Beaumont Carol: State Sector and Public Finance Reform Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeBeaumont Carol: State Sector and Public Finance Reform Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 02 July 2013. Volume:691;Page:11620. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CAROL BEAUMONT (Labour):E ngā mana e ngā reo e ngā tangata o te wa.Tēnā koutou tēnā koutou tēnā koutou katoa. I rise to speak along with my colleagues in support of this bill the State Sector and Public Finance Reform Bill. We have however some reservations that we will be outlining throughout this.It is probably clear to people and I am sure the point has already been made that we did oppose this bill at its first reading. But I am very proud of the fact that my Labour colleagues on the Finance and Expenditure Committee along with the State sector unions have averted disaster for Government workers who were set to lose their redundancy entitlements and employment rights. Part 1 of the bill that we are talking about covers this quite comprehensively. The Labour members of the Finance and Expenditure Committee did fight long and hard to get some very important changes. I am aware that the unions that represent our public servants believe that those changes are sufficient.It is interesting to come into the Chamber to talk on this bill and this particular matter of the treatment of public servants as during the dinner break I was at a meeting with people from Transparency International New Zealand and they were talking about the Corruption Perceptions Index. One of the points they made was that the New Zealand public sector is perceived as the least corrupt in the world. That is pretty amazing. That is about the quality of our public servants and it really says to me that how we treat our public servants—the working conditions the rates of pay obviously but also the other conditions of employment—is actually very important. To maintain a corruption-free Public Service is critically important. It has a range of benefits and we are looked up to internationally still for that.I thought that that was quite amazing. Recognising the work of our public servants is something that often is not done. Quite often people make cheap political points about bureaucrats. They make cheap political points about there being too many of these people who are not doing front-office functions—that they are actually a drain on the taxpayer. Well actually they perform vitally important roles.We were concerned that the attempts in this bill that were around trying to have a more flexible innovative and efficient set of State services and the ability to move people and to restrict entitlements to redundancy and so on were actually going to undermine public servants and treat them in a way that was not fair and reasonable. I am glad that the redundancy provisions have been improved and that State sector employees—public servants—will retain their entitlements unless accepting a position that is no less favourable than their existing package. That was quite an important debate as I understand it because originally the wording had a qualifier—“overall” no less favourable. The interesting thing is that in law the debate about what that would look like certainly did not require the terms and conditions to be exactly the same. But we were satisfied with deleting the word “overall” because we felt that that actually was likely to maintain protections for employees. We do note though that we have some reservations about this. There is a risk that courts could be too liberal in their view of interpreting what “no less favourable” means.We are concerned also along with the Public Service Association that the right for Public Service workers to bargain their redundancy provisions has been removed and a proper redeployment scheme has not been reconsidered. It is important in times of high unemployment and when in fact there have been cuts throughout the Public Service that we do consider things like redeployment that we do consider people’s needs for job security. There are many public servants who have lost their jobs and who are now in the situation of being unemployed. I think it is a shame that there was not greater consideration around those redeployment provisions. The transitional arrangementshave also been approved so that collective agreements and individual agreements are “sunsetted” equally.One of the other things that I think is interesting in this part of the bill is around the Government Workforce Policy Statement. There has been some revision there to ensure that current legal and bargaining rights have been protected. That is really important. Originally there was a mechanism for a Government Workforce Policy Order and the select committee has recommended renaming the Government Workforce Policy Order as a Government Workforce Policy Statement—so a statement rather than an order—to clarify the provisions and to constrain them to their intended effect.The important thing here is that the orders indicate a broad Government policy intention around how the State services should approach employment relations and workforce capability to create a more transparent and consultative mechanism for developing formal workforce policy for the State services. These orders though were not intended to have legislative effect nor to override existing legal rights or obligations including negotiated terms for pay and conditions in existing bargaining rights. That is really important and certainly we on this side of the Chamber strongly support the rights of workers to negotiate their terms and conditions of employment and to ensure the right to bargain and the right to protection of those negotiated terms and conditions of employment. We are very pleased that the amendments to these provisions make it clear that these statements do not have legal force and do not undermine existing bargaining rights. But having said that we have ongoing reservations that notwithstanding the clarity of these provisions the Government may try to use these instruments as a binding force. So for the avoidance of doubt Labour would like to reiterate that we and the committee in its consideration of the bill do not consider these statements to be legally binding.It is worth noting I think as we are discussing these types of provisions that of course we are in a situation in this country where workers’ rights are under attack. Since National was elected in 2008 we have seen the undermining of a whole number of provisions that affect workers—things that would basically reduce wages. The Employment Relations Amendment Bill which is now before a select committee is certainly in that category. So you can understand why when looking at a bill like this we might be concerned and might along with the unions—the Public Service Association the Council of Trade Unions and others—be very concerned about these types of provisions around redundancy clauses and around workforce policy statements. This is a Government that does not respect workers’ rights to collectively bargain. It does not respect workers’ rights to be in unions and certainly it has done nothing to see us move to the kind of high-wage high-skill highly productive economy that this country so desperately needs. In fact wages have been flat-lining or reducing for many New Zealanders. We are a low-wage economy and that will continue to hamper our ability to move forward economically.So those are the sorts of I guess umbrella concerns that we had when we were looking at this legislation and I think anybody listening to this and anybody who is aware of the record of the Government and its current intentions around the Employment Relations Amendment Bill would think it made absolute sense that we were very concerned about those provisions.Again I reiterate the fact that I am very proud of the work that was done by the members of the Finance and Expenditure Committee particularly around the provisions of this part Part 1 which involves amendments to the State Sector Act to ensure that some of these concerns around redundancy and the possibility of these workforce policy statements undermining legal and bargaining rights have been significantly improved. Ihave outlined however that we retain some existing concerns so that is why we are supporting this bill with reservations. I think that it is not surprising to see—