Fenton Darien: Estimates Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeFenton Darien: Estimates Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 31 July 2013. Volume:692;Page:12173. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DARIEN FENTON (Labour):The estimates debate on Vote Labour provides a really good opportunity to do a performance review of the work in the labour portfolio and the work of the Minister of Labour who is now 6 months into the job. He may be new and he has certainly learnt his lines extremely well but there is something deeply antiquated about the Minister’s approach to labour relations and the labour portfolio. In 6 months he has delivered a 25c an hour increase in the minimum wage—a miserable25c an hour. He has also cut young workers’ pay and brought back youth rates for the first time since last century. He has revived a stupid piece of legislation that has languished on the Order Paper for 3 years because it was so hopeless and is so mean that it will cut basic rights to meal and rest breaks. And now he has sent to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee the nastiest piece of proposed labour law that we have seen since Jim Bolger was the Prime Minister.This is going to be a very testing time for employment relations in New Zealand. It is going to be a testing time for the Minister as opposition to his employment law ramps up and as everyday Kiwi workers begin to understand exactly what the agenda of this National Government is about. It is hard enough to get a job let alone one that pays the bills but employment law changes that are being proposed by Simon Bridges and this National Government will have a knock-on effect to every wage and salary earner in New Zealand and they will entrench Kiwis in a low-wage economy. By taking away workers’ rights to fair wage bargaining and standard setting Kiwi workers across the board are going to see their wages fall.What did we see this week? We saw an Australian company that is bringing a call centre to New Zealand. Do you know why it is coming here? Because wages here are 30 percent cheaper. Kiwi workers are 30 percent cheaper. Australian companies are bringing jobs here—Hon Tau Henare: How many jobs will there be?DARIEN FENTON: —and at what price? So does Tau Henare think Kiwi workers are not worth as much as Australian workers? We have the maddest situation at the moment where New Zealanders are going to Australia to get better pay and Australian employers are coming to New Zealand to get lower pay. That is a crazy situation.Every change that this Government is proposing—from allowing employers to walk away from negotiations into why people have been sacked to taking away the right to a tea break—is taking us backwards to those ideas that we saw last century that were tried and miserably failed. We should not be feeling proud and Tau Henare should not be feeling proud that we are attracting Australian business on the basis of being a cheap economy on the basis of being a low-wage destination. That is shameful—that is shameful. It is interesting to me that we never ever hear any mention now of closing the wage gap with Australia. That goal has gone. That has disappeared. The Government has given up on it. Instead it is actually increasing the wage gap with Australia. That is the way Steven Joyce thinks we create job opportunities.But back to the Minister of Labour’s performance. I am very generous so I am going to give him a five out of 10 for health and safety. He has got a bill in front of the select committee now and there is going to be another one coming. But his department has badly botched the change process from moving the old Department of Labour to the new agency—it is a change process called Lifting Our Game and the health and safety inspectors are so disillusioned with it that they call it “Shifting the Blame”—and in the process the department has lost numerous experienced health and safety experts. We cannot afford to do that with our health and safety record.The Minister too I have to say kindly has exhibited some stubbornness and a tendency to think he has all the answers especially in forestry where the death toll this year is now at six. It is now at six. The families who have lost those loved ones are desperate. They are calling on the Minister and they are calling on the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee for an independent inquiry. In fact even the forestry owners are now asking for help. But of course this Minister says he has all the answers.I give him a four out of 10 for responding to concerns—[Bell rung ]The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson): The member has run out of calls. I call the honourable—DARIEN FENTON: I raise a point of order Mr Chairperson. No we have not.The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson): You have not?DARIEN FENTON: No I think we have got one more call.The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson): OK. I have got a record here that says 26 calls.DARIEN FENTON: I thought we had 27. We get 27.The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson): Well we need to get this sorted because if the member has another call I am happy to give her the call. I need to find out what is right. I am sorry but the information that the Clerk’s Office has is 26.Chris Hipkins: I raise a point of order Mr Chairperson. The allocation that we were given by the Government whips’ office shows that this being an 8-hour debate—I can run through the numbers for you if you wish to be assured—the Labour Party gets 28.09 percent of the calls which in raw minutes is 134.83 raw minutes and when rounded to number of minutes is 134 raw minutes. Therefore that equates to 27 calls.The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson): Well all members are honourable and the member’s word will be accepted. I call the honourable member Darien Fenton.DARIEN FENTON: As I was saying I was about to give the Minister four out of 10 for his response to concerns about the exploitation of migrant workers. Yes he is making the right noises along with the Minister of Immigration Michael Woodhouse but he has still failed to explain how he is going to deal with the increasing exploitation of migrant workers where they are being employed on sub-minimum wages with just 35 labour inspectors throughout the whole country. The Minister of Labour told us during the estimates process that the way he will do that is to free up inspector time by not enforcing Easter shop trading legislation. That would free up just three inspectors when inspectors are actually spending 54 percent of their time on migrant worker exploitation. So that is not going to cut it.Also I do have to ask the Committee why we pass laws. The Easter shop trading legislation has been subject to conscience votes. Seven times I think since I have been in Parliament members have used their conscience to pass a law to say that there should not be shop trading on Easter Sunday. And this is a law that I have supported because I do not want to see workers forced to work on Easter Sunday. Why have a law if the Minister can then just decide that he has got the right to ignore it?I do have to get to the bottom end when I am talking about scoring the Minister. It is a two out of 10 for the employment law changes. I know he is doing the bidding of his political masters I know he is the puppet or the king of the rebirth of the right-wing branch of the National Party but he does have to watch it. This Minister is getting a reputation for being a little bit economical with the truth. First of all there was the thing about the ILO where he said he was going off to the ILO to ask it about his law. When he got there he bottled it and refused to meet with the Secretary-General of the ILO.Dr Rajen Prasad: Really?DARIEN FENTON: Yes. Then there was the story about the forestry workers where he claimed that the forestry workers were completely on side with his revised code of practice when in fact Helen Kelly was there and was able to say that that was not true. The bottom line is that the Minister has been warned and warned again about the severity of his changes to employment law. He has been warned by his officials by the ILO and by numerous organisations that they will result in workers’ wages being cut that collective bargaining will be undermined and diminished as a result that litigation will increase over the petty changes to partial strikes and notice periods and that vulnerable workers such as the cleaners who work in this Parliament and clean hisoffice will be exposed once again to being the meat in the sandwich between voracious tendering processes where the cost of labour is the only competition. He has been warned that these changes will expose New Zealand—Hon Tau Henare: By who? Oh that’s right by you.DARIEN FENTON: —in Cabinet papers by his officials and by the ILO—to international embarrassment through a complaint of breaches to ILO Conventions 87 and 98. This is a Government that is trying to secure a place on the United Nations Security Council—we are supporting that—but it has to do it on the grounds of being a good international citizen. You cannot stand up in international fora and say that you support something and then break the laws at home. Interestingly in the free-trade agreement signed with Taiwan just a couple of weeks ago right in the body of the document it talks about complying with ILO Conventions 87 and 98 as a core part of our commitment to that free-trade agreement. But here we are planning to breach those very conventions in our own country.I think the financial year 2013-14 will be very interesting. It will be an interesting year for Vote Labour and for the Minister. It will become pretty rocky. Can I assure you that we in Labour will be taking the message out to workers and their families up and down the country that Labour is standing up for them. We will do everything we can to defeat these backward-looking changes that the Minister and this Government are proposing. They are backward-looking changes because they will do nothing to grow our economy. They will do nothing to create jobs. They will take us back to a low wage. They will increase the low wages in this country. They are tried and failed policies.