people around the country who have emailed me this afternoon their views and their beliefs both in an email and on Facebook that this somehow is going to be the removal of the right of employees to take a tea break. Well, nothing could be further from the truth—[Interruption]. The irrational rant from the meerkats on the other side at the mere sniff of this kind of exploitation that they claim is there is unfortunate and untrue. We know that there are situations in the workplace, including workplaces that I have managed, where there are sole-charge operations for which it is necessary and appropriate to have some flexibility in the rest and meal breaks, whether it is the two registered nurses on night shift at the weekend at small surgical hospitals who, for safety reasons, cannot leave the ward at 2 o’clock in the morning. I, as an employer, gave them a meal, a meal allowance, and some extra time in recognition of that inability. Why you would want to leave and go downtown in Dunedin at 2 o’clock on a Monday morning is anybody’s guess, but, indeed, that was the flexible arrangements we had before this law change. It is probably still there and probably in breach of the Employment Relations Act. It is unnecessary, and this brings back some sense to that

There is the sole-charge air traffic controller at small airports who, again, for safety reasons, cannot leave. There is the night-shift supervisor at the 24-hour service station and the sole-charge person who, for very good reasons, want to have that flexibility. I think we patronise employees by pretending that they cannot negotiate with their employer for a fair outcome. It has to be done with the agreement of the employer and the employee together. That is the modern workplace, not the cloth cap - wearing rhetoric that I think we are going to hear during the Committee stage of this bill.

Very good improvements to the bill were made by the committee as it came out, and they were confirmed at its second reading. But there are a couple of amendments that I will be introducing under Government Supplementary Order Papers. I want to acknowledge the Hon Peter Dunne for his suggestions around the cessation of bargaining, the ending of bargaining, and for ensuring—albeit that I think that the bill was pretty clear about this; it is certainly appropriate to strengthen and make absolutely clear—that the Employment Relations Authority needs to be satisfied that both parties to the ending of the negotiations have acted in good faith and that the cessation of the negotiations should not take place if one party has not acted in good faith. So the Hon Peter Dunne has proposed a Supplementary Order Paper. The Government is happy to see that in place.

Part 6A has been a fairly contentious part of the Employment Relations Act for the last 9 or 10 years. There are some sensible amendments, in my view, to acknowledge the burden of Part 6A on very small businesses, small to medium sized enterprises of 19 staff or fewer, and to provide clarity around the obligations on the outgoing employer and the incoming employer under a restructure so that employees have enough time to consider their options, and the incoming employer has a clear understanding of the time frame for the getting of the information and an understanding of what employees he or she is taking on.

The last amendment under a Supplementary Order Paper is to the provisions under the Employment Relations Authority and the ability for the powers of the chief of the Employment Relations Authority to be delegated. In the absence of this and in the absence of the chief of the authority, if it were to occur, that could cause some problems with decisions that are required to be made by that chief. I think that is a sensible and pragmatic change.

This is a good bill. This is a bill that delivers on the promises this Government has made in the last two election campaigns. We have the mandate to pass it. We have the numbers to pass. It will improve the workplace by providing flexibility for both employers and employees. I expect that to be robustly debated this evening and I look forward to it.

Thank you very much, Mr Deputy Chair, and given that this is the first time that I have spoken whilst you are in the Chair, may I congratulate you on your election to that role.

I hope that members opposite enjoyed their meal break, because we in this House get the right to a meal break. It is something that we kind of take for granted. We work pretty hard, but we expect to get a meal break in the evenings. I suspect that most members, particularly those on the other side of the Chamber, have had a very enjoyable one. There were a few maiden speeches today, and there might have been a few wines and beers and maybe some nice nibbles enjoyed during the meal break tonight. But that is not, of course, what the National Government wants for the ordinary worker in New Zealand—no, sir. No, it is what those members want for themselves. It is what they want for themselves, but it is not what they want for the ordinary workers. So I hope they enjoyed their meal break. I hope they enjoyed their meal break, because workers right across the country will be watching this session of Parliament this evening and thinking to themselves what a lovely bunch of people they are in the National Government. They want meal breaks for themselves. They want caviar for themselves and scraps for the rest of the country.

Part 1 of the Employment Relations Amendment Bill is essentially the thrust of the whole bill. There are a number of changes made to the principal Act in this part, and I expect that there will be a lot of debate about those different changes. I want to focus my first contribution this evening on clauses 7, 8, and 9. These are the clauses that relate to collective bargaining and, in particular, to the duty to conclude collective bargaining. What clause 7 does is it repeals section 31(aa) of the principal Act, which states that one of the objects of Part 5 of the Act is “to provide that the duty of good faith … requires parties bargaining for a collective agreement to conclude a collective agreement unless there is a genuine reason, based on reasonable grounds, not to”. What a perfectly reasonable clause to have in a piece of employment legislation—employers and unions that are at the bargaining table have a duty to do their utmost to conclude that bargaining, to form a collective agreement, and actually conclude that bargaining and reach some form of agreement that allows the people working in that workplace to be on a collective agreement that is shared amongst them all. What a very reasonable thing to have in your legislation, and yet this Government, with clause 7, plans to remove that.

Then what clause 8 actually does is repeal section 32(1)(ca), which states: “even though the union and the employer have come to a standstill or reached a deadlock about a matter, they must continue to bargain …”—they must continue to bargain. Yes, we know. Look, I have been at the bargaining table myself and I know that sometimes you reach an impasse and it can be incredibly difficult to see a way forward. What the legislation does right now is it keeps people at the table. It takes away the soft option of simply giving up and walking away from collective bargaining. That is what this legislation, which this Government intends to pass this evening, will do. It will give, principally, the employer the opportunity to give up as soon as bargaining gets difficult and walk away.

Clause 9 replaces the duty of good faith. The principal Act required parties to conclude collective agreement unless there is a genuine reason not to, and clause 9 amends it to say, basically, that they can walk away from collective bargaining at any moment. This weakens the position of every employee in the country. This says to employers that you can bargain for a while—you can do a bit of surface bargaining, you can show good faith—and then, as soon as you reach an impasse, you can walk away from the bargaining table.

💬 David Bennett: Oh, not true—not true.

It absolutely is true, David Bennett. And if you think it is not true, David Bennett, get to your feet and tell us why it is not true. I want to hear from the former chair of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee why he thinks I am wrong on this point. That is what all the submitters came and told us at the select committee. That is what all the advice was when we were at the select committee. It was that these changes and this repeal of the duty to conclude bargaining weakens the position of employees and makes it easier for employers to walk away.

So what is the intent of this? Well, the intent is for unions and employees not to put up claims in their bargaining that they think are going to be difficult. They are going to try to make the bargaining process as simple as possible for the employer by avoiding the difficult issues, but what is the point of collective bargaining if it is not to address the difficult issues in the workplace? It might be about pay. It might be about conditions. It might be about industry standards. It might be about setting up some sort of joint committee to address an ongoing issue in that industry or in that workplace. It could be a whole host of things, but the incentive here with this legislation is not to introduce any of those issues into bargaining, because the employer will simply say: “This is too hard. We’re walking away.” That is the effect of this legislation, and it disempowers workers. It disenfranchises workers. It has got nothing to do with unions, actually; it has got everything to do with the bargaining power that working people have in the workplace.

It is typical of the National Government, is it not? It claims that this is a small but effective change. Well, it will be effective, all right. It will keep wages down. It will keep unions under control. It will keep workers suppressed. It will be very effective, but it is not small. It is not a small change because what it will do is keep wages down. I hear from the opposing benches that wages should move with productivity, and we on this side of the Chamber could not agree more. But over the last 20 years productivity has increased—I cannot remember the number off the top of my head. I am hoping someone will tell me, but it is significant. It is significant—

💬 Hon Members: Heaps.

Heaps—it has improved heaps. But we know that wages have simply not kept up, and we know that if wages had kept up with productivity over the last 25 years, wages would be, on average, about $8 or $9 an hour higher than they are right now. Why have they not kept up? Because our industrial relations law has not been strong enough as it is, and yet this Government plans to weaken it with these changes in clauses 7, 8, and 9. That is why there is such a big pay gap between New Zealand and Australia. Does anybody remember when that was an aim of this Government—to close the pay gap between New Zealand and Australia? One of the main reasons why Australia has better wages than we do in New Zealand is that it has got better legislation and it has got stronger unions that can collectively bargain, and that collective bargaining actually raises wages for all workers, whether they are in a union or they are not. So that is what these three clauses are all about. They are suppressing wages and suppressing workplace rights.

Another rather insidious and odious part of this legislation is the removal of the 30-day rule, where someone goes on to the collective agreement automatically in the first 30 days. The thing is that employers say they want flexibility. Well, they have got flexibility right now. If they want to pay someone more than what the collective agreement allows for in the first 30 days, they can. There is nothing stopping them. What they cannot do is pay someone less than what the collective agreement allows for in the first 30 days. That can be the only possible reason for removing the right to go on to the collective agreement in the first 30 days of employment. It is so that the employer can offer a contract on less favourable terms than the collective agreement. That is the only reason. I have not heard a single substantive argument that proves me wrong, and if I am wrong about that, then again I invite the members opposite to get to their feet and tell us why I am wrong about that.

This again is about supressing wages. It is about weakening the new worker’s position in the workplace. Of course when there are scarce jobs out there, they are going to take the conditions that they are given by the employer. They are not going to take the choice of the better contract; they are going to take the weaker position because they know that the employer will just go to the other dozen or so people who applied for that job and offer it to them. Of course, we know that for every person who goes out and applies for a job, there are at least 10 or 20 other people applying for that same job when they line up. That is why we have queues of thousands outside supermarkets. People who are stuck on benefits actually do want to work and go out there and get a decent job, or even a low-paying job or a minimum wage job. People want to work, and there is so much competition for those jobs because the labour market is so weak at the moment under this Government that of course people will feel under pressure to take the contract that has worse terms and conditions than what the collective allows for because they know that the employer can just go to the next person if they do not agree to that.

What an awful for this Government to do. What an insidious and odious thing to do to workers. This, again, is not a small change. This is a significant change. Effective? Yes. Will it achieve what the National Government wants it to do? Yes, of course it will. Is it small? No, sir, it is not. It will have a massive impact on the ability of ordinary working people to bargain for a decent contract that has decent pay and decent conditions in the workplace.

Well, here we are, the very first act of this Government in the 51st Parliament and what is it? Surprise, surprise! It is dealing to hard-working New Zealanders. That is the very first thing. It has suspended the Address in Reply debate to deal to the working people of New Zealand. It is a disgrace and the Government is reverting to type. Part 1 of the Employment Relations Amendment Bill is where the rubber hits the road. This is where it is all happening, because what is the urgency that this is the very first act of this new Government? What is the urgency in this? What is the harm that it is aiming to fix up? Well, in determining and weakening collective bargaining, who is it that this Government could be going after in such a hell of a hurry?

Well, I am looking at some of the collective agreements that are about to expire: nurses. Public hospital nurses are who the Government is after, because they are negotiating their employment agreement right now—right now—and that is who the Government is after. It is the nurses who actually look after people when they end up in the public hospital that this Government is going after. Why else would this be the very first act that it has undertaken as a new Government? Then after the nurses come the teachers. The teachers’ collective employment agreement is up about the middle of next year and they are whom the Government is going to have in its sights next. That is why it has suspended a debate to try to force this through. Nurses, teachers—police will be next, firefighters will be after that, and the Government is after each and every single one of them. So when nurses, teachers, firefighters, police, and anyone on a collective agreement think about the vote that they may have cast during the election, they need to know what the very first act is that this Government is taking against their interests.

The only reason for weakening collective bargaining—and Part 1 is weakening collective bargaining—is to drive down wages. That is the only reason to do it.

💬 David Bennett: Oh, what a load of rubbish!

Government members say “Oh rubbish!” but what is the reason? What is the harm that we are trying to fix here? Is it because we have had lots of long and bitter industrial disputes where workers have demanded unrealistic wages and gained them? Is that what has been happening in New Zealand? I have not seen any of that. In fact, what I have seen, though, is a report in the New Zealand Herald earlier this week where a Skycity worker got up at the annual general meeting and talked about how she is a sole parent, working 2 days a week, trying to make ends meet, and actually doing what the Government wants. She is actually in paid employment instead of being on the benefit. She was working 2 days a week. She, after 17 years or 11 years—one of those two, it might have been 11 years of service for Skycity—without any consultation was cut down to 1 day a week. She was cut down to 1 day a week at the minimum wage to try to exist on. She got up in that shareholders meeting. She told her story to a group of shareholders who were just about to vote in an increase in directors’ fees for Skycity.

That is what has been going on this country. We have got growing inequality. There have been wage movements all right but they have been for directors and chief executive officers when we know now that the gap between people on the average wage in organisations and their chief executive officers has grown hugely under this Government. And that is what this bill is designed to do. It is designed to make that even worse—even worse—than what it is under the current Government.

That is not the New Zealand that I think and the Labour Party believes we ought to have. We actually do not think it is fair that chief executive officers keep getting huge increases while this Government passes this sort of legislation for no reason. Where is the harm? Where is the dispute? I want the members opposite to get up and name the dispute where workers have won an unreasonable wage increase because there has been a duty to conclude collective bargaining. Minister Woodhouse, I challenge you to get up and name that dispute where workers have won an unfair wage increase because the Act, the legislation, currently requires a duty to conclude collective bargaining. If there is no such dispute, if there is no such example, then why is the Government making this its very first act? Well, I will tell you why. It is because it is after the hard-working nurses. It is after our very valuable teachers. I listened very carefully to Steven Joyce earlier this week when he said—

💬 Hon Member: Why?

Well, because I am interested to know what is in the recesses of the dark minds of the National Party. That is why I listened to him. He talked about the tertiary education sector. And do you know what he said? He said its costs have increased by 70 percent in the last 10 years and it must get its costs under control. Well, on this side of the Chamber we all know what that is code for because the tertiary sector does not have whizz bang machinery or lots of capital expenditure in terms of research and development costs and that sort of thing. It spends its money on employing quality people. It spends its money on wages to have the best academic people we can have in our tertiary institutions. So what Steven Joyce is saying is that he wants wage cuts. He wants wage cuts and this is the legislation in Part 1 that the Government is going to use to bring that about.

I want to move on to talk about the meal breaks and rest periods part of this bill. It is an issue that is very close to my heart because, in fact, I wrote the current piece of legislation. It was a member’s bill that I wrote in my name. It was adopted as a Government bill in my first term in Parliament and so I take it a little bit personally but, more important, the stories that we heard when we passed that legislation were incredible and that is what we are about to go back to. What people said was that they could not believe that in the year 2007—I think it was 2006 or 2007 when we passed that—workers in a civilised democracy like New Zealand did not have the legal right in law to have a lunch break or a rest period. People could not believe that but when they came to hear the stories—and Mr Bennett was on that select committee at the time—I think even they could not believe it. There were people who came before the select committee and told us stories about how they had been sacked. Yes, they had been sacked because they dared to take a lunch break in their workplace in the year 2007 in Aotearoa New Zealand.

That was not just an isolated incident. The one I remember very clearly was from Hamilton. A young guy by the name of Ānaru came and told the select committee about working for Subway in Hamilton where he had done his shift and he agreed to stay on and do a second shift because another work colleague of his was sick. He did the right thing. He did not have to agree to it but he did it. But after he had done about 10 hours, he started to get pretty tired and fatigued and he knew he was going to make a mistake if he did not get a break. He insisted on taking a break, a half-hour meal break—and when he returned he was sacked. He was sacked for daring to walk off the job. They said he had abandoned his duty. He had gone to take a meal break.

This brings me to another point. The reason I wrote that piece of legislation was because of my concern around the health and safety issues associated with fatigue at work. That is the reason we have the right to a tea break and to a meal break. It is to keep people safe, because we know that if people are tired they will hurt themselves and others, and sometimes that actually ends up in workers losing their lives. This is particularly when you think about dangerous industries like forestry where we know already there is pressure on workers to work without taking their breaks because they are paid on a piecemeal basis rather than on the hours that are worked. We already know that there are actually major health and safety issues going on, and here is the Government saying: “Well, actually you can bargain away your right to have a meal break. Just don’t bother having one.” Maybe the employer will offer you a chocolate fish! Or maybe the employer will just threaten you as they threatened Ānaru with his job if you insist on taking a meal break.

Those are the sorts of things that are going to start happening over and over again if this Government has its way. That legislation, that meal breaks and rest periods legislation, which was brought in as part of a Government bill that also dealt with infant feeding breaks—[Bell rung] I am probably going to continue the story later on.

It gives me great pleasure to speak on the Employment Relations Amendment Bill. I would just like to acknowledge the Minister in the chair, Michael Woodhouse, who is a very fine Minister and he has done an excellent job on this bill, as well as members of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee, from both sides of the Chamber, who actually worked hard to make this bill the best that it could be. I acknowledge members of the Labour Party who were on that committee who actually had a lot of experience—people like Andrew Little, who is very experienced in negotiations and labour relations law. Their roles were pivotal in making sure that we got this bill to the stage we have today.

I would just like to clear up a few things that the Labour Opposition members have been talking about today. The first thing is that unions have a very vital role in our economy and in our workers’ representation, and the National Government understands and acknowledges that. Collective bargaining has a very important role as well. That is something that many unions engage in and it has given good results for workers in New Zealand. That is something that is not attacked in this bill, contrary to the Opposition members’ claims.

Opposition members are claiming that this bill is an attack on collective bargaining. It is not. This bill provides fairness and flexibility in the workplace. That is what this bill does. If you look at it, in collective bargaining there is a duty of good faith. Underlying all employment law is the duty of good faith, and that applies to both parties in the negotiations. They have to approach those negotiations in good faith.

💬 Sue Moroney: That’s already in there.

Yes, it is, Ms Moroney—it is in there. This bill enshrines that in the sense that in collective bargaining you cannot just withdraw, as the Opposition says, because that overriding duty of good faith is still on the employer. So the employer cannot just withdraw because they do not like the idea of this collective bargaining. They are still under that duty of good faith, and that is an important thing. At the moment, in the current situation, the employee, through the union, can withdraw at any stage but the employer cannot. The employer, even if they have that duty of good faith and go through that collective bargaining process, cannot withdraw. They still have that duty of good faith.

The problem with this legislation is that it brings out the worst in the Labour Party. When you have legislation like this it shows the true colours of the Labour Party. Those people over there are not there to protect workers. They are protecting themselves because they want to be in the privileged position of representing unions and workers’ rights. They see themselves as some kinds of gods for workers, who can tell people what they should do. The 10 of them who are left over there tonight represent all workers in New Zealand and know better than workers, and that is not what we are about in this Parliament. We want to give flexibility and rights to workers.

I say to the Labour Party members that while most of the Labour Party leadership is out doing their election campaigning for their new leader, why do you not give each worker the ability to vote for your leader? Why do you make it so that only the union delegates can vote on behalf of the unions? Why do you not give every worker that ability to vote? Because they cannot. Did you know that? Under the election campaign that is going on now—

💬 Sue Moroney: I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. I would ask about the relevance of that to Part 1 of this bill, but would also ask the member to answer the question that I asked him about what the example is of where this has gone wrong.

The CHAIRPERSON (Chester Borrows): Order! You are not going to use a point of order to bring about that sort of political comment.

Collective bargaining is the crucial part of this legislation. What we are saying is that this legislation gives flexibility and rights to workers. It does not encourage what the Labour Party wants, and that is a privileged few demanding and deciding for workers. I was just using the example of the Labour Party and its selection process, and how it does not give every individual worker the ability to vote. It is only the privileged few who all want to sit on those benches at some point who have the voting base. That is why the Labour Party is against this bill. The Labour Party is against flexibility, it is against freedom, and it is about having control over workers. It is about controlling collective bargaining. That is what the Labour Party is about.

This is my first time speaking in the 51st Parliament and it grieves me to actually have to speak on this bill in the Committee of the whole House, because it is a noxious piece of legislation. I will confine my comments to Part 1 of the bill as is required under Standing Orders for the Committee of the whole House but I do want to have on the record that this is a distressing piece of legislation that is bad for New Zealand workers and that the National Government should be ashamed of itself.

This is not the legislation that we want in this country that will provide for harmonious workplace relationships. It is not; it will not provide that. This is not the law that we need in place that will work hand in hand with our health and safety laws to keep workers safe. This legislation is not going to provide that. This is not the law that will increase productivity through good employment relationships between employers and employees. This legislation will not deliver that. This is not the legislation that will encourage employers to be good, excellent employers to their workers. This legislation is not going to deliver that. The purpose of the Employment Relations Act is to promote collective bargaining. Contrary to what the previous speaker, David Bennett, said the amendment in this bill will completely undermine all attempts at collective bargaining across this nation for every group of workers who organise themselves into a point where they can negotiate collectively with their employer.

The bill does this in several ways. One way is in the removal of the duty to conclude, where the employer can apply to the Employment Relations Authority and ask that it deem the negotiations to be finished. They can do that if those negotiations have been what is referred to in the legislation as “difficult”. Negotiations by their very nature are difficult. I have never, ever, ever heard of a group of workers represented by their union actually going and asking for the type of mediation to conclude a settlement unless there was difficulty happening on the part of the employer all along the line. We have seen this countless times, and most recently, I guess, with the Meat and Related Trades Workers Union, with AFFCO employers, and with the Ports of Auckland. It was not ever the unions that were walking away from the negotiations, because it is not in their interests to. But it is in the interests of employers to walk away from collective bargaining because when you get into individual-based bargaining that is when you get to force wages down.

If we seriously want to be a country where we are welcoming back our young people to jobs in New Zealand then those jobs need to be good jobs. They need to be jobs that people want to take on, that they can feed their families with, and that they can provide for themselves with. They cannot do that when this Government creates what is essentially a low-wage economy. What this legislation does is it reinforces bad management behaviour. It gives no examples of how employers and employees can work for a more productive workforce and for more productivity. We see this happening in small pockets across New Zealand and in unionised workplaces. We used to be a country that pride itself on being fair. We used to be a country that thought that a fair day’s pay was what you should have as of right if you gave a fair day’s work.

This legislation eats away at every right that workers have, to the point where it removes even the right to a tea break. I acknowledge Sue Moroney from the Labour Party for the work that she did in ensuring that there was that right enshrined in this legislation before it is amended. Tea breaks, rest breaks, are essential not only for health and safety but also for a productive workforce. We know, if we look at our shocking ACC injury rates, that people need to take their rest breaks so that they are fit for work. What we have seen over the last 12 months is 182,900 claims for ACC for work-related injuries. They happened at work. In areas like agriculture, fishing, and forestry there is a one-in-four chance of being injured at work, and we know from talking to those workers that fatigue has a huge impact on their ability to do their jobs. Each one of those industries also has situations where workers may be single operators, as was referred to the Minister, but they need to take rest breaks more than ever in order to be able to minimise the risk that they deal with.

Those worksites—in farming, forestry, and fisheries—are frequently isolated workplaces. They are frequently workplaces where they do not have union representation. Here is where we come to the crux of the matter and to what this legislation is all about. It is about breaking the unions and reducing the rights of workers to belong to unions. If not, why would we have in this legislation the clause that removes the right for new workers to be offered, within the first 30 days, conditions based on the same collective employment agreement if there is one in place on that site? The removal of that means that we are therefore getting into a situation where workers are having to negotiate individually.

When we take into account the other legislation that the Government enacted in its previous term, like the 90-day trials, and like youth rates, we are creating a situation where new workers, desperate for a job, are not going to talk about wanting a tea break. They are not going to raise any issues of health and safety. They are going to work whatever hours and for whatever pay that the employer deems fit to give them, because if they do not they can be sacked within 90 days for no reason at all. This legislation goes hand in hand with the other provisions that this Government has put in place to make life harder for workers. It will drive wages down. It will certainly drive wages down, because we know for a fact that unionised worksites, worksites where there is a collective employment agreement in place, have better pay, better working conditions, and better health and safety. When we start to break down their ability to negotiate collectively through the removal of the duty to conclude, but also through the removal of the requirement for employers to participate in multi-employment collective agreements, then we are starting to break down bargaining to a point where individuals will be paid based on their individual ability to negotiate.

Most low-paid workers in low-skilled jobs, particularly in the service sector, have not got a lot of power to be able to negotiate—unlike, for example, the chief executive officer of the ANZ bank, David Hisco—

💬 Carmel Sepuloni: $2,000 an hour, or something.

$2,000 an hour, or $4.1 million a year, is his income. If you look at those top 50 chief executive officers—the New Zealand Herald did a study on this quite recently—you see that they had, on average, a 4 percent pay increase over the last year, which is not the sort of increase that has been passed on to workers, I might add. It is only their strength in numbers that gives them the ability to negotiate decent pay rates. Otherwise there would be no point. If every employer was an excellent employer, and if every employer invested in their workforce, invested in their workers and treated them well, then it would not be an issue. But legislation is about protection. Legislation is about education as well. We need to lift the standard that our managers have so that workers are treated better on their jobs. This legislation does not do it. It goes completely the other way.

When the Government MPs and the Ministers talk about flexibility they are not talking about a worker’s flexibility around work; they are talking about the employer’s right to manage to the extreme and to force wages down. When we force wages down it is bad for all of us. It is bad for our economy as well. We need to be smarter about how we run this economy. We need to be ensuring that our workers are able to live on what they earn, but we see that two out of five of all the children who are living in poverty—and there are 265,000 of them—come from working families.

I must admit, being back for the first time in 3 years, that I was astounded to have to speak on a bill that takes away the rights of good, hard-working Kiwis. The first speech I heard was the Prime Minister’s Speech from the Throne, which set out lofty ambitions around child poverty, housing, and all these other great things, yet the first piece of legislation before the Committee is a piece of legislation that takes rights from good, hard-working Kiwis. There is a little bit of a dichotomy there, I think.

What I would like to speak about is section 4(1B)(a), inserted by clause 4 in Part 1, in the bill. This talks about the disclosure of information. Section (1B) states: “However, subsection (1A)(c) does not require an employer to provide access to confidential information—”. What it does is it sets out a list of conditions under which an employer does not have to provide confidential information to an employee. Personally, I think that this offends the principle of natural justice and that is actually a right to a fair hearing.

But let me give the other side the reason why we have this bill and especially clause 4, before us. It is set out in the regulatory impact statement. Let me quote: “This arose from a case between the Vice-Chancellor of Massey University and Wrigley in 2010.” It is quite a well-known case in the Employment Court. It set a number of precedents. It is the only case on this, and let me tell you what the regulatory impact statement says: “The judgment is not consistent with widespread desirable and accepted employer practices in restructuring and redundancy situations …”. This bill is very definitely about what is good for the employer and how they can make workers redundant without going through the practices of fair and reasonable consultation. It says it here in black and white. Do you know what? When the regulatory impact statement actually looks at the scope of this problem, it says: “There is limited information on the scale of this problem.” It actually admits they do not know what the problem is. There is one case—one case.

I will tell you one other thing the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee did. It had a look at a range of options on how to deal with this, and one of them, it said, was the status quo. What they said about that is: “Benefits of the status quo include time to monitor the impacts of the decision and see how employer practices develop.” Do you know what? They decided not to do that. I suspect that the Attorney-General, who is a very good lawyer and is renowned in legal circles, has great difficulty with this bill. This bill is a reaction to one decision in the Employment Court. Without seeing how this beds down, without seeing how the market handles this, the Government is saying: “No, we don’t like that decision. We’re going to change the law.” That is not a good way to change the law. That is not good legal practice. I am astounded that the Attorney-General has not just tapped Mr Bennett on the shoulder and said: “Excuse me, Mr Chair of that select committee, I don’t think this is the right thing to do. Let’s give this a little bit of time and let’s see how the market reacts.”

The other thing that surprises me is that the regulatory impact statement says when it talks about the status quo: “These [legislative] requirements differ significantly from commonly understood principles of information provision to employees, particularly during restructuring and redundancy situations.” But I would argue that that is a contradiction of the clause above it, which said they do not even know the scale of the problem. So what are we actually trying to address here? One situation—one situation.

Let us have a look at the legislation. Section 4(1B)(a), as inserted by clause 4, says that this is not requiring “an employer to provide access to confidential information—(a) that is about an identifiable individual other than the affected employee …”. Keep in mind that a lot of this is about restructuring and making employees redundant. There is a whole lot of legal precedent around how you can actually do this, and in a number of legal precedents, and the Attorney-General will be aware of these—you know, the Communication and Energy Workers Union, Telecom New Zealand Ltd, Wellington International Airport, and Air New Zealand Ltd. These set out a number of tests around the definition of consultation. A number of these tests are very important to what actually constitutes fair and reasonable behaviour.

As the clause I read out says, that is about an identifiable individual other than the affected employee. The thing that really sets off alarm bells for me about this is with the non-disclosure of information. A bad employer—and most employers are good employers; I want to put that on the table—could say to an employee: “I’m not going to tell you, Mr Employee, why I am firing you, because they have changed the law and I don’t have to disclose that information.” I think that is a real breach of the duty to act fairly.

💬 David Bennett: Read the bill.

I am reading the bill, Mr Bennett. I am reading the bill here. I actually read it out. The other thing here, if we go down to subsection (e): “where it is necessary, for any other good reason”, this is where an employer does not have to disclose information, “to maintain the confidentiality of information, (for example, to avoid unreasonable prejudice to the employer’s commercial position).”—again, there are a number of legal precedents around this. What determines “unreasonable prejudice”? I think what is going to end up happening is this is going to have to be determined by jurisprudence, because this is just not clear.

I can imagine an employer would say: “I don’t have to disclose that information, why I am making you redundant, because it is ‘unreasonable prejudice’.” But the problem we have got here, as I see it, is that there are a number of very clear tests that have been set out by the Employment Court around how an employer must deal with an employee during a restructuring situation. They are very clear because what has happened in the past is employees have not been treated well, and the Employment Court has now set out a number of tests that allow the employee to have access to natural justice. I can imagine, as I mentioned, that this would allow an employer to be very disingenuous in the way they communicated with that employee, and I have grave concern.

But the concern I really have is that the tests that are set out now around restructuring, and certainly in terms of redundancy, are quite clear. It makes it quite easy for an employee who feels aggrieved to actually take a case to the Employment Court and get a fair hearing in a personal grievance. The reason I say that is it is actually very expensive for an employee to take a case to the Employment Court. Luckily, if an employee is in a union, then the union has the ability to do that, and what you find in a lot of these cases before the Employment Court is it is actually unions that are taking an employer to the Employment Court, because they are the only ones that can afford to do it. But under this clause, it just creates a whole level of uncertainty that Employment Court precedents actually got rid of. So what we ended up with is a situation that was actually very fair and reasonable. It really was fair and reasonable. It meant that the employer had to consult, and there is a whole lot of jurisprudence and a whole lot of precedents around the level of consultation, what it meant, how it was to be undertaken, and, basically, good faith—natural justice, and we all understand natural justice.

What that does, and I am really concerned about this, is that it once again blurs the line. What it does is move the pendulum far too far over to the right, when we had settled quite well in the centre. I think a lot of us will agree that maybe 60 years ago the pendulum was too far to the left, but a lot of jurisprudence and a lot of really good decisions by Judge Travis, for example, brought it right back to the centre. So employers knew their exact obligations. They knew their obligations, and, Mr Attorney-General, I hope you are going to stand up, because I do not know how you can defend a piece of legislation that is made to repeal one decision that was made in the Employment Court. It really is not a good way to make law.

I would like to reiterate that this is not about the workers versus the employees. This is not about employers versus unions. This is not about us versus them. All this is about is a fair go, and Part 1 section 4(1B) in clause 4 takes away the ability of the employee to know exactly where they stand. Section 4(1B)(a), as I said, is about an identifiable individual other than the affected employee. What is to stop an employer saying to Mrs King: “Mrs King, I’m going to make you redundant because of what someone said.”? “Well, who said what?”. “I’m sorry, I cannot tell you that.”

Look, there are a couple of things I need to engage with, firstly, from that member, Stuart Nash. He was saying that it is not about us and them; it is not about the employer versus the employee. Well, in fact, when we have listened relatively carefully to the speeches from the other side of the Chamber, that is exactly what it has been: employer: evil and bad; employee: good. That is actually the antithesis, the opposite, of what this very bill has been about. In fact, those of us on the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee will know about the various nuances.

The other quick element I need to touch on is natural justice. It is tossed out and thrown around as an idea all the time without an understanding. Using it in the context of clause 4, it is about natural justice not only for the employer, the employee concerned, but others who may have been a part of that process of handing over the information. The thing about natural justice—

💬 Stuart Nash: But it’s fundamentally about the employee who will be made redundant.

Absolutely, and the member rightly points out that it is fundamentally asking a question about an employee to an employer, but the other fundamental element of natural justice is that it can touch on other people, and if they are being implicated as part of that discussion, you cannot compromise their natural justice. So I would encourage the member—and I know he will have an opinion on this—to go back to read clause 4 and see the nuances within.

This is a good bill. There has been a series of questions, particularly as we are looking into Part 1, of why this is one of the first Government bills. I have to say I think one of the reasons is the Minister, Hon Michael Woodhouse, and I say that because he is relatively new in the role, but walking to the Chamber here tonight, he was completely and utterly up to speed on this. This is not a reflection on my other ministerial colleagues, but he knew the intricacies of this bill, and that is most welcome. The other reason is, and we heard it in in the Speech from the Throne, that, actually, employment is a central theme for this Government—

💬 Phil Twyford: What are you implying about Simon Bridges? Very uncalled for. He’s not in the House to defend himself.

I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. I just wanted to note that the member is drawing attention to the fact that people may be absent from the Chamber.

The CHAIRPERSON (Chester Borrows): Carry on.

I am just limbering up on the rules. [Interruption] That is right. It is egregious, absolutely. I am shocked and horrified! It is an affront to natural justice! Anyway, the second reason is that, actually, employment is at the heart of what we are talking about. This is a bill that is trying to set that balance.

We have heard lots of accusations from the Opposition. Those of us who sat on this committee and worked through this bill are happy with where it came to, because there are a lot of nuances involved. You can tell that the other side has not read that, because they have taken this as the Chicken Little approach. It is bad, it is evil, the sky is falling down, it is egregious, and it is the end of the world as you know it, which is clearly not the case.

Let us use a few illustrations. The whole thing of the element around the 30 days of the individual contract—at the moment, if you want to start a new job, you can only take the collective agreement. We are saying: “Actually, if you as an employee want to engage with your employer in an individual contract, why can you not have the choice?”. The whole point is that the other side do not like individuals having the choice. Only Labour and the Greens know best! I have to say that when I have taken up my employment agreements in the past, I would like the choice, but Labour and the Greens and the others—they know that if you get someone on that collective agreement right from the start in those 30 days, then they are going to be one of their mates. They are going to keep paying their money to the leadership of the Labour Party—ultimately through the unions—day after day, week after week, and it is not on. Why would you not have that choice?

Concluding bargaining—why should bargaining go on and on and on ad infinitum just for the sake of it? This bill redresses that. It says: to act “in good faith”. That is one of the core principles that we have had within our employment agreements. Actually, you cannot, as an employer, just walk away from it because you do not like bargaining. That is explicit—explicit—in Part 1 of this bill. What are the problems there? The bill introduces flexible working arrangements for people. Again, if you, an employee, want to make the choice to have flexible arrangements, you can ask for it. You do not need to kowtow and ask the permission of the Opposition.

We are hearing, too, a lot about meal breaks. We heard, I thought, quite adequately from the Minister, of those times when actually taking a prescribed meal break is not prudent. As someone who has worked in the health sector—when you think of the doctors, the nurses, and the administrators—there are times when walking out halfway through an operation is not prudent. Well, actually, I think of it even when I worked in a petrol station. Me walking away just because I had to have my prescribed meal break at the busiest time of the day is not prudent. You know what? It is the faith that Kiwis can make their decisions. So, again, this is a very positive bill.

Kia ora, Mr Chair. New Zealand First will be opposing this bill. We will be opposing this bill for the following reasons. First of all, let us just have a think about what is the purpose of laws. Apart from taxation, the purpose of the majority of our laws is to protect us. The laws are our fall-back place. The laws state that this is the minimum we will accept for our people.

I want to just harken back to when I was working in the insolvency division of KPMG Peat Marwick when the Employment Contracts Act first came in. That organisation ran training sessions for businesses and for employers on how they could use where the loopholes were and how that Act could be used to tighten, to keep their employees in line, or to be used to their benefit. I am not aware of any organisation that ran training sessions for employees around that Act.

Mr Bennett talks about flexibility. I see there the new member of the House from Invercargill, Ms Dowie. I listened to her maiden speech earlier today. It was a very good maiden speech, a very nice maiden speech, actually. Many of the new National Party members of Parliament used the word “choice”, used the word “justice”, and used the words “I am here for all New Zealanders.” I believe that is the catchphrase we are going to hear for the next 3 years. That is the 2017 campaign cry. I think that is what we are going to hear.

Well, let us just talk about a 19-year-old young man, a pizza chef right now. He came to see me about the fact that he cannot get a contract. He is working 13 out of 14 days, from 10 in the morning until 10 at night, and his employer, because of this situation of his employment, requires flexibility around his break times. So they are zero—so they are zero. And the law is supposed to be the minimum place that he can come back to so he can get some justice—so he can get some justice—whether it be natural or otherwise.

Minister McClay, who is in the Chamber, had a conversation with me in the elevator on the way up here. He said: “Well, this young man has rights. This young man can actually go and seek his rights.” And he absolutely can, except for the fact that it will cost him money to go and seek his rights. It will cost him money to go and seek his rights, and this flexibility that Mr O’Connor stands and blithely says that everybody should have—he does not mean for all New Zealanders. If this young man went to his employer tomorrow and said “Excuse me, but the law says I am entitled to a meal break, the law says I am entitled to overtime pay after a certain period of time, and the law says that I can actually work an 8-hour shift and decline working more.”, he would lose his job.

Do not tell me that that would not happen, because in this environment, particularly in this environment, it is those workers who are most vulnerable. They are part of that “all New Zealand” that that party, apparently, is supposed to represent. But they are migrant workers, young workers, older workers, women workers. Those are the people who work for the minimum wage. There is a queue out the door for their job. They do not have flexibility, and they do not have choice, and those members know it.

💬 David Bennett: What about Brendan?

Mr Bennett, you know it more than most. You know it more than most. But Mr Bennett would be the first to tell you that if that young man turned down those conditions, he is a bludger. He should be grateful for that one job, that job that has completely denied him all those rights that other workers stood up for—that his grandparents, his parents, and Mr Bennett’s parents believed was what was best and good about this country. It is the thin end of the wedge and New Zealand First will not support it. But it is incredibly interesting that it is this part of the wedge that this Government has decided, in the first week of coming back into this Chamber, will set the tone for the next 3 years.

So, New Zealand, listen to what they say. Listen to the words they use and then understand that it is just to keep you calm. Read the words in this bill and then tell me how—stand up, Mr Bennett. Take another call and tell us how that young man can be given his rights.

This is my first call in the 51st Parliament and I want to start with a couple of points. First, I want to congratulate you, Mr Chairman, on your appointment as Deputy Speaker, and I want to thank the good people of the Te Atatū electorate for electing me to do this job for another 3 years. I particularly want to thank my hard-working campaign team for all the work they did in getting the vote out.

We have seen a branding exercise over the last few weeks, as there has been a lot of very soothing talk about child poverty and housing affordability. But let us look at what the National members are doing, not what they are saying. What are they doing? Well, they are talking about fixing child poverty and making more affordable housing. They are taking us off to war in the Middle East. They are setting out to privatise $5 billion worth of State houses. And in this bill they are setting out to weaken the position of workers in this country, to take away their rights.

I want to talk about the duty to conclude provision and clauses 7 to 9 in Part 1. The duty to conclude is an obligation and a duty of decency. What it requires is that both parties have a commitment to collective bargaining; they are not allowed to just walk away from the bargaining table. What this bill does is it strips out that decent, civilising influence of the duty to conclude and it replaces it with the law of the jungle. This bill, the Employment Relations Amendment Bill, may as well be called the “Ports of Auckland Bill”, because this bill is dedicated to the Ports of Auckland. In fact, the former Minister of Labour Simon Bridges pretty much put that on the public record when he said that this bill was a direct response to the Ports of Auckland dispute.

I want to say a few things about the Ports of Auckland dispute. I am an Aucklander and I objected to an organisation owned by the ratepayers of Auckland behaving in the most despicable way to its employees. This bill sends a signal to employers like the Ports of Auckland. It says: “The gloves are off. Knock yourself out. It’s all on. You can smash the union. You can casualise the workers. You can drive down your labour costs, and, boys, this is how you’re gonna do it.” That is what clauses 7 to 9 in this bill are all about.

In March 2012, the Ports of Auckland and the Maritime Union of New Zealand found themselves in a dispute. The union was seeking to place some restrictions on the ability of the company to contract out its workforce. In March 2012, the Ports of Auckland announced that it was going to contract out all stevedoring work on the Auckland wharves and make all of its workers redundant. It then began to enter into negotiations with a number of stevedoring companies, including overseas companies, to bring in strikebreakers en masse on to the Auckland wharves to smash the Maritime Union of New Zealand. The union went on strike and the Employment Court ruled that the port company had acted in breach of good faith. It said that you cannot simply contract out your workforce in the middle of bargaining and, effectively, walk away from collective bargaining like that. The port company was ultimately fined $40,000 for employing mass strikebreakers to come in to destroy and to take away the jobs of the members of the Maritime Union of New Zealand—the jobs of good, hard-working New Zealanders.

I want to say this: when we are talking about decency in the workplace, let us remember how the Ports of Auckland behaved during this dispute. There is a guy called Cecil Walker, who was employed by the Ports of Auckland. A couple of years before the dispute happened, Cecil Walker’s wife died of cancer. He had two young kids whom he was supporting on his own. He was caught up in the middle of the dispute. He committed the sin of talking publicly about the effect of the port company’s actions in sacking its workers and bringing in strikebreakers. He committed the crime of talking in the media about how that affected him as a worker. So what did the Ports of Auckland do? It rifled through his personnel files in the human resources office and it leaked Cecil Walker’s personal information to Whale Oil, the National Party’s paid attack dog. So Cameron Slater on behalf of the Ports of Auckland—a paid attack dog—launched organised character assassination against Cecil Walker.

That shows what some employers will do when the leash is off. The Ports of Auckland thought this was its big opportunity to smash the union, to end the collective contract, and it walked away from it, just as this bill will allow it to do once it is passed. But the decency of the current legislation with its duty to conclude, backed up by the Employment Court, brought the Ports of Auckland back to the negotiating table. The effect of that dispute—bringing in new workers on lower wages and setting up their own union to compete with the Maritime Union—was to weaken the terms and conditions of those employees. That is what this legislation is designed to do. You mark my words, when this bill is passed it will send a signal to the worst employers in this country and invite them to smash the union, to drive down the terms and conditions, and to lower wage costs. This is not a good bill. It is not a sensible or pragmatic bill, as the Minister said it was in his opening contribution. This bill is all about stripping out the decency from our employment laws.

We have seen a series of disputes under this National Government. The Government first came for the actors with The Hobbit dispute. It took a whole group of workers in New Zealand and stripped them of their employment rights and their ability to negotiate a collective agreement. Then the Government came for the meatworkers, and we saw the AFFCO meatworkers dispute. Just as this legislation will allow bad employers like the Ports of Auckland to smash the union and drive down conditions, it will be a green light to employers like Talley’s with its efforts to smash the meatworkers union in 2012.

This is bad law. It does nothing, as Denise Roche said, to address the productivity challenges that we have as a country, to lift skills, or to lift productivity through smart management and working with the workforce to raise productivity and to make things that the world wants to buy from our country. It reverts to a 19th century mind-set of industrial relations. It is all about driving down labour costs. That is what this National Government is all about when it reverts to type. It was elected in 2008 on a campaign about how our wages were lower than Australia’s. Why are our wages lower than Australia’s? They are lower because in this country successive National Governments have smashed the unions and weakened the power of New Zealand workers to collectively negotiate to get a fair share of the wealth they produce. This bill is just another chapter in that series.

I move, That the question be now put.

It is very interesting to be here tonight. It is a day in this Parliament when we are enjoying the maiden speeches of new members across the Chamber. Over the last couple of days we have been in the ceremonial phase of the opening of this new Parliament. For those of us who have been here a few years, a few terms, it is always a welcome time because it is a very human time. We mix as MPs, and we celebrate the talent and the experience that people bring to Parliament across the Chamber.

Then we come to this bill. This is really the first substantive piece of legislation that the Government has put before the country. Here all of the camaraderie, the parliamentary process, and the chivalry, if you like, are put aside, and we come down to the differences between that side of the Chamber and this. It does not matter what you call it—at the end of the day, the National Party represents the interests of capital and the Labour Party represents the interests of labour. The clue is in our name—the clue is in our name. And it is in our colour too, which has got a bit of a history to it, but the clue is in our name.

Debates like this lay bare the age-old struggle between the interests, so-called, of capital to drive down labour costs by any means necessary and the interests of workers to bind together to protect the basic minimums. Here is the thing: the historical economic evidence shows that capital left to its own devices actually eats its own young. In the 1990s when the National Government last tried this despicable trick, through a thing called the Employment Contracts Act, we suffered through it for a decade. The cost was evident in two dimensions: firstly, in human misery. We saw a rapid widening of the gap between rich and poor, we saw a rapid increase in poverty, we saw a rapid increase in the diseases of poverty, and a growing child poverty problem, which is still with us—sheeted home to employment law changes like this that eroded the situation of those who work hard but do not earn a lot.

But here was the second effect out of the Employment Contracts Act: labour productivity declined. Why? Because it created an incentive for capital to substitute investment in machinery, tools, training, and productivity-enhancing investments for cheap labour—for cheap labour. What happened as a result was that labour productivity declined in New Zealand and started to get way ahead of us in Australia. The Employment Contracts Act, measured in terms of its human impact and measured in terms of its economic impact, was a failure.

Enter the Clark - Cullen Government and the Employment Relations Act, which this bill amends, that sought to find a sensible middle ground. It did not go back towards awards or compulsory unionism or some of the arrangements that pre-dated the Employment Contracts Act. What it did do was put in place obligations of good-faith bargaining and a reasonable set of minimum protections. That is what we are here today to watch the short-sighted National Government attempt to remove. Pillar by pillar, brick by brick, stone by stone, it is tearing down the temple of decency and building instead the ramshackle structure of the short-term self-perceived interest of capital.

So some examples—let us get out of the clouds and down to the grassroots. Let us take Part 6A. Let us talk about some real people, like Mele Tavete, a Wellington cleaner whom colleagues will have mentioned, who has been cleaning the same premises for 20 hours a week for 17 years. What happened was when Mele’s employer changed because the contract was sold to a small company, it told Mele that she had to have her hours radically reduced. She was working only 20 hours. She refused to take the lower hours and asked to be paid out. Part 6A protected her so that she could get reasonable compensation. Under the law as amended by this bill, she would have got nothing. So somebody who has done nothing wrong, after 17 years earning the minimum wage or close to it, loses the most basic rights because the naked interests of capital have driven the Government—[Bell rung] Mr Chairman. That was my first call, Mr Chairman.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): I call the Hon David Cunliffe, but I do want to warn members that we are on the Committee stage.

Mr Chairman, I recognise your guidance. The amendments to Part 6A are contained in Part 1, and as we go back to Part 6A, the amendment removes the protections that apply to workers who are contracted out. So nothing changes for the workers except that the ownership of the business changes and the new owner uses that as an excuse to erode their terms and conditions. The sad fact is this is most often to be used against the lowest paid and most vulnerable workers. It is wrong. It is just wrong. It is unethical, it is un-sensible from an economic point of view, and it is wrong.

Let us move to another of the provisions, “Rest and meal breaks”. As we went around the country during the campaign that we have just had, this was iconic. It was the ACT Party’s support that was withdrawn that prevented this bill from going through before the election. It was withdrawn because the member concerned was on his way to the slammer and was no longer able to be a member of Parliament. That is why this bill did not get through before the election.

This is a kind of conservative’s dream. Imagine a provision that is already flexible—which is to allow something like a minimum 10-minute rest break and a minimum half hour lunch break on a flexible arrangement to be agreed mutually between the boss and the worker—all gone. All gone because the naked interests of capital played out through the National Party and its little subsidiary brand—whatever his name is over there. That is vested in this piece of legislation, which takes away the 10-minute smoko break. Workers around the country get this. It is something that belongs in a Charles Dickens story. It takes us back to sweatshop economics. It takes us back to 19th century labour law. It is a ridiculous, shameful thing to do in the 21st century.

This part also removes fundamentally the duty to conclude collective bargaining. The idea here is good faith means two sides negotiate and both sides have an obligation to reach a conclusion. It does not mean they have to agree. It does not mean that either side has to give in, but they both have to sit at the table and talk their way through the problem until they get to a compromise or a stand-off, which then is referred to arbitration. Not now. Not now, because this bill gives the employer a scot-free “get out of jail free” card.

Let us walk away! Spray and walk away—that is what this bill permits. Gone is decency, gone is the fair middle ground, and gone are the privileges that have been hard fought for over the years. Kiwis out there will know that on the first legislating day of this, the final term of this Government, they chose to break through the camaraderie of the parliamentary process and remind every single New Zealander that they are here to do the bidding of the bosses. They are here to pursue the naked interest of capital against the minimum decencies for Kiwi families that have been hard fought for.

That is the reality of the 2014 election—this piece of paper. First up: the Employment Relations Amendment Bill—the “Take Away the Smoko Break Bill”, the “Get Out of Jail Free, Spray and Walk Away, Gone is Good-Faith Bargaining, Remove the Protections for the Most Vulnerable Bill”. I am reminded of a passage in the Bible, which says to those who have much, so will more be given, but for those who have little, even that which they have will be taken away. Well, hey presto! It is taken away in this bill. National should be ashamed of itself, except it has done New Zealand a favour. It has just told us what it is really about and we are not going to forget it. This Labour Party is going to take the fight to those craven cronies of capital for the next 3 years so that New Zealanders have a real choice and can do what is right, decent, and fair, which is throw out this pile of rubbish and give ordinary New Zealanders a fair go.

I move, That the question be now put.

Can people just settle down? I am going to take another call, but I do want to remind members again that this is a Committee stage for debate about specific clauses in the bill or in the amendments.

Thank you, Mr Chair, and congratulations on your appointment. I do look forward to what you will bring to the role. Just before I get into it—and I want to speak quite substantively around clause 11 of the Employment Relations Amendment Bill in my speech tonight—I would just like to acknowledge that after the nice, leisurely 1.5 hour dinner break that is set into our programme for every evening, it feels particularly ironic to be coming into this Chamber to remove the rights of ordinary New Zealanders to that predictability and security. It makes me very uncomfortable in my role as a parliamentarian to feel that there is such a distance between the conditions I expect and I experience in this place and what New Zealanders can experience in their lives. It seems to me it would be better if this Parliament returned a little bit more to focus on ourselves and connecting to the reality of average New Zealanders, rather than undermining the conditions and experiences of those people.

Tonight I would like to speak to clause 11 of this amendment bill, which provides employers with the ability to opt out of multi-employer collective agreement bargaining. That sounds like a really technical thing. I think it is a hard thing for most people in New Zealand who are maybe not members of unions or who are not part of a collective contract to understand what on Earth this might actually mean, be about, or mean in practice.

Tonight I would actually like, with the indulgence of the Committee, to relay an oral submission that was given to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee about this bill and what it may mean in practice in our mental health services in hospitals. It was a submission given by a staff nurse at Te Whare O Matairangi, the mental health recovery unit at Wellington Regional Hospital—a staff nurse called Grant Brookes. He clearly recalled the state of Wellington inpatient mental health services before the current national multi-employer collective agreement was put in place in 2005. He recalled for the committee that in 2011 a service user left the ward and climbed into a tiger cage at Wellington Zoo, where he was mauled. Another young man jumped to his death from the roof of Wellington College before he was even noted as missing from the inpatient unit. In 2004 another man jumped six storeys from the ward in the hospital to the car-park below. A young woman allowed out on day leave walked in front of a train and killed herself.

This was the state of our mental health services in Wellington at that time. It was a service in crisis. Yet the nursing staff had clear ideas about the roots of the problem, which were reported in the nursing journal Kai Tiaki Nursing New Zealand in October 2005. It was noted that the 29-bed ward had been caring for up to 50 people at a time and that throughout 2003 and 2004, the time of those deaths and terrible incidents, patients were bunking in lounges, in the TV room, and in the telephone room. They were even sleeping on mattresses on the floor in the corridor. Nurse-to-patient ratios were as high as 1:10 and 1:20. Grant Brookes told us that this was a result of the Employment Relations Act and the fact that there was not a multi-employer collective agreement in place.

He told us that the staff at the time had a clear idea about solutions but there was no mechanism for staff and management to collaborate on resolving the crisis. This is at the heart of what collective agreements can offer and what they have offered in the health context. Managers had cancelled all meetings with the nurses organisation. Communication had broken down and the acting clinical director basically denied that overcrowding or overstaffing in any way contributed to those events, describing staffing ratios in the ward as “very good”. Then in 2004 a third of the staff resigned, understandably—

I would like to take this opportunity, in my first speech of the 51st Parliament, to congratulate the Government. I congratulate it on its consistency, because it has consistently advocated for flexibility and choice for its mates, not for others. I will go back to 1992. I was not here then. I was here a year later. The Government advocated for choice and flexibility for mining companies so they did not have to adhere to the mines regulations. It then moved on, in the 1990s, to offer choice and flexibility for those building houses, so we had building deregulation. Then we had choice and flexibility in the electricity sector. As I look at Part 1 of the Employment Relations Amendment Bill, what this legislation is going to do is change the balance and give choice and flexibility to the mates of the National Party—as my colleague says, those who have the interest of capital over labour—and leave nothing for the working New Zealander.

When I look through Part 1, I ask the question: what is trying to be solved here? What are we trying to do, or what is the Government trying to do? I go to the regulatory impact statement. It says in there, from the Government itself: “There is limited evidence on the size and underlying causes of the problems being assessed. While the Department is able to access data on concluded employment agreements, the Department does not have data on how much bargaining has been initiated and not concluded, or on how long, on average, bargaining takes.” The point is that the Government does not actually know what it is trying to solve here, other than an ideological approach that says we will try to crush the unions and any organisation of labour, and offer absolute flexibility to the free-market ideologues. There have been a few of them over there. These are people who advocate for free and open markets—the dairy industry. Mr Bennett over there would be one of them. He actually supplies a company that is forced to take milk from any dairy farmer who wishes to supply it. This is not choice and flexibility for Fonterra.

Let us go and look at a few other organisations. Complete choice and flexibility would mean that any manufacturer could do what they like. They do not have to be part of an organisation. In fact, what we have—

💬 David Bennett: Mr Chair, are we getting on to the bill? What’s the story?

If Mr Bennett would like to know the reference, Part 1 makes reference to the ability for employers to opt out or not conclude any negotiations. What we have in law are protections for people to ensure fairness in most parts of our society. We stand for that here. On that side of the Chamber, though, the members stand for choice and flexibility for their mates. However, they also represent organisations that understand that collective efforts offer greater good—collective efforts offer greater good. Who understands that? Unions do, I guess. So too does Business New Zealand, because they come together to advocate for what they want. The Manufacturers and Exporters Association, the Hospitality Association, the Tourism Industry Association, and Federated Farmers of New Zealand come together to advocate for one another, for fairness in terms of Resource Management Act reform, contractual arrangements with sharemilkers, and contractual arrangements with companies. They need protections to ensure their operations are fair and balanced. So too do workers. So too do workers. This Government has consistently trodden on the efforts of workers and the unions to represent them, in the belief that choice and flexibility deliver better outcomes. It is absolute hypocrisy—absolute hypocrisy—that it can advocate and allow unity on one side, and then try to destroy and break down—

I move, That the question be now put.

I want to speak specifically about a provision in the bill, but before I do that I want to acknowledge two things. I want, first of all, to acknowledge the fact that we are debating this in the lead-up to Labour Weekend and the irony of doing so, and I want to respond to a comment that the Minister made in his opening remarks, which I was listening carefully to, when he talked about the types of people who perhaps did not need to have rest breaks and meal breaks during their working day. He mentioned particularly the plight of a sole-charge air traffic controller. I want to say to the Minister that as a member of the travelling public and someone who does take flights regularly, I want to make sure that if my plane is being guided into land by a sole-charge air traffic controller, they are on top of their game and that they are not busting to go to the toilet and trying to find ways to short-cut the process a little bit. I want to know that my plane is going to land nice and safely. I want to make sure that they get the protections to ensure that they do that, and I am sure that the travelling public do, too.

I also say to the members on the other side of the Chamber that as somebody who frequently dines out in what could be otherwise described as a fast-food establishment, I want to know that the workers who are serving me my food are actually being given decent employment conditions, including the ability to have a meal break and a rest break when they need it, and that they are not being exploited.

Contrary to what members on the other side of the Chamber will say, this is not actually about union members. Most union members will be covered by a collective employment agreement that guarantees them. What we are talking about are the first-time employees, the teenagers who get their first job, and the people who are not members of the union, who are not covered by a significant collective employment agreement. They are the types of people whom we are talking about in this legislation. They are the types of people whom the National Government is riding roughshod over.

I turn specifically to the clause in the bill that I want to talk about, which inserts new section 69CA, which is the definition of an exempt employer for the purposes of Part 6A of the Act. What is Part 6A, first of all? Part 6A is the protection for vulnerable workers in a contracting-out environment. This is very important for New Zealand, for two reasons. One is that we are a small-business economy and, second, this Government’s agenda has been to turn New Zealand into a service industry economy, rather than a value-added economy. What is the major competing cost factor in a service industry economy? It is wages. Therefore, if we are going to compete in service industries, and in service industries alone, employers are going to be looking for ways to drive down the cost of wages.

Clause 30 in the bill inserts new section 69CA, which is the meaning of an exempt employer. It states that an exempt employer is one who “employs 19 or fewer employees;”. Well, let us just think about that for a moment. We have this National Government talking all the time about how New Zealand is a small-business economy. I know New Zealand is a small-business economy. I have got countless small businesses in my own electorate. That is a given; that is a reality. In many of the service industries, where subcontracting, and subcontracting from subcontractors, is an increasing trend, what we are going to see with vulnerable workers who are in these subcontracting subcontracting arrangements is that employers will find a way to make sure they have fewer than 19 employees. If that means they set up five small subsidiary companies that can subcontract from the main contractor in order to work their way round the law, that is what they will do. What we see under this Government is this mentality that we have to drive down labour costs in order to compete in service industries, because it has no plan to add value-added jobs to the New Zealand economy.

So this exemption creates an enormous loophole that once again will see vulnerable workers not being covered by the protections that they should be covered by. We are talking about cleaners and caretakers. We are talking about people who work in the hospitality industry, where contracting out is a continual mentality. People in the food trade—not necessarily the people who are the chefs; we are talking about the people who clean the pots and the pans, who are employed by some of the large employers that we have at the moment. To give an example, many large employers might tender for a contract to provide catering services to a large employer like, for example, this one—like Parliament. Rather than delivering that through one main company, they will set up separate companies for each of the sites that they deliver the service to. Thus, in many cases, they will get around the law by having 19 or fewer employees at each of those subsidiary companies that they use in these contracting arrangements.

This subcontracting mentality is the thing that is going to result in a lot of vulnerable workers, whom the Employment Relations Act was designed to protect, losing the protection that they should get under the law, and that is simply wrong. To restate, in many cases it is not going to be union members.

I move, That the question be now put.

I wish to speak to clause 56 of the Employment Relations Amendment Bill, which adds new sections 95A through to 95H into the original legislation. This is in relation to partial strikes and the penalties that this bill introduces for workers who undertake a partial strike. A partial strike is when workers maybe work-to-rule. They do not do any additional work that they are often expected to do over and above their normal contracted conditions. A partial strike may involve wearing a particular colour or wearing a badge to work that indicates to the customers of that business that the workers there are in some dispute with their employer. Under the current legislation there is no immediate penalty for workers who use that opportunity to have a partial strike. It works as a nice halfway house. It is a nice opportunity for employees to demonstrate that they are in bargaining, that they have reached some impasse, and to withdraw a portion of their labour or maybe to demonstrate to the wider public that they are in that position with their employer but without going the full way to a full strike, which, of course, has an impact on them as employees because it means lost wages but it also has an impact on the employer in terms of lost productivity.

What this legislation does is it penalises workers who use that partial strike option. The concern here is that what this clause in this bill will do is it will actually create the situation where industrial action—full-scale industrial action—is more likely to occur, because if workers are going to be penalised for taking partial strike action, if they are going to be penalised if they show up at work wearing a particular colour, then why not go the whole way and take the penalty for going into a full strike? Actually, the way the legislation is written creates a lot of difficulties for workers who plan to take a partial strike. For instance, there is no clarity in the legislation around whether the employer has to indicate whether they are planning to use the provisions of clause 56.

There is no indication that the employer has to indicate how much they are going to dock an employee’s pay by. It is set at a maximum of 10 percent of the employee’s pay. If the full 10 percent is adopted, that would most likely be an enormous overreaction from an employer for a partial strike, especially a work-to-rule strike, but there is no requirement in the law here for an employer to actually indicate how much they are going to dock the pay. If a group of employees were considering going into a partial strike and then the employer responded by saying “We are going to dock your pay.”, then the employees do not actually necessarily know what the consequences of that are going to be. I imagine that the intention of this legislation is that it will try to disincentivise the use of partial strikes by employees but, of course, they still have that ability to go to a full strike. If they are already at an impasse in bargaining, if they are talking about taking industrial action, then the obvious next step is to shift to full industrial action.

The other concern is, of course, that the decision made by the employer may be challenged by the employees. That means there is more likelihood in the event of these partial strikes and if clause 56 was enacted by an employer that we end up with more arbitration, more necessity to take these issues to the Employment Court. That takes up more of the employer’s time. It takes up more of the union’s time. That is more wasted resources, which I should imagine is the exact opposite of what the Government intends by introducing these clauses. Where a worker or a group of workers believes that the specified pay reduction has been incorrectly made, they may ask their union to request the information relied on to calculate the specified pay reduction. The union must request that in writing and as soon as reasonably practical after the pay day on which the first deduction was made. The workers cannot request the information directly.

I move, That the question be now put.

Tēnā koe. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. The Minister and Government members have consistently made claims this evening that this legislation is not eroding the rights of workers or the important role that collective bargaining plays in our economy. Yet if we look at the specific clauses in Part 1 of this bill, it is very, very clear that that is exactly what this legislation does. Clauses 7 to 10 turn the original intent of good faith collective bargaining completely on its head. It removes the requirement for collective bargaining to be concluded as an example of good faith and it extends the amount of time during which bargaining cannot be done. Clause 9 is the duty to conclude bargaining. This clause allows parties to apply to the authority if things get difficult. It means that workers will not be able to strike for a period of at least 60 days before bargaining can be initiated again, and it places workers in a very weak bargaining position.

Clause 11 gives employers the ability to opt out of multi-employer collectives, which my colleague Jan Logie very eloquently explained is going to result in all sorts of difficulties for workplaces where there simply is not the ability for employees and management to find collective solutions to some of the problems that they are facing. Clauses 15 to 18 remove the right of new employees who have not yet joined a union to be offered the collective agreement if there is one already in place on site. Clauses 28 to 42—we have heard a bit about clause 30—amend Part 6A of the original Act, which gives workers in some occupations where contracting companies regularly turn over a measure of job security by ensuring that they can be employed by the new contractor. What this does is it means that in companies with fewer than 19 employees, those employees simply will not have the same guarantees that other employees have in larger companies.

The sum total of Part 1 of this bill is to erode collective bargaining and to erode the rights of workers. I would like to ask those in this Chamber, particularly members on the opposite of the Chamber, and those watching at home to think to themselves when they have been the most effective, motivated, and productive. It is common sense that people work most effectively when they are not stressed, when they are not overworked, when they are paid a decent wage, and do not have to stress about making ends meet. The Government claims that these changes are about making our economy more productive but in fact they are simply benefiting a small number of people. They are not benefiting the economy as a whole.

I know there are a lot of great employers out there who realise that people work more productively when they are well looked after, but the reality of human nature is that not everyone will. In the absence of collective bargaining and good employment law, it is a race to the bottom. It actually disadvantages good employers to not have law that sets a minimum standard. This is what history has shown us. Before the collective action of workers, who fought for the protection of wages and working conditions, people worked in horrific conditions. That was to the benefit of a small number of industrialists who had mainly inherited their businesses and wealth, but it was not to the benefit of the overall economy. It was organised workers who fought for better wages and conditions, not the invisible hand that delivered that.

I just have to quote Adam Smith here, that great father of neoclassical economics. He observed this. He wrote that the interests of manufacturers and merchants “…in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, [the interest] of the public.” I think this is the common theme of this National Government. In its policy and legislation that we see implemented, it is acting in the interests of some employers and of some trades and industries, and claiming that this will be better for the economy as a whole when, in fact, it is the opposite. It is the very opposite. We know if we look at the evidence from overseas that the countries that are richer and more productive than New Zealand actually have more collective bargaining and more unionised workforces, not less. They have better employment conditions, they have more time off, and they have guarantees for workers. We cannot liberalise our economy any more. We already have—

I move, That the question be now put.

I want to warn the Committee that I am getting very close to taking the closure. What I will be looking for now is not only relevance but novelty. We have got to have some new arguments and new material.

Thank you for the opportunity to make another contribution on this bill. I want to make an additional point on clause 56 in Part 1 because my colleague Iain Lees-Galloway spoke on—quite rightly, and I think he was the first person to speak on it—the effect of the reduction in wages for undertaking a partial strike. I want to add the point that it is most frequently our emergency services that actually use this provision when they have a dispute with their employer, and there is a very good reason why it is frequently our emergency services that use this provision when they have a dispute with their employer. It is because they are so reluctant to take full strike action to address any dispute that they might have with their employer.

I will use the example of the firefighters. People probably did not even notice, but over the last year our firefighters have been in a dispute with their employer. People did not notice because fires kept getting attended to and the accidents kept getting attended to. All of those things kept happening because the firefighters did not withdraw their labour in order to get their dispute sorted out. What they did was to take partial strike action—that is, they worked to rule. They were on duty the whole time, but they chose not to do some duties that were actually outside what they were contracted to do: filling out some reports, sending some emails—some administrative functions that were not core to the service that we, the New Zealand public, rely on them for.

Why I am describing this in some detail is that without much fuss and bother they were able to demonstrate their value to their employer and get their industrial dispute sorted out, without it impacting at all—at all—on the New Zealand public. What I believe clause 56 will do—I think Iain Lees-Galloway is right about this—is that it will actually mean that if employees, the firefighters and other emergency service workers, are going to be actually penalised for that, they may well say: “Well, let’s just go the whole hog. Let’s not muck around with a partial strike. Let’s actually do the whole thing.” That is actually going to harm the New Zealand public if it is brought about. I sat in on some of the submissions on this bill and asked some of the unions that had used this provision about that. They said that the reason why they used partial strikes was the nature of the services that their union members undertook, and they said that they really wanted to try every other avenue first before they withdrew their labour and, therefore, harmed the public in that way. They said they believed that this provision would put more pressure on members of their unions to actually take much more drastic action. I think that that is the thing that the Government does not want to do, but I think that this will be an unintended consequence of clause 56 in Part 1 of the Employment Relations Amendment Bill.

I want to talk about the 40 percent of children living in poverty in this country who are in working households. I want to talk about them because the Prime Minister wrote in his Speech from the Throne that child poverty was going to be a priority, and yet here the Government is, in its very first act of the 51st Parliament, moving to reduce wages in the very households where those 40 percent of children living in poverty actually reside. I think that the Government is going about this in completely the wrong way because it is those same families who are going to have this pressure on them. When the employer says to them “No, you can’t have a wage increase this year, but I’ll tell you what. If you agree to give up your lunch break and your tea break, I might see fit to give you half a percent.”, it is these families who are going to come under the pressure to actually give away their right to have a lunch break and a tea break. That will be completely legal under what the Government is proposing, and yet they would not be able to do that under the current law. Under the current law, yes, they can bargain for their wage increase, but they must retain the legal right to have a lunch break and a meal break. It is these very families who are going to have this pressure on them, and that is the mechanism that is going to be used. So the pretence from the National Government that workers are going to have control over whether they are going to have a tea break and a lunch break we know to be a complete nonsense. It actually belongs in the crypt where Bill Birch’s idea that workers were going to have freedom of choice to keep their penal rates belongs.

I move, That the question be now put.

Mr Chairman, let me just begin by congratulating you on your elevation—

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): This will not help.

—before I turn to clause 11.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Oh, all right.

Clause 11—I want to ask the Minister in the chair, the Hon Michael Woodhouse, whether he would take a call and explain to the Committee the purpose of this bill and what will be the result for the workforce. When one reads the regulatory impact statement, it does say there is limited evidence on the size and underlying causes of the problem that this Government has identified, and if you go further into that regulatory impact statement and look at what the proposal is to allow an employer to opt out of multi-employer bargaining, it says that the flexibility is for employers, but there is no flexibility for employees. So I would like the Minister to please rise and tell the Committee what the outcome of this particular bill is for the New Zealand workforce. If the economy has grown by 3.5 percent in the last year, why was it that last year 43 percent of the workforce did not get a wage increase? I put it to this Committee that 43 percent of the workforce did not get a pay increase because that workforce were not members of a trade union.

Now you have this Government, which has set its sights on those who are members of a union, and particularly those who are in multi-employer collective agreements, and it is determined to get rid of their particular rights. If you look at the list of those multi-employer agreements that are up for renewal in this year, it is the Public Service Association, and next year it is all the public sector. In my community, those who work in the public sector are earning a little bit more income than those in the private sector. Why is this Government now determined to start attacking those who are the middle-income earners in the public sector? What is that Government intending to do when on the one hand it says it is out there protecting the vulnerable, but on the other hand it has set its sights on undermining the ability of workers to organise and to negotiate in collective agreements? I want that Minister to rise to his feet and tell this Committee what the outcome of this bill is on the workforce that is out there in New Zealand.

The Government is determined, based on what I am reading in this particular bill on clause 11, to undermine the rights of workers. Why is that—why is that? What drives the Government? I would put it to this Committee that it is blindly feeding its greed and the greed of its friends, who are behind the scenes telling it that this is the right thing to do. I would say to you and that Minister that this is wrong. This is wrong. It does not support any of the workforce of New Zealand. It does not address the issues that were raised earlier today by my colleagues about poverty, about children—that you cannot feed children with promises, that you cannot feed children with white papers and the promise to do something. This bill is actually going to affect and have a direct impact on the livelihood of the workforce. Why is that? I have asked that Minister, who is pretending not to listen to me, to rise to his feet and tell this Committee what the impact is.

There is already a declining number of the workforce in the trade union movement, but those who are in the trade union movement are able, through collective bargaining, to achieve a little bit better than those who are not in the trade union movement. We have a situation that all in this Committee are aware of. We have the working poor—people who are working long hours in difficult conditions, often on a minimum wage, but who cannot maintain the bills. They cannot pay regular rent, and clause 11, in my view, is designed to even make it—

I move, That the question be now put.

Mr Chair, may I congratulate you. I do not think either of us ever imagined when we were in the same class at high school that we would end up here tonight.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): It is probably the only reason you got the call.

I will not hesitate to make full use of my incredible advantages. The Chair was very quiet at school, but he seems to have found a voice. However, I know that he wants us to stick narrowly to Part 1 of the Employment Relations Amendment Bill, so I intend to do that. The Chair also asked for novelty so I am going to attempt to give you a bit of novelty on this bill. I would like to acknowledge, however, all the Opposition speakers so far, because I think they have been absolutely brilliant and on the money. There is a bit of a novelty here when we start looking at the regulatory impact statement on the summary of assessment of the proposals when they look at the objectives of the Act in terms of international obligations. I do not know whether anyone else has mentioned this. There are nine proposals and out of the nine there are seven that fail to meet our international obligations. I am just going to read not the proposals but the summaries of what they are. They are “Uncertain”, “Inconsistent”, “Inconsistent”, “Inconsistent”, “Uncertain”, “Uncertain”, and “Inconsistent”.

💬 Sue Moroney: It sounds like the Government.

Well, it does. It does sound a bit like the Government. It does sound a bit like the entire drafting of this piece of legislation, which is a disaster. But it is also interesting that, particularly in terms of labour law, international obligations are a serious matter, and yet this bill will go through despite the fact that seven of the nine proposals are completely at odds with our international obligations. Does anyone care on the Government side of the Chamber? I do not think they do, and it is a pity because the amount of work that goes into developing international labour law and the commitments that we make to international obligations are serious and binding and yet they are being absolutely abused.

However, I will move rapidly onwards to my favourite part of this bill, clauses 43 to 46. Let us talk about tea breaks. Let us talk about tea breaks in history, because clauses 43 to 46 are an example of how history does repeat itself and how important history is. It was interesting hearing some of the maiden speeches yesterday when they talked about Margaret Thatcher and the brave new world. It was quite disturbing to hear all these young people talking about this because they do not seem to know the facts of history and what labour laws such as this one can do in taking us back—way back behind Margaret Thatcher, way back into the 18th century—because, actually, in 1908 there was a miners’ strike that was directly related to clause 43 and 46.

💬 Paul Foster-Bell: I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. This speech is veering very distantly from relevance to the particular clause being debated.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Mr Foster-Bell, I will be the judge of that and although I agree with you, I think it is better that you do not bring it up.

I will continue focusing on clauses 43 to 46, because I think clauses 43 to 46 could well be called the “Crib-time Bill”. Crib-time, if you do not know what crib-time is, for the younger people here who do not study history, is that in 1908 in Blackball they had the crib-time strike and it was about exactly this point, which is in this amendment Act—this point about people’s right to eat at work and to have time off. So, actually, it is incredibly important to remember what people went through to create this, and now in one stroke of the pen it is gone. I read the commentary on this and I found it pretty bizarre. Let us have a look at it. It says here that things would be more flexible, and it would be fine. Changes to meal and rest breaks provisions will be more flexible and will improve the work and productivity. It is just quite bizarre. How can this possibly be? It talks about the fact that there can be compensatory measures for cutting these breaks. What? What is going to compensate you for that? What is going to compensate the forestry workers who have died this year? Nothing.

We actually have to be serious about what meal breaks are. As many others have pointed out, this is not a luxury; this is a necessity. So do not bandy words around in these commentaries and do not make up stuff about compensation that does not exist, and then facilitate the undermining of laws that have been in place and that were fought for and developed by workers since 1908. It is dangerous down the mines, in the forests, in the rest homes, and in the mental health services, and crib-time 21st century is important. That is why clauses 43 to 46 are such serious clauses, because we should never take for granted such clauses.

I have a friend who works in the bakery of a supermarket. This is directly related to clause 43, I promise you, and she is on—

I move, That the question be now put.

The question is that the question be now put.

I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): You are not going to trifle, are you, Mr Lees-Galloway?

I am not going to trifle—not at all. I just want to query your knowledge of the Standing Orders. Can a member raise a closure motion more than once in one debate?

Yes, they can.

I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. Do you want my assurance that I am not going to trifle with you as well, Mr Chairman? I want you to explain why, during the course of the debate, you have gone against what I consider is a respected practice, and that is to call members who are receiving the call for the first time, rather than, as you have done on two occasions, call members for the second time. My colleagues Kelvin Davis, Dr Megan Woods, and I have all been here since 7.30 actively seeking a call at every opportunity. You were not here for the first hour. I will hold your predecessor responsible for that, but you are in the same position. Since that time you have called my colleagues Iain Lees-Galloway and Sue Moroney more than once, so I would like some explanation—

I am happy to rule now. I acted in error in calling Iain Lees-Galloway. I should not have done that, but, having done that, I thought it was probably better to give his colleague, Sue Moroney, who was also a leader on the bill, a similar opportunity. As a result of that, the debate was somewhat extended.

We now move on to the Minister’s amendments. The question is that the Minister’s amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 1 be agreed to.

I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. I just wanted to find out what happened to my Supplementary Order Papers 12 and 13—whether they were going to be put. They are amending Part 1.

The Minister’s amendments go first. There are quite a few amendments, which we will work our way through, and I am pretty sure that when we get to the second page we will get to yours.

The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 1 in the name of the Hon Michael Woodhouse to Part 1 be agreed to.

I will just warn the Committee that as a result of that amendment being agreed to, there are a couple of Supplementary Order Papers later that will be ruled out of order because they are inconsistent with the decision that we have just taken.

The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 5 in the name of Andrew Little to Part 1 be agreed to.

Andrew Little’s amendment to delete clause 11, set out on Supplementary Order Paper 8, is ruled out of order as being inconsistent, as I previously outlined.

The question was put that the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 8 in the name of Andrew Little to clause 13 be agreed to.

Andrew Little’s amendment to delete clause 17, set out on Supplementary Order Paper 9, is ruled out of order as being inconsistent with a previous decision.

The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 9 in the name of Andrew Little to Part 1 be agreed to.

Andrew Little’s amendments to delete clause 30 and new section 69G(3) in clause 32, as set out on Supplementary Order Paper 7, are ruled out of order as being inconsistent with a previous decision.

The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 7 in the name of Andrew Little to Part 1 be agreed to.

Andrew Little’s amendments to delete clauses 51 and 56, as set out on Supplementary Order Paper 11, are ruled out on a similar basis to previously.

The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 11 in the name of Andrew Little to Part 1 be agreed to.