Curran Clare: Employment Relations Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading 
Curran Clare: Employment Relations Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading 
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CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South) 
: 
 I would just like to make a remark about the speech made by Sir Roger Douglas—and unfortunately he has not remained in the House—but it is hard to take him seriously given that he presided over one of the biggest— 
Hon Tau Henare 
: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. Members are not supposed to say whether a member is in the House. It is pretty plain. 
Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER 
: Thank you for that. The member cannot refer to the absence of a member from the House. 
CLARE CURRAN 
: I apologise Mr Deputy Speaker. 
I want to talk a bit about what this Government is. My colleague Darren Hughes today quite accurately described it as a mirage because ultimately it does not mean what it says. This Government does a thing called Orwellian language. Orwellian language means an attitude and a policy of control by propaganda surveillance misinformation denial of truth and manipulation of the past. The Minister of Labour Kate Wilkinson stood in the House at question time today and again during her first reading speech and described this Employment Relations Amendment Bill (No 2) as fair and reasonable. Let me tell the House what fair and reasonable means according to this Government. It means unfair and unreasonable. Every time this Government says certain words we know that it means something else—the opposite. The Minister said that the bill was not major and that it was only a little change. That means it is a big change. It is just like when Tony Ryall talks constantly about change in health—change that equals cuts. Bill English talks about change in the public sector and reprioritisation—words that mean cuts; cuts to people’s services and cuts to people’s jobs. The icing on the cake is “aspirational” which means that the Government does not really mean it. We are aspirational about closing the wage gap between New Zealand and Australia. We are aspirational about creating 170000 jobs—was it? 
Grant Robertson 
: Something like that. 
CLARE CURRAN 
: It was something like that. 
Unfortunately the Government is not aspirational about this bill. It really means it but it is not a small change that is fair and reasonable. It is a major shift towards fundamentally affecting the relationship between employers and employees in our New Zealand workplaces. It is taking us backwards as a country. It will affect the morale and the productivity of employees of hard-working New Zealanders of people who earn wages and salaries and of people who are not liars and slackers. It will make workplaces harder to be in. It will entrench unfairness in our employment relations system and it will not do anything to address the fact that we do not have enough jobs in this country and we do not have an economic plan. If the Australian Labor Party wins the election on Saturday it will make Australia an even more attractive place to head for with higher wages and more jobs in an environment that encourages and enables working people and does not make them feel bad. 
Labour opposes this bill. I commend all my colleagues for their efforts to expose this bill for what it really is—an assault on workers’ rights wages and conditions. It demonstrates that the Government is implicitly saying at the outset: “We don’t care about fairness or treating employees as a valuable resource.” It is a continuation of National’s attack on workers’ rights wages and conditions. These amendments are unfair unbalanced and unnecessary. As I said it is a backward step for New Zealand. It will undermine the ability of New Zealand employees to improve their wages and working conditions. 
I will talk briefly about a couple of the measures: firstly the 90-day trial period which will let employers sack employees for no justifiable reason within 90 days of taking a new job. With an estimated 700000 people changing jobs every year and about 300000 at any one time in their first 90 days the legislation will have a grave effect on most workers. I know that one of my other colleagues called it sloppy and bad management practice. It will allow and encourage employers to substitute dismissal for sound appointment and induction and good supervision and training for new employees. It will lead to considerable abuse and bad practice; it will not increase employment or work towards closing that gap with Australia. During the 1990s the Employment Contracts Act allowed many of these practices so the legislation is going backwards; it is going back to the future. The result of that bad practice and the destruction of unions was low wages. In the 1990s after inflation the average wage rose only 6 percent over the 10 years that the legislation was in force and studies of this period show that exports were built on low wages and low skills rather than on high value. That was the period when most of the growth gap with Australia opened up so I ask whether that is what we are heading for again. 
I will give just a few examples of real people who have been affected by the existing 90-day law. A woman in Auckland worked at a bar but got the sack because—she thought—her employer wanted to hire younger people. There was nothing wrong with the quality of her work; it was just her age. But as I was told how could she prove it? She could not and had to leave. That was not fair. A man in Wellington gave up a good job to go and work in a public relations company. He got to the new job and discovered that builders were doing renovations and he did not have an office. He did not have a job. A young worker at Burger Fuel was dismissed for asking for a tea break. That worker had no ability to defend himself; it was not fair. Twenty-two percent of people employed on the 90-day trial basis to date have lost their jobs but if there was a problem with the quality of the work being done or with behaviour in the workplace they could be dismissed fairly. Why should we make it legal to dismiss workers unfairly? It goes against the grain it goes against the New Zealand psyche and it goes against the essence of what it means to be a New Zealander. It legislates for bad employers and bad employment practices—bad law. I did not come into this place to see bad law being enacted. 
I will also speak about restricting union access which is an ideological and deliberate attack on the democratic right of workers to join unions and resolve workplace issues. There are campaigns nationwide on the streets in which workers and unions are protesting against this unjust and unfair legislation. The House has heard from Labour and Green members about this today; it is about fairness. This Government has at least now shown its true colours; it pretended to like the unions and the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions for the first 19 months of its term. But all of a sudden this legislation has shown what Government members really think: keep unions out of workplaces. I heard Kate Wilkinson say at question time today that the legislation had just a small change that provided discretion to employers to be able to plan. But I ask: plan for what? It is a plan to be able to block union representatives from workplaces if there is any whiff of trouble—in other words to prevent employees from exercising their rights to be represented in their workplaces. 
At the same time we know there is actually no need for the change. The regulatory impact statement noted that there did not appear to be widespread evidence of union representatives exercising their current rights to enter workplaces in an inappropriate way resulting in disruption for business operations or in an adverse impact on the employment relationship between employer and union members. Having lived in Australia for a few years during the 1990s I saw what happened when the Howard Government unfairly took on the unions and workers interfered with that relationship between working people and their employers and tried to skew it to the side of employers. Many thousands—hundreds of thousands—of people took to the streets over it and the Prime Minister had to back down because it was fundamentally unfair. It is a short-sighted attack on workers and it will have negative consequences not only for working people but for the initiatives to change our workplaces into the productive—and it just appals me to hear Government members say exactly the opposite—well-rewarded places they need to be for real growth in the economy. 
I will mention a few things about National’s past record on workers’ rights. Too many of the Ministers in the current Government are from National’s school of the 1990s which taught that workers’ rights should be secondary to business profits. National has a shocking record on workers’ rights but it tried to put on a smiley face at the last election and pretend that things would be different this time. But they are not and they are clearly not. The first thing that National did in Government in the 1990s was to repeal the last thing that Labour had passed the employment equity legislation and in 1991 the National Government passed the Employment Contracts Act.