Fenton Darien: State Sector and Public Finance Reform Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeFenton Darien: State Sector and Public Finance Reform Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 25 June 2013. Volume:691;Page:11225. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DARIEN FENTON (Labour):I have been fascinated hearing about the select committee process on the State Sector and Public Finance Reform Bill particularly because David Bennett is a member of that committee the Finance and Expenditure Committee and I am hoping that he will learn quite a lot about how you can make changes that actually improve workers’ rights when we come to consider the draconian employment law legislation in front of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee. In my first reading speech I said there were some good things in this bill and there were some things that we were concerned about. Some of them have been cleaned up. I am particularly pleased that we have got to a position with the redundancy provisions for State sector employees where the Public Service union is comfortable with it although it has commented that there is no doubt that there are more restraints being imposed on redundancy compensation but compared with the original proposal it has certainly made some ground.I noted also that Jonathan Coleman the Minister of State Services when he was in his second reading speech talked about redundancy being about fairness. I am quite confused about that actually. It seems that redundancy is about fairness when it comes to this bill but it is not about fairness when it comes to Sue Moroney’s bill the Employment Relations (Statutory Minimum Redundancy Entitlements) Amendment Bill which would provide redundancy fairness for private sector workers as well as public sector workers. Also it seems that this is about fairness when it comes to situations in the Public Service which of course I support where workers are being transferred from one position to another—and there are many rights that are being cleaned up in this bill and I totally support those—but when it comes to transferring low-paid cleaners or low-paid kitchen workers or low-paid orderlies or laundry workers who work in the private sector or even in hospitals or are employed as contractors under Part 6 of the Employment Relations Act fairness does not apply. Actually whatthe Government wants to do is take away rights of workers who are actually employed by small employers.The second thing that I wanted to mention is the issue of workplace orders and again this is something that I understand took a lot of negotiation and a lot of consideration and that perhaps is an exemplar about how select committees can reach agreement and make progress on a bill that is important to everyone. Originally the bill allowed for the Government to use Orders in Council to intervene in collective bargaining between the union and the employer for example to prevent the employer agreeing to a pay rise. It is really pleasing that the select committee has dropped that provision and instead the new bill allows the State Services Commissioner to issue workforce policy statements but these specifically exclude pay and conditions. But as my colleague David Parker warned earlier though there are consequences—there are knock-on effects. The Government’s Employment Relations Amendment Bill will have a knock-on effect in the State sector. Although the State Services Commission will not be able to interfere with collective bargaining the Government’s bill around collective bargaining will have an enormous impact on State sector workers and we will see how that goes. But under that bill employers will not have to negotiate a collective agreement. They can just say: “Well we don’t want to.” So it is going to be harder for them to negotiate a pay rise let alone protection for people who work in the State sector in the public sector who may be in a situation where they are trying to bargain for a pay rise or to keep their current terms and conditions as they have to do at the moment because this Government has been so mean.Also under those provisions new workers can be paid less. So having a collective agreement is one thing but being able to bring in new workers and pay them less under the Government’s other legislation will actually undermine the provisions in the bill around collective agreements. There are other provisions that I could talk about but I will not. What I would say is I find two things very interesting. One is that we have a select committee process where there seems to be agreement across the board albeit with some reservations on our side about the rights of workers to redundancy and collective bargaining but then on the other hand another select committee is about to completely undermine those provisions for all workers.