Sowry Roger: Employment Relations Law Reform Bill — In Committee 
Sowry Roger: Employment Relations Law Reform Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:620;Page:16188] 
Hon ROGER SOWRY (National) 
: 
 I want firstly to pick up on the point that the Hon Richard Prebble has made which I think is a very good point. It is the fact that in his time in the House he has never before seen the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions not just draft a bill as it has done in the past—and we know that thanks to the Official Information Act—but be invited into the lobby. I know that the senior Government whip Jill Pettis is the person who has admitted to bringing Mr Wilson into the lobby but the real issue is why she brought him in. She answered that question from Radio New Zealand by saying that she brought him in because the Minister wanted him. So the Minister in the chair Paul Swain wanted to have Ross Wilson’s view. It was not good enough just to take the view of the officials so the Government brought Ross Wilson into the lobby where the departmental officials are. One can only assume of course that the departmental officials ended up in a very compromised position taking their instructions from the Council of Trade Unions. That is an outrageous position to place the officials in and it just shows the level that this Government will stoop to in order to get its legislation through. 
I say to the members of the Labour Party—who are in an arrogant frame of mind over many issues and this particular bill is one of them—that not one business in New Zealand that made a submission to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee was in favour of this legislation. When those Labour members go back and wander around their electorates they will say they listened to people and the legislation will not be all that bad. If they had listened to people why did they not change the bill? They have actually made this bill worse than it was. Under this legislation we will see multi-employment collective agreements that lock up the ports and the transport industry and that subject those industries to union bullying to union threats and to going back to the old days—and they were not good old days—of union domination. Already Ports of Auckland is saying that that is what will occur in the ports around the country. It has told the Government that the ports will be targeted by the union movement. 
What has been the Government’s response to that? The Government’s response has been to say we should trust it because it thinks the unions will behave responsibly. The unions may behave responsibly up until the time of the election and then all bets will be off. This is a straight trade-off. Members of the unions have been told to keep their heads down and that the Labour Government will effectively deliver them the mechanism to give this country compulsory union membership. That is what the bill does. The bill states to employers that if they have 10 staff four of whom join the union and they negotiate with the union to pay those four staff a certain rate they cannot pay the other six the same rate without risking that they end up before the Employment Court for undermining the union. That is the reality of this legislation so employers are already looking to find ways around it. They are already saying that they will just contract work out and avoid employing staff. Every employer everywhere we go says that he or she will avoid employing staff.