Chadwick Steve: Employment Relations (Film Production Work) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Chadwick Steve: Employment Relations (Film Production Work) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:668;Page:15023] 
Hon STEVE CHADWICK (Labour) 
: 
 I will take a short call on clause 3 of the Employment Relations (Film Production Work) Amendment Bill which states “This Act amends the Employment Relations Act. Fundamentally that takes us back to why we are here in Committee in urgency debating amendments to industrial legislation that are not required. They were never asked for by the actors and those engaged in the industry or by the producers. I go back to what Gerry Brownlee said in May 2009 when he was fronting a New Zealand film networking function. He stated: “Our competitors continue to work to attract productions to their countries. So while we don’t want to engage in a ‘race to the bottom’ within higher and higher incentives the next step is to cultivate a regulatory environment that makes it easy for filmmakers to come to New Zealand and film in our locations use our facilities and hire our workers and engage our talent pool.” 
Labour would have agreed with that statement in 2009 but never since 2009 have workers in the film industry asked for legislative change to give them clarity or to give producers clarity about hiring staff. They have never asked for that. 
Hon Gerry Brownlee 
: Why did they put on the black ban? 
Hon STEVE CHADWICK 
: The Minister opposite knows that when he met them in his office they reached an agreement to work together on looking at a new approach based on the Pink Book and reaching an industrial standard. The Minister knows that that was the agreement—[ 
Interruption 
] Yes but the agreement was never to change the Employment Relations Act. It was never in National’s film strategy. It was never in its economic plan that it would amend industrial legislation and go back to the days of the Employment Contracts Act. It has never ever stated to the public that changes to the Employment Relations Act were required. It was not until Warner Bros came and bullied New Zealand saying that it wanted clarity that this happened. The Americans will be laughing at the fact that New Zealand has rolled over bringing this House into urgency—making a mockery of urgency—just to get the Employment Relations Act changed today quite apart from the incentives. 
What Mr Key has changed in perpetuity is the right of workers to have their actual employment conditions be the determinant of whether they qualify for sick leave annual leave and normal working hours. Commentators are noticing this. The Government wanted to attract the industry to New Zealand so it was prepared to go beyond financial incentives to change the paramountcy of our domestic legislation our industrial legislation for the will and the demands of Warner Bros in America. That is simply disgraceful. The whole premise for this wrong track that New Zealand is now going down is that Ministers were confused. They were in a chaotic state. They were responding to pressures that they perceived about the need for a change to the Employment Relations Act. They sought Crown Law advice based on the assumption that the actors wanted collective bargaining. That was not right. That will cost the Crown— 
Hon Gerry Brownlee 
: Yes it was. 
Hon STEVE CHADWICK 
: No it was not right. The actors were working on an industrial standard based on the Pink Book and the Minister knows that. He had them in his office and that was the agreement when they left his office. Those parties agreed to find a Kiwi solution together. It could have been our own domestic solution based on those industrial standards and we could have moved forward. 
Now we have a stripping of the rights of workers a stripping of all of those benefits that they had fought so hard for industrially and that is why I cannot support the change to the Employment Relations Act proposed in this bill. The workers in the industry know they are independent contractors. They absolutely know that. They do not know what benefits accrue whether they are an employee or an independent contractor but they knew that they had the ability to work together to find the right industrial solution. 
Hon Tau Henare 
: That’s the next clause. 
Hon STEVE CHADWICK 
: No it is not—we did not need to change the Employment Relations Act. We are going back to the dark days before 2002.