Goldsmith PaulHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Thank you Madam Speaker. Well here we are five years to the day since this Government was sworn in I believe—five years—and the Prime Minister's in Antarctica. She doesn't want to celebrate five years; Parliament's sitting and she's in Antarctica. What are we celebrating after five years? Endless failure to achieve anything. When it comes to housing what have they achieved? Where are the KiwiBuild houses? Nowhere to be found. When it comes to emergency waiting times at hospitals nothing there. Mental health? Nothing there. Education? They haven't even got the kids to school. Law and order? The ram raiders are running all over the place. The slow tram coming down Dominion Road? Not to be found. But there is one thing. There is one thing that this Government can do; it can pass bills. That's one thing it can do. And so yes they've got a majority to pass a bill and they're all here and they're celebrating the union movement. They can pass a bill. That's the only thing this Government is capable of doing. And yes there's not a person in this country who doesn't want to see higher wages for New Zealanders. Everybody wants higher wages and they want better resources. The question is: how do you achieve that sustainably? This Government believes the way to improve wages is to pass a law to have higher wages. That's how they think they get higher wages. Or the other way. There's two ways you can get higher wages under Labour's thinking. One is to pass legislation to legislate for higher wages. The second way is to shut the borders and stop immigrants coming in. And so if you have no immigrants coming through you have a worker shortage therefore wages go up. That's their approach to having higher wages. Well our view is if you want to have sustainably higher wages you need to have more productive businesses. That's how you get sustainably higher wages. Productivity is improved by investment and by higher skills and by all those things that are not related to Governments passing legislation. I stood up during the committee stage and tried to suggest to the Minister that perhaps one of the things that could be considered and talked about during the development of a fair pay agreement might be the productivity of the business. And of course he voted it down. He did not want any discussion of productivity as part of these misnamed fair pay agreements. So I can commit to the House that if National is fortunate enough to win the next election this will be gone. We'll be repealing this. It will not exist. So you can campaign on the mandatory union deals all you like over the next year because they won't survive a change of Government. Why are people concerned about their living standards? It's because we've got uncontrolled inflation. Wages are going slower than inflation under this Government. New Zealanders are going backwards. They're struggling because of the cost of living crisis. Wages are behind and people are feeling the pinch. And we've heard lots of stories of people who are struggling in this country. There's no question. There are many New Zealanders who are struggling; not just people who are on wages but also many small business operations are struggling to stay afloat and they are being confronted every day first by the difficulty of finding workers and second by the difficulty of dealing with all the additional costs and regulations that this Government passes and a whole host of other challenges that they face. If they are a small retail business they're facing ram raids and smash and grabs every second day. They're struggling with all sorts of issues. But what this Government knows how to do is add extra cost and difficulty for those businesses as well. So their response is to legislate for higher wages to stem the flow of immigration and hope that will force up wages. That of course is not sustainable. What you need is higher productivity. So if we look at this bill what does it do? What it does is it undermines the flexible labour markets that have been one of the pillars of our relative economic success over the last three decades. It's part of the reason why we have such low unemployment rates in this country and they want to unwind that to a one-size-fits-all approach whereby if you're a cleaning operation—an example has been used many times—and if you employ 5000 people you still have to deal with the same situation as if you were a mum and dad operator with two people. Michael Wood has recognised that there is a need for regional variation—he recognises grudgingly I think that there's a difference between Auckland and Eketāhuna and the needs and requirements of businesses operating in both those environments. So there's a little bit of flexibility for regions but he refuses to recognise that there's differences between very large businesses and small businesses. What you can cope with if you've got 10000 employees in the supermarket context in terms of terms and conditions and hourly breaks and penal rates and holiday time and all those sorts of things research and development and training—all those things you can cope with if you've got 10000 employees are not necessarily things you can cope with if you've got two employees. But they don't recognise that. So if you're running a little Four Square in Hokianga you've got to be exactly the same as if you're running a big operation in central Auckland and that doesn't work. It's not practical and it's going to make it difficult. And so on the one hand the Government spends all its time saying it's going to get tough on the supermarkets We're going to get the Commerce Commission in. We're going to go hard on the duopoly." and on the other they're bringing in legislation which makes it easier for the big players. Who do you think is going to be actually doing the negotiations for these fair pay agreements? Do you think is going to be the little players the little mum and dad operations? No. Do you think they're going to have any involvement in the negotiations? Not at all. It will be the big players who will negotiate; they'll negotiate naturally because what will come out of the whole process will be things that suit the bigger players. It's always the case with regulation; that's going to be the case with this. So on the one hand they're going to be tough on the big players. On the other hand we're going to pass more regulation that the big players will be able to negotiate more easily than the small players. So surprise surprise! It doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Secondly the better name for this bill is the "Mandatory Union Deals that are Imposed on Workplaces Bill". There's no choice. There's no choice about this. We've heard from Willie Jackson that democracy has changed in this country. Most people haven't sort of been aware of that. They're surprised that we didn't have a referendum on our democracy changing. But apparently according to Willie it has. And when it comes to this bill we see the sorts of things that are involved in that. So instead of having 50 percent of a workforce agreeing to go into a fair pay agreement all you need is a handful. You'd need 10 percent maybe but say you've got 200000 workers in an industry all you need is 1000—well that's less than 1 percent of the industry and they say "OK we're going to have a fair pay agreement." If a tiny minority say we're going to have a fair pay agreement once it's started there's no stopping it. Hon Kiritapu Allan: Isn't that wonderful—isn't that wonderful! Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: That's right—that's right. So the 70 percent of the Labour caucus who are ex-union members are happy about this and we can understand that. So celebrate it because after five years of achieving nothing on the issues that matter to New Zealand you can come along here today and pass a bill. That's great! This party is capable because it has a majority of passing bills and this is the latest one that they've passed. It imposes fair pay agreements on workforces even though they don't vote for them even though they don't want them. So the employers get dragged into the process. They've got a gun to the head. They either agree with it or if they don't agree with it it goes off to the Employment Relations Authority and they impose those conditions on those businesses even though they won't have had a chance to have their say and they have no choice about whether they're going to be involved in it. So the point—the simple point—I'm making is this. Every New Zealander wants to see higher wages for New Zealanders. And what we see is a Government that truly believes that the best way to get higher wages is for the Government to come along here to Parliament and pass a bill that lifts up wages through minimum wages and so forth—[Interruption] that's great—regardless of whether a business can afford to pay that or not; it doesn't matter. That's an irrelevant issue according to this Government. The productivity of it the international competitiveness of the business doesn't matter. That's irrelevant. It's only that this does this Government passes the legislation. The second route is to starve off immigration and reduce the workforce. And then of course at the same time they've got make-work schemes trying to hire New Zealanders at a time when businesses can't get access to workers. But that's a separate issue. So this Government's view is that's how you lift wages. Our view on this side of the House is if you want to sustainably improve wages over time you need to have more productive businesses. And that is going to be based sadly not on legislation but on free markets and people being prepared to invest their own capital and to grow their businesses."