Fenton Darien: Civil Aviation (Cape Town Convention and Other Matters) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Fenton Darien: Civil Aviation (Cape Town Convention and Other Matters) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 22 June 2010. Volume:664;Page:12012. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
DARIEN FENTON (Labour) 
: 
 It is an absolute privilege to take a call on the Civil Aviation (Cape Town Convention and Other Matters) Amendment Bill 2010. I have been waiting with bated breath and great anticipation to take a call on this bill because it is such a riveting and exciting bill! But you know I do not want to belittle the bill because I know it is important. As other members have said the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee examined the treaty and reported back to the House 4 or 5 weeks ago. I want to thank very much the officials who took us through this convention. It was a very interesting experience and I think the officials did their very very best to try to make it interesting for the members of the committee and I genuinely thank them for that. 
The national interest analysis that is attached to the report from the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee on the treaty examination is very very thorough and perhaps if I have the chance later on in the Committee stage I may talk about some of the advantages. But there are also some disadvantages as explained to us by the officials that I think are worth considering. 
Labour is supporting the bill because it is pretty uncontroversial. It amends domestic legislation so that New Zealand can be party to an international convention on aircraft ownership. I cannot help myself with this legislation because here we are with a convention. I am aware that New Zealand tries to be a good global citizen by participating in global agreements and playing a leadership role in that. So the question comes up again for me as to why we support this convention but not one on fundamental rights for domestic workers which our Government voted against at the International Labour Organization 2 weeks ago. It voted alongside countries like Bahrain Saudi Arabia Iran and Kuwait to prevent an international standard that would provide protection to domestic workers throughout the world but also in New Zealand. We have not received an explanation for why our country voted in opposition to countries like the USA Australia the UK and the Philippines and I think it is very damaging to our reputation. 
As I said although I am pleased that we are supporting this bill across the House I am still very very concerned about our position especially as a former National Party MP Marilyn Waring has offered an apology to the women of the Commonwealth for New Zealand’s vote against the proposed ILO convention. She said that New Zealanders are “ashamed saddened and outraged that the principles which we hold dear and try to live by have been abrogated by the government of New Zealand.” Despite what the Minister says this is a convention that would have affected New Zealand workers. There are around 20000 home-based care workers in New Zealand and thousands more throughout the world. So we talk in this debate about developing countries and how this convention will help them but we do not care about the thousands of domestic workers throughout the world who have no rights. The overwhelming majority of New Zealand domestic workers are very poorly paid and they are excluded from the discrimination provisions of the Human Rights Act. 
Although we support this convention the following question came to my attention when I was thinking about this: how can we agree on this across the House when we have this situation at the ILO? New Zealand has had a good reputation particularly under the previous Government and that is slowly being eroded. 
As other members have mentioned this bill also contains amendments to the Civil Aviation Act. The amendments are designed to introduce more flexibility into civil aviation rule-making. I want to make a couple of comments about air safety. The Minister is not here but perhaps later I can ask him some questions. The Civil Aviation Authority does a good job given its paucity of funding and the challenges of regulating aircraft operation in New Zealand commercial and recreational which is a very wide-ranging operation. An issue that came up recently concerned Queenstown Airport. We wrote to the Civil Aviation Authority asking about safety issues at Queenstown Airport. It is a difficult airport and there have been media reports about a lack of experience in the control tower and an increasing number of safety incidents. The Associate Minister of Transport Nathan Guy will be pleased to know that Airways Corporation of New Zealand wrote back to us on behalf of the Civil Aviation Authority with assurances that staffing and training levels are more than adequate for this particular airport. 
That is all well and good but what happened last week? Two pilots apparently used their airside security passes to sneak on to the Queenstown Airport runway in the middle of the night to race a car. The boy-racer legislation did not apply to them obviously. Needless to say those pilots put the lives of others at risk and they ended up being banned from all airport land for 2 years. OK that is the right outcome. So the authority that Mr Guy is responsible for has provided us with perfectly reasonable answers to our valid concerns but I have to say that these perfectly reasonable answers have not prevented a couple of cowboy pilots from drag racing on the airstrip at Queenstown. I encourage the Minister to be more vigilant about these sorts of things. We cannot have these sorts of security concerns happening at our airports. 
I want to raise another issue in respect of civil aviation. The Associate Minister recently made an announcement about the monitoring of commercial pilots for drug and alcohol issues. There are two things. The Civil Aviation Authority will work with the Ministry of Justice to introduce random checks on commercial pilots for any criminal convictions that have not been declared and secondly it will introduce an electronic database that will enable them to more effectively gather information and monitor any trends. Labour supports these initiatives and I really want to say that Labour members do not believe there is any room for drug and alcohol use among pilots. I do have to reflect though that Air New Zealand has had monitoring systems in place for many years and it was quite aggrieved at the suggestion that it had not. In actual fact the problem is with small aircraft and small commercial airlines. 
It seemed as though Mr Guy was being pretty proactive in terms of his press release of 1 April. But what it did not say was that the Civil Aviation Authority had repeatedly been asking for more powers to identify pilots with drinking problems but unfortunately the Minister had been sitting on his hands. The Christchurch  
Press  
obtained a briefing to the Minister under the Official Information Act. It was written just a month earlier and states that the existing system is heavily dependent on individuals acting responsibly and self disclosing information relating to their drug and alcohol use. But it also shows that the Civil Aviation Authority had proposed a series of measures including limits for drug and alcohol use but that nothing had been done. 
As members will see although Labour supports this convention there are some concerns. If I had more time I would mention many more but perhaps I will get to those during the second and the third readings. We have many concerns around civil aviation the things we need to be doing in New Zealand to ensure the safety of people who fly in New Zealand and of course meeting our international obligations thereby making it easier for our airline industry to operate internationally and to meet our obligations to other countries. Thank you.