Brownlee Gerry: Land Transport Management Amendment Bill — Instruction to Committee In Committee Instruction to Committee In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Brownlee Gerry: Land Transport Management Amendment Bill — Instruction to Committee In Committee Instruction to Committee In Committee 
[Sitting date: 01 July 2008. Volume:648;Page:17037. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
GERRY BROWNLEE (National—Ilam) 
: 
 I think the points raised by Mr English should be well understood by the wider public because here we have a Government that literally for months has been running around the country saying how wonderful it is that it is buying back New Zealand rail. It has neglected the fact that New Zealand rail was actually not going anywhere any time soon; New Zealand rail was always going to be in New Zealand. Nobody who was operating it could pack it up and take it away. The previous owners had no choice other than to continue operating it. The problem was that the Government in taking over the rail track decided to put a huge value on it. 
Today we heard Michael Cullen crowing about the fact that the railways were bought for a dollar and are now valued at over $10 billion. But that is the problem. You see poor old Toll was asked to pay a rental on the tracks that reflected that $10 billion value. [ 
Interruption 
] Those members laugh at me for saying “poor old Toll” but that is exactly what the Government did and I will come to that in a minute. Toll was encouraged or required to pay a track rental that reflected a return on that $10 billion. They said: “We can’t do it. We can’t make the rail system in New Zealand work if we have to pay rent on those tracks when you’ve put a value of $10 billion on them.” They sold them for a dollar the Government made them $10 billion in value and Toll said: “What are you doing? This is not going to work.” Negotiations went on and on and finally the Government said: “Poor old Toll. We have to help them out. We’ve put them in a dreadful position so we’ll make them an offer they can’t refuse.” They started talking about the numbers. We heard it would be $600 million then $700 million. Toll said it was worth a billion. These numbers get so big that we almost lose sight of what it is. Finally today we heard that $690 million - odd has been paid to Australian shareholders of Toll because the Government obviously felt sorry for them. There can be no other reason. There will not be one extra train one extra track or one extra freight load taken as a result of today’s change in ownership. 
All we are seeing today is a change in ownership a liability back on the New Zealand taxpayer and further a new set of colours for the trains and the rolling stock. Some people unkindly said today that it was the Labour Party colours painted on them. I think Mr Key was far more accurate when he said it was a graphic representation of the ink that will run across the Government’s books as a result of this particular purchase. In fact the red and the grey livery of the new KiwiRail are the old colours of the Progressive party which was once here in the House. You see I think the Government is trying to say that this is a progressive move. 
Dr Cullen also said to the House today that he thought that New Zealanders including Mr Key might have noticed that the oil price has gone up. Well we certainly have. But how is that helped by the purchase of this organisation today? The fact is that those trains and those ferries run on diesel so the one thing that everyone needs to be sure of and needs to know for certain is that as a result of the purchase today not only will New Zealanders using those services pay more because of the cost of operation but they will pay a lot more because of the cost of capital invested in those businesses—far in excess of what is reasonable and realistic. 
Then today the appalling situation arose whereby Dr Cullen said he has just discovered that the superannuation entitlements of many of the workers employed in Toll are suddenly lost. Those workers have had 15 years of protection since that rail company has been in the private sector. It returns to the Government today and those entitlements are lost. So we have this little Supplementary Order Paper being appended to the Land Transport Management Amendment Bill. It is quite out of the scope of that bill but nonetheless it is thrown in there so it can be got though. The question I have for Dr Cullen is this: what would have happened when he found out about it this morning if there had not been the happy coincidence of this bill being on the Order Paper this afternoon? The reality is that those people’s entitlements would have sat in abeyance until the Government found a bit of time to try to enact some retrospective legislation to put it right. What it really tells us is just how little the current Government cares about working New Zealanders. 
Hon Maurice Williamson 
: They could have done it in the organised crime bill—that’s next. 
GERRY BROWNLEE 
: My colleague says—if we consider how this process works and what we are talking about here today—the Government could in fact have come to the House with this Supplementary Order Paper and attached it to the Organised Crime (Penalties and Sentencing) Bill which is next but that would be too close to home because it is almost an organised crime for the Government to have gone out and spent the money it has on this particular organisation knowing that it will never be able to make a single penny out of it. 
We of course will not want to see workers who have served Toll and New Zealand Rail for all that time penalised. That is our record. [ 
Interruption 
] Darien Fenton over there one of the doyennes of the union movement in this country was one of those who in 1993 made the Government aware of the problem—and the National Government did not quibble. There was no quibbling at all. The entitlements that people had accumulated over all those years were simply transferred with them. They were able to stay in the Government Superannuation Fund as they worked for the successive private entities that owned that organisation. It is such an irony is it not I say to Ms Fenton that we are here in the House today having discovered that a Labour Government was the Government that took those entitlements away from those workers? 
There is another bill on the Order Paper that the Government could have attached this particular Supplementary Order Paper to and that is the Judicial Matters Bill but that also would have been somewhat of an irony given the extraordinary lack of judgment that the current Government has shown not only in making the purchase in the first place but in failing to recognise the need to protect workers. How many times have we seen Labour members stand up in this House and talk about vulnerable workers? How many times have we heard them talk about the economy not delivering to hard-working New Zealanders about the benefits of KiwiSaver and about the minimum wage that should be paid to New Zealanders—all those things that engender the idea that Labour cares deeply about workers in this country? Then Labour has one very clear symbolic opportunity and it forgets about workers. 
What really amuses me is that we know what would have happened here. As they were going through that negotiation Dr Cullen would have been going down to the Labour caucus room on a Tuesday and giving them a bit of an update on how it was all going and not one of them—not one of them—would have asked the question: “What about the workers?”. I would have thought Parekura Horomia would say: “Wassup Dr Cullen?” but no nothing—not a squeak not a murmur not a mention. So here we are in the House this afternoon having to approve a jacked-up process to try to protect the workers of New Zealand—in particular the workers who have transferred from New Zealand Rail to Tranz Rail to Toll Rail and now to— 
Hon Parekura Horomia 
: Boo hoo! 
GERRY BROWNLEE 
: There is old Parekura Horomia over there pretending he is crying. He does not care. He did not care through months and months of caucus meetings and Cabinet meetings and Cabinet committee meetings and then ultimately when sitting in the Cabinet room at the top of the Beehive making the decision. He did not care. Well we care. We think the workers are entitled to this but we want to make sure that all New Zealanders know that this is a day that Labour was exposed as being a party that could not give a tuppence about workers in this country.