Screen Industry Workers Bill

I move, That the Screen Industry Workers Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Education and Workforce Committee to consider the bill. At the appropriate time, I intend to move that the Screen Industry Workers Bill be reported to the House by 2 June 2020 and that the committee have authority to meet at any time while the House is sitting (except during oral questions), during any evening on a day on which there has been a sitting of the House, and on a Friday in a week in which there has been a sitting of the House and outside the Wellington area, despite Standing Orders 191, 193, and 194(1)(b) and (c).

Our screen industry is world class. We are known here in New Zealand as a great place to make movies and to make television and games. This isn’t just because of our dramatic landscapes. It’s because of the talented, creative people working in our screen industry. However, there is one feature of our screen industry of which none of us can be proud. The general law of New Zealand, consistent with international best practice, is that the courts will look at the real nature of a relationship between parties and determine whether they are an employee or a contractor.

Ten years ago, when the National Party was in Government, they introduced legislation and rammed it through all three stages under urgency in a single day. It was the so-called “Hobbit law”. There was no consultation of affected workers, no select committee—an abrogation of the democratic process. And, as a result, film workers lost their ability to challenge their status as a contractor. For those who would have been employees, this means they also lost their right to bargain collectively, their right to challenge unfair dismissals, and a range of other rights.

Today, almost 90 percent of screen production workers are contractors. They generally work multiple jobs a year and experience peaks and troughs in their work. They supplement their income by taking on jobs outside the industry. We hear about workers who accept less pay on a domestic production because they want to see the local industry grow, and then they try to make up the difference with a higher paying job on an international production.

A screen worker’s median monthly earnings are around $3,370. That comes to about $40,000 annually. Workers are often offered contracts on a “take it or leave it” basis. There is no scope to negotiate terms and conditions of work, let alone to request to be hired as an employee rather than a contractor. Another problem is that when something goes wrong, contractors in the screen industry have no avenues for recourse within the employment system. Instead, they have to use the civil dispute resolution procedures, which see them treated as corporate entities having a contractual dispute rather than as people just having a problem at work.

During the 2017 election campaign, the Labour Party said that we would restore the rights of film industry workers to bargain collectively. Upon forming a Government with our partners in New Zealand First and the Greens, we formed the Film Industry Working Group, drawing from all the major players in the screen industry, including producers, actors, and technicians, plus the Council of Trade Unions and Business New Zealand. We asked the working group to find a way to balance allowing workers to bargain collectively and to keep working as contractors if they wanted with giving production companies certainty about workers’ employment status, while maintaining contribution in our vibrant screen industry. This was not an easy task. I commend the members of the Film Industry Working Group and their facilitator, Linda Clark, for their creativity and the collaboration they demonstrated during the process. Over 10 months in 2018, they developed a unique model for workplace relations in the screen industry. Their model is what the Screen Industry Workers Bill is based on.

The working group said that production companies should retain certainty about their workers’ employment status through continuing to be exempt from the real nature test for employment status. In exchange, they said that contractors in the industry should be able to bargain collectively. Alongside this, screen industry collective bargaining should provide a greater degree of worker protection than collective bargaining under the Employment Relations Act.

The bill has been designed with the unique circumstances of the screen industry in mind. It is self-contained; it has no effect outside of the screen industry. The main features of the bill are a requirement for all workers to have written contracts, which contain mandatory terms about termination and protection from bullying, discrimination, and harassment; a framework allowing occupation-wide collective contracts to be negotiated which set minimum terms for all contractors in those occupations—these can, of course, be improved upon in enterprise-specific collective contracts and individual contracts—and a tiered dispute resolution system to support parties to resolve issues that may arise during the course of a contractual relationship or collective bargaining is also provided for in this bill.

We want to make sure that our screen industry flourishes. That’s why we’ve involved industry from the outset: to identify a practical solution that restores workers’ rights whilst reflecting the real needs of the screen industry. The bill represents the industry’s collective vision and ambitions. The Film Industry Working Group process has also generated mature and trusting relationships across various segments of the screen industry. I believe this will stand the industry in good stead. The consensus between the industry and screen workers will provide certainty for the sector and investors so that our screen production industry can thrive for many, many years to come. All people in New Zealand deserve good jobs, decent work conditions, and fair compensation for their work. The screen industry bill will ensure these for workers in our screen industry too.

I want to conclude with a message to the Opposition. I don’t know how they plan to vote on this bill this evening, but the press release that I have seen from the National Party indicates that they plan to vote against. I say to them: send this bill to the select committee and send a signal to the screen industry, and especially producers overseas who plan to invest in the New Zealand screen industry, that this issue is settled, that they can have confidence that there will be no chopping and changing in the future, at some distant point in the future, when another Government is in charge of New Zealand. They want certainty. That is what we have achieved by working alongside them. I implore all members of the House to signal to the screen industry that this is the final resolution of an issue which has challenged this nation for near on a decade. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Well, like the Minister’s voice, this is a Government that is running out of oomph. The Minister really got up tonight and tried to justify a piece of legislation that’s actually going to do terrific harm to the film industry and sector in New Zealand—an industry and a sector that we as New Zealanders have become enormously proud of over the last decade or so. It is an industry that has been able to advance New Zealand tourism, New Zealand enterprise, and the New Zealand economy and provide jobs, work, employment, and income for literally thousands of New Zealand’s most talented and creative people.

This is a bill that actually seeks to harm all those gains. It’s a bill that really just characterises in the most obvious way how little understood the economy is by this Government. This is a Government that actually doesn’t understand how the New Zealand economy works, doesn’t understand how the film industry works, and doesn’t want to create opportunity for New Zealanders who want to be earning an income working in the sector, earning an international reputation, and doing good for “New Zealand Incorporated”, and, of course, themselves.

This is a bill that actually is payback for non-delivery of a whole raft of promises that were made to the trade union movement by this Government upon their election. They haven’t been able to deliver so many things. But they want to, in the last 198 days of this Government, try and finally deliver at least something to their union mates. This seems to be the prize that they want to deliver. Well, there is no prize for those hundreds, if not thousands, of people who are currently employed as independent contractors in the film sector, in the screen sector, who are earning good money and producing good quality product. Now this Government, this Labour-led Government, wants to unionise, on behalf of their union mates, this piece of legislation and return back to the bad old days when industry film makers decided that they didn’t want to come to New Zealand. They didn’t want to be here because the environment didn’t provide an opportunity for them to be competitive. They will take, as they did previously, that investment opportunity and the work that goes with it offshore. And that’s because this Government puts their union mates and their ideology ahead of prospects and good opportunities for New Zealanders to earn a decent income in a sector where we can and have been incredibly good and received not only domestic acclaim but international acclaim.

This is a Government that wants to repeal what we put forward and what has been working exceptionally well, to the great benefit of the thousands of people working in the sector and, of course, the film sector, and earning export dollars as well. They want to repeal what we called the “Hobbit law”, and they promised actually to do it. This was their promise. They actually promised to do it within the first 100 days, and they failed hopelessly on that. Now, in the last dying days of this administration, they’re going to try and push it through, ram it through, as fast as they can. So even after nearly three years in office, finally they’ve come to try and get it through.

One of the things that concerned me about the Minister’s speech was what appears to be a truncated and shortened report back process for the select committee. It’s looking like—I think, if I heard the Minister correctly—he wants a report back to this Parliament by 2 June, and that’s not even three months. It means that they’re trying to push this through absolutely as fast as they can.

The amendments that we made to this legislation back in 2010 have worked exceptionally well. They were pragmatic, sensible changes that worked not only for those people who wanted to work and be employed in this sector but also for the movie and film makers. Now Labour is attempting to do little more than appease their union mates yet again, because what National knows is that a thriving, growing economy, which this Government seems not to be remotely concerned about, is dependent on a flexible labour market—a flexible labour market. That’s the kind of market place that was generating 10,000 jobs a month—10,000 jobs a month—under the last administration. And what have we now? A piece of legislation designed only to stifle an opportunity for jobs to be created—to stifle opportunity for New Zealanders to be employed and work within a thriving and growing environment and an opportunity. This Government wants to shrink that down so that there will be fewer New Zealanders working in an area where we know we have good creative skills and opportunity, not only for New Zealanders here but internationally as well.

This Government’s own advice showed that the 2010 amendment actually worked and that it has been working. The fact that it’s taken them so long to get to this point, I think, is an indication that actually, in their heart of hearts, they know that it’s working and they know how damaging this will be. They also know that in 198 days, when the election is held, the prospect of this legislation being turned over is very high, and they know that the damage that they’ll be doing will be neatly contained to probably only a few months, because it will need to be fixed—fixed in terms of growing our economy.

This Government—really, all they want to do is just push some more power to the unions, and we know about how that connection works. The history—we know the history. We know the relationship that exists between the parliamentary Labour Party and the trade union movement in New Zealand. We understand that connection. It’s historic and it’s political and it’s all based on a relationship that goes back a very long period of time, and they try and wrap it up as being some kind of benefit to New Zealanders. Well, nothing could be further from the truth. This is a piece of legislation that is doing little more than shrinking a huge opportunity for New Zealanders and for our economy.

Now, one of the most important things about the legislation that was changed in 2010 is that it had built into it a respect for the rights of individual workers to negotiate their own terms of employment and their own working rates, their own pay rates. This is something that we know this Government doesn’t like having. They don’t like people having an ability to negotiate on their own behalf; they like this collectivism. They like everything to be neatly put together and controlled by the union bosses in Wellington, and they like big unions, big control, and big Government. We take exactly the reverse view. We think that New Zealanders are at their best when they have the ability to negotiate for themselves, to create flexible working environments that create opportunities for growth and for more people to be employed.

What this piece of legislation will do is simply reduce the availability of opportunity for New Zealanders to be earning an income from a thriving film and screen sector. I think that’s an appalling indictment on this Government. This is without doubt the most hopeless Government that we’ve had since the last one-term Labour Government—that one that was tossed out in 1975. They are showing all the same hallmarks of that Government back then. They were out of touch with reality. They wanted to shrink the New Zealand economy down. They were completely dominated by the trade union movement and the relationships, historical and political, that exist between them.

In this case, billions of dollars—billions of dollars—of potential revenue to New Zealand is going to be lost because the film makers, the people who want to invest their capital in New Zealand, are simply going to take that offshore and go somewhere else. That’s what this Government wants. They seem to want to just turn their face on the opportunities that exist and have been working so well.

So this is a very poor piece of legislation. It’s a result of one of the innumerable working committees that this Government set up. They promised it within the first hundred days. They’ve only been able to get a bill introduced into the House in the last few months—if not weeks—of this administration. It’s a poor piece of legislation that we will oppose at every opportunity.

Just before I call the next speaker, I just want to remind those members that are not sitting in their normal seats that it is against the Standing Orders to move your seat closer in order to interject—so just a warning.

Thank you, Madam Speaker, and it’s a pleasure to take a call on the Screen Industry Workers Bill. I would like to start by just correcting the previous speaker, Scott Simpson, on a few things. This bill is the culmination of hard work by many, many parties, and it is actually a piece to be really proud of. I commend the Minister Iain Lees-Galloway on bringing it to the House. But this was the commitment that we made: to start it in the first 100 days. So the fact that we’re bringing it into the House now is the fruition of all the work that has been done.

Somehow the Opposition seems to criticise us for taking the time to get it right, rather than what they did when they actually put the “Hobbit law” in place, when they rushed it through—“rammed it through”, I think, was the wording that the Minister correctly used—did it overnight, without the ability of one single person who was actually at the receiving end of this legislation to have a say in it. There was no select committee at all. The previous speaker objected to a shortened time line. Well, the Opposition, when they were in the National Government, rammed this piece of legislation through without even one day in between putting it into law. So the hypocrisy is just touching me from the side, and I want to have a shower.

This bill shows that we are actively addressing the long-term challenges facing New Zealand, and we are not shying away from the problems; we are actually tackling them. When the Opposition talks about jobs, as we hear them do, their focus is on the numbers—basically, just the number of jobs. It doesn’t matter what kind of a job, as long as people have jobs—never mind about the quality of the jobs. Now, what we are doing is very different. We are bringing dignity and respect back into the workplace. That is something that the Opposition doesn’t know, and, actually, the fact that the previous spokesperson for workplace relations took the first call is very telling because I believe that the current spokesperson for workplace relations doesn’t actually really care.

💬 Jan Tinetti: Who’s that?

I think it’s the Hon Todd McClay, but he doesn’t care. He might take a call—who knows—but we haven’t heard him so far.

So what we are doing now, when we’re talking about jobs, is we are restoring the rights of screen production workers to bargain collectively to actually allow them to continue working as contractors. As we have heard from the Minister, currently these workers are deemed to be contractors. They are therefore not entitled to employment rights, and people might be surprised about that. These are human rights to bargain collectively—internationally recognised rights all over the world. In other countries, screen and film industry workers do have those rights, and from overseas they come to New Zealand with those rights—they would have bargained collectively for their rights—but yet we are denying our own people in New Zealand to have those same rights. It’s absolutely appalling.

This started back in 2010—that’s quite correct—and the workers at that time sought to get some protection, some minimum standards in legislation, to protect them from things like bullying, harassment, contract termination, security of work, health and safety—minimum rights, nothing more they asked for. The film industry—and people have not properly understood this—is a very unusual, inconsistent, and potentially exploiting industry, so we need to make sure that people have proper protections in place.

Now, we all know what happened at the end of the day because of that imbalance in the employment relationships because, contrary to what the previous speaker told us, it’s not a matter of just walking up to your boss and telling him or her what you want; it’s actually an uneven playing field. So collective bargaining puts that balance a little bit back in the scales. But in the end, what happened is that the National Government rode roughshod over the people’s working rights and, again, as I said, overnight, without any select committee process at all, put this legislation in place—took away the rights to collectively bargain for a group of New Zealand workers. They did that overnight. The Minister said, “an abrogation of the democratic process” and I think that’s a wonderful word.

It was a shameful day for New Zealand. It was a shameful day. I was a law student in my second year at that time, and I remember the feeling—

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: I’m just going to stop the speaker because we’ve had a lot of talk about the past. I do think that she should focus on the bill before the House. This is the first reading of that bill.

Absolutely, and it was an absolute outrage that this bill needs to turn around a situation that was created in such a contentious and deeply motivated action. There’s actually a really great record of this contentious industrial dispute. If anybody wants to google “Helen Kelly, president of the NZCTU, Hobbit dispute” you’ll get all of the background.

So, actually, fast-forwarding nine years, lifting nine years of dark blue darkness, we now have a great bill in place. To pass that bill actually gives some human rights back to the group that should have that. So I commend this bill to the House. Thank you very much.

Look, I rise to take a call on this bill. National opposes this bill. Firstly, I think it is important to state absolutely very clearly that, on this side of the House, we support a fair workplace, and we do understand that there is a really delicate balance to be had between what are workers’ rights and also the need to be constantly vigilant around where we have exploitation.

I believe that there are a number of areas where National has improved the law, but we have been very focused on ensuring that, if we get that balance out of step, the reality is there will be an economic consequence. It is correct that, under this Government, we have a pretty extraordinary situation with coronavirus. We have huge economic impacts that people are predicting. We’ve got an export education industry that is in significant disarray. This is relevant to this bill in that the conversation that many New Zealanders are having—whether it’s the 90 percent of small businesses that we have in New Zealand—is what can we be doing to ensure that people survive what is a pretty tumultuous period.

So we do want to raise, on behalf of the Opposition, the timing of this, and that brings me to what my learned colleague Scott Simpson has mentioned. The reality is that it is relevant that this was promised within the first 100 days. We know that this is a broken promise and that it wasn’t delivered in the first 100 days, and that’s not unlike hundreds of other promises across what the Government has said. In education, there are about 50 that are undelivered, and we just do put on the record that this is a promise that has been significantly delayed.

The second issue that I want to raise is actually the importance of the cultural and creative sector and jobs. So let’s go back and let’s actually accept on the record here today that the Government is trying to rewrite history. I know that it was a difficult period. There were different views around the “Hobbit law”, but let’s remember why this law came into place. The reality is there was a stoush around The Lord of the Rings. There were concerns that it could go to another country. There were significant issues raised at the time. Sir Peter Jackson, obviously, went on national TV in quite a very public dispute with lead actors in New Zealand, but the reality is that New Zealand has reaped billions of dollars of economic development as a result of the growth in the film industry and a number of productions that have come here.

So we do put on record the history behind this law. It wasn’t that people were trying to be unfair in terms of workplace relations; it was about ensuring that we retain jobs in New Zealand and we ensure that the creative sector has the ability to have those jobs.

I think, in terms of the substance of the bill, again, Scott Simpson has raised a range of issues around both collective bargaining and what this means—I know Todd McClay has said some of this stuff publicly—in terms of pay rates and what we think will actually be the impact of this bill. We do note that the working group—again, one of the many hundreds of working groups set up by this Government—actually said that they believed that they were satisfied with the status quo. So while on this side of the House we recognise that it’s very important to have a balanced workplace relations framework, we do want to put on the record the billions of dollars of economic development that have been created, the importance and the backdrop that this bill is going through Parliament, and the importance of a fair process around this bill.

The question that I would ask of the Minister is: why is this bill—of course, we understand that you’ve already broken your promise—being rammed through in a truncated time period—[Interruption]

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! Order!

You can’t stand in this House and try and be hypocritical—oh, I don’t know that I can say that—

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: No, you can’t.

—and criticise the last National Government—[Interruption]

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! Come on, that is a barrage.

—for a bad process and then on the other hand try and push it through in a truncated process.

So we do put on the record, here in this House, the fact that there is a truncated process being argued for, and that it is important that we hear the different perspectives of the debate both from workers but also from people who have put up arguments around the creative sector and jobs and what this will mean for film production. We look forward to the debate at the select committee. Thank you.

It gives me great pleasure to stand on behalf of New Zealand First, to speak again tonight on the Screen Industry Workers Bill. I like Nikki Kaye. I think she’s a great speaker. She’s thoughtful, and I think she actually gave a good contribution tonight, but she came to the wrong conclusion.

It was certainly very unclear when the Hon Scott Simpson delivered his speech and had no clear direction as to the actual reasoning behind the National Party not supporting this bill moving forward except for: “This harms all those gains that we’ve got, and it is just promises to the trade unions—their mates that they’re looking after.”, but it doesn’t talk about what the bill actually does or how it actually makes the current laws even better. Nor does it point to the fact that when the “Hobbit law” was introduced in 2010, despite the rhetoric they’re saying that we’re rushing this through, it was done under urgency in one day. So that, I would suggest, is a contradiction of terms when you are starting to use that as a defence to put this through.

The fact is that we said we were going to do this as a coalition Government—to do something in the first 100 days—to set up a working group. Now, the working group—let me go to the working group, because it’s taken this much time to thoroughly go through and look at every single aspect that is going to benefit the industry—a $3 billion industry for New Zealand that we can grow and develop, providing that we look after the most vulnerable workers inside this. Now, let’s go through the working group: Linda Clark from the facilitator of Kensington Swan; Alex Lee, film group Auckland; Alice Shearman, the New Zealand Writers Guild; Augie Davis, the Stunt Guild of New Zealand; Barrie Osborne, the film producer; Brendan Keys from Weta Digital; Erina Tamepo from iwi; Melissa Ansell-Bridges from Equity New Zealand; Michael Brook, Regional Film Offices New Zealand; Paul Mackay from Business NZ; Richard Fletcher, the Screen Production and Development Association; Richard Wagstaff from the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions; Sioux Macdonald from the Screen Industry Guild; and Tui Ruwhiu, the Directors and Editors Guild of New Zealand. What a comprehensive group to comprehensively look at a solution that we are trying to fix that they put through in 2010 under urgency without any consideration and with no ability for people to come and submit on. Now we’ve got something that is truly going to make this industry fly and look after the most vulnerable people within this well and truly establishing itself industry in New Zealand.

Now, the other thing that I think the National Party need to understand is—because they haven’t clearly articulated why they wouldn’t do it, except Nikki Kaye did mention the fact that they were concerned about the industry being under siege. What she didn’t say is the reason why they rushed it through is they were concerned about strikes.

They used that as their analogy back in 2010, but the simple reality is that since then, the industry itself has established a blue book. It’s a code of conduct. It’s codifying existing industry standards that have been well and truly adopted throughout the industry on their own terms and merits. This bill simply enables the same rules that apply in the blue book to ensure that those vulnerable workers can actually sit down and collectively bargain and agree to it.

What I also didn’t say was that wonderful list of talented, exceptionally involved industry heads of bodies, including BusinessNZ, agreed with this bill unanimously. It has been agreed by all members who had attended all of those working groups and sat down to go through line by line of what’s wrong and what the problems are.

I don’t see where the National Party is actually pushing back on this. This is only good. If they actually read the fine print and understood the bill, they would understand that there is absolutely no way that anybody through this collective bargaining process can strike—there is no way. There is no benefit in striking through this. We have to simply ensure that the most vulnerable workers—those ones that are a single voice in a short truncated period of employment—get the best available opportunity given to them.

The collective bargaining mechanism that this bill actually enables is something that this side of the House certainly agrees on, along with the industry as a whole. Producers—we are talking about overseas people that come to New Zealand to use our wonderful country to produce some of the most incredible films that the world has seen. This is actually only going to strengthen it. To strengthen it, we have to make sure that those workers are being looked after. Those people that are at the bottom end of the employment scale don’t have the bargaining power as an individual, but they have a collective bargaining power under this law.

That is why we are excited to put this through a select committee process. It’s not a truncated select committee process. We want to ensure that we’ve heard from all submitters to hear what their concerns are—if there are any at all, because I haven’t to date heard any of those concerns being put forward. If there is going to be a body that would be standing up to say, “Maybe we’ve got a problem here.”, it would certainly be BusinessNZ. I’ve been talking to them today and they said, “It’s two thumbs up from us. We think this is a good move. We think it’s going to be wonderful for our industry.” New Zealand First stands with our coalition partner, side by side, to see this bill go through the House. And, yes, I believe we can get it done before the end of this term and before the next election. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

I’m taking this call to oppose the Screen Industry Workers Bill in the first reading. I would like to start by reminding members in Government that when National came in in 2008, the global financial crisis was coming our way. We were doing everything possible to cushion our families and businesses from the adverse impacts of the global financial crisis. Yes, we had to make some changes in a very, very short time to ensure we were able to retain jobs here in New Zealand. We didn’t want to see our film industry going offshore. That is the reason we had to do a lot of changes—

💬 Marja Lubeck: That’s got nothing to do with this bill at all.

—we had to bring in policies to support—

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! Order! I won’t speak to Marja Lubeck again. You are not in your position. You are at the back of the House. You cannot move your seat in order to interject, I’m sorry.

💬 Hon Iain Lees-Galloway: I raise a point of order, Madam Speaker. Whilst that is a literal and precise interpretation of the Standing Orders and Speakers’ rulings, it is normal practice at this time of night for members to move more towards the main block of the House. Marja Lubeck is still in the back row of the Government benches, and it is not unusual for members to occupy a seat in that position and to interject in a normal fashion during a debate. I think your ruling this evening departs significantly from the way Speakers usually address these kinds of issues, and I’d ask you to reflect on that.

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: I have reflected on it. I did give the member a warning. There were two members who were continually interrupting. It was not normal interjection, and I think other members can support that. Marja Lubeck has been interjecting constantly, and that’s why I have spoken.

And we stand by the change that we did to the employment legislation that brought the law which is commonly called the “Hobbit law”. Definitely we know that that law is working really well, because in the film industry we have seen the flexible labour market is giving us the revenue that we need to support our economy. We have seen, since that Government came in, the economy is going down—economic growth is sliding down. When we were in Government, we were supporting the economy. This is another piece of legislation that is a good example of policies that they are bringing to damage our economy.

This bill is nothing except supporting their union friends. Yes—exactly. This is about bringing collective bargaining for people that are not defined as employees in their employment agreement. They want to capture each and every individual—

💬 Hon Dr Megan Woods: Usually you say “union mates” FYI.

—working in the film industry to ensure that they become union members. It’s all about “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch your back”, because unions obviously—

💬 Hon Member: What?

Yes, in the last election—

💬 Kieran McAnulty: I raise a point of order, Madam Speaker. This is the chair of the Education and Workforce Committee, and I think it’s highly improper—and, I would argue, in breach of Speakers’ rulings 49/1 and 49/2—to suggest that this Government is acting in a way that is under the direction of another body. The suggestion that this is, as the member said, “You scratch my back; I scratch yours”, “this Government’s doing it to build union membership”—that is an improper suggestion on this bill.

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Yeah, I can’t agree entirely. I think it is borderline, but I think to suggest that saying “You scratch my back I’ll scratch yours” is implying that there’s some outside force being brought to bear is probably a step too far. As the Minister in the chair has said across the House in interjections, “What you normally say is ‘your union mates’ ”. So I think there’s a bit of give and take here, but I will ask the member to be a bit more careful.

Speaking to the point of order.

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Well, I don’t think I really need any help. I’m not ruling it out of order; I’m just saying that the member needs to be careful because it is against the Standing Orders to suggest that anyone outside is bringing force to bear in order to gain an advantage.

Thank you, Madam Speaker, and I was going to actually build on that, but—[Interruption] I can see why they’re so scared. They don’t want me to talk about that, and now they’re laughing because they’re so embarrassed about what’s coming out through this legislation. It’s really obvious—it’s obvious—

💬 Kieran McAnulty: I raise a point of order, Madam Speaker. I do firmly believe that that comment from the member is actually reflecting on your ruling. You’ve just instructed this member not to go down this line because it is, in your words, “borderline” and arguably a breach of Speakers’ rulings—to then stand up and say, “Well, I know why they don’t want them to say it.” We brought it up because it’s a breach of Speakers’ rulings, not for any other reason, and I think her suggesting that is actually reflecting on your ruling, Madam Speaker.

💬 Hon Member: A ruling that it didn’t breach Speakers’ rulings.

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Thank you; I can deal with this. Yeah, there wasn’t actually a breach. And unfortunately, in the three or four minutes we have left and in the laughter and hilarity that’s happening, I think it was a reasonable to and fro between both sides, and I decided not to intervene, but I will ask Parmjeet Parmar to continue addressing the bill that is before this House.

So this Government is really keen on bringing in collective bargaining, and definitely there are questions about that—why this Government is so keen on bringing in collective bargaining in each and every industry. They don’t care about how many jobs are being created; all they care about is how many people are getting collective bargaining access—that’s all they care about, and we know the underlying reason for that.

This legislation does nothing. It just unwinds the good work that was done by the previous National Government. And then we also see that the select committee process is going to be a truncated process. So that means they don’t want the industry to have their say in the select committee process because they want to deliver this result before this election, because they want to go out and say that, yes, there are more people now in collective bargaining. We do not support this legislation.

I’m sorry—just a bit slow getting to my feet. This debate is interrupted and is set down for resumption next sitting day.

Debate interrupted.

The House adjourned at 10 p.m.