Fenton Darien: Local Government (Auckland Council) Bill — In Committee 
Fenton Darien: Local Government (Auckland Council) Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:657;Page:6563] 
DARIEN FENTON (Labour) 
: 
 We started this debate yesterday. I was one of the early speakers in this Committee stage and I referred to the 6000 staff—citizens voters and workers of Auckland—who are facing awful uncertainty and lay-offs. 
Hon Member 
: And their families. 
DARIEN FENTON 
: That is right. In all of the 15 hours that we have been debating the Local Government (Auckland Council) Bill I have not heard one comment from the other side of the Chamber about those staff and the huge challenges facing them. There have been no guarantees from this Government. There has been no reassurance about those workers’ positions. That tells those of us on this side of the Chamber that the Government does not care about 6000 workers and their families in Auckland. It does not care; otherwise it would have come to the party and Minister Rodney Hide and the National-Act Government would have provided a firm guarantee that staff would move to the new council and that local government services would not be cut. We have not heard that. 
On this side of the Chamber as my colleague Carol Beaumont said earlier we are moving an amendment that will provide protection for the staff. We want it written into this legislation and we want it to be part of the setting up of the new council. We tried to include such protection in the first bill the Local Government (Tamaki Makaurau Reorganisation) Bill and the Government voted it down. That was an appalling message to those 6000 workers. It was an awful message that resonated right around the councils. Those workers have to carry on their work and provide services day in day out. The message they got from the debate on the first bill was that this Government does not care. Now the Government has a second chance to put something in this bill to prove that it does care about the local government workers in Auckland. We want to ensure that the Government guarantees those jobs and the terms and conditions of those workers during the transition to the new Auckland Council. 
We have to keep Auckland working during this transition process. If there are no guarantees if workers lose confidence which they are doing as they are expected to pick up more and more work as people leave as they are required to fit in with the sinking-lid policy that is already being applied our city of Auckland will grind to a halt. It will to stop working. The Government has never understood how important those people who do the work are to keeping Auckland working. Unfortunately the Government thinks that these workers should just keep on hanging on and that they should hang in there. You know there is a recession so they are lucky to have jobs. After all they are just a bunch of bureaucrats so who cares? Those workers keep trying to do what they are doing because they believe in what they do and in the quality of the service they provide to Auckland citizens. They hope the Government will do the right thing. 
As I said before the Auckland Transition Agency is not replacing workers as they leave so the workers are already carrying extra workloads. Fixed-term employment agreements are coming in as are external contractors. In addition to the 6000 workers who are employed by the councils a whole raft of contractors are facing uncertainty. 
It also worries me in particular that we are seeing some pretty awful employer behaviour at the moment. I call it “employers unplugged”. They have been unplugged from the expectation that the previous Labour Government had of them to behave with some decency and fairness. 
At the moment we have a threatened lockout of Auckland bus workers. They are council workers once removed. There are lockouts and threatened lockouts of dairy workers in the Waikato. Today there are more lockouts involving the Bridgeman Concrete workers in Manukau. I think the Government should adopt Labour’s amendment to reassure the Auckland council workers that during the reorganisation the workers’ ability to deliver high-quality services will be maintained that the reorganisation must maintain or improve the terms and conditions of those workers and that they must have certainty. I am relieved that the workers of Auckland have a good reputation—