Lees-Galloway Iain: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLees-Galloway Iain: General Debate[Sitting date: 09 September 2015. Volume:708;Page:6437. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North): On this side of the House and in the Labour Party right across the country we are preparing to celebrate 100 years of the Labour movement. The Labour Party was formed in 1916 by people who wanted to get a better deal for workers. They were sick of being exploited they were sick of not having a chance to get ahead they were sick of dying of diseases caused by exploitative working conditions they were sick of their children dying too young and they were sick of their children not being able to go to school and not being able to get ahead. The Labour Party was formed because we held the values of working people we knew the value of work and we wanted people to get ahead.After the first Labour Government was elected the National Party was formed to keep Labour out of Government. That was the sole purpose of the National Party: to keep the people who represented the working people—the hard-working ordinary salt of the earth - backbone of the country—out of Government and out of power. That is what the National Party is all about and that is why the National Party has no idea what it stands for. It has no values; all it has are focus groups and Crosby/Textor. That is all the National Party has.We believe in a country that does far more for New Zealanders than what working people and ordinary New Zealanders are getting from this National Government. We believe in a country where if you work you can get ahead and where if you work you will actually get paid a decent day’s pay for a decent day’s work. That is what we believe in. We believe that if you get a job you should have some security in that work. You should know from one week to the next how many hours you are going to get and how much you are going to be paid so that you can put some money aside so that you can get a mortgage or get a loan or so that you can save up for your kids to be able to go to school camp—all the variety of things that people ought to be able to take for granted but that have become luxuries under this National Government. Working people get a raw deal under National.I want to talk about one of my constituents. I am going to call her Jane because she is so scared that her employer might find out that she has come to speak to me that she does not even want her real name to be exposed. Jane came to me and she said: “Is there anything I can do about my employment situation? I do not have an employment agreement. When I go to work my employer decides what is work and what is not—what I get paid for and what I do not get paid for.” So when she is sitting on the phones staffing the phones she does not get paid. When she goes into a meeting she does not get paid. Unless it is work as defined by the employer she does not get paid. That is completely illegal and my advice to her was: “We have got to go to a labour inspector. We have got to get this investigated.” Her response was: “I can’t do that because I might lose that little bit of work that I’ve got.”That is the plight of working people today under this National Government. Working people are too scared even to stand up for the rights that they are given in the law. At the same time this Government has passed law after law after law stripping away workers’ rights. Well we believe in something much better than that. We believe that Jane should get not only her minimum standards as allowed for under the current law but also guaranteed hours. She should know how many hours she is going to get from one week to the next. She should get paid a decent wage for the work that she does. She should be respected by her employer for the work that she does. She should have the opportunity to develop her career so that she can get ahead in her chosen profession and so that she can live the life that members opposite who think that getting a passport every 5 years is the worst thing that could possibly happen to them take for granted.That is how out of touch those members are. They talk about how they are getting more people into work when those people are on zero-hour contracts when they are on the minimum wage—or not even getting the minimum wage because they are on contracts and they have to work too many hours to get the money that they have been contracted for and they do not even get the minimum wage. We can do much better than that. Labour has a vision that is far more ambitious for working New Zealanders than National could ever be and it is time for the end of this anti-worker Government and for something that actually provides New Zealanders with the Kiwi dream that New Zealand was originally founded on.