Sowry Roger: Employment Relations Law Reform Bill — In Committee 
Sowry Roger: Employment Relations Law Reform Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:620;Page:16140] 
Hon ROGER SOWRY (National) 
: 
 As a member who sat on the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee I want to say that Part 1 which of course is the bulk of the bill is of considerable concern to the National Party and something that we are totally opposed to. 
I want to start with the clauses in this part that require negotiations to be carried out and concluded. So here we have the Minister legislating to require the unions and employers to continue to meet when they cannot agree. What is the purpose of that provision? It is clearly a purpose from the trade unions’ point of view because they do not want employers to say that that is it they cannot agree so they are walking away from the table. It is in fact the employers who lose money and whose management time is taken up by having to sit at the table with trade union officials and it is employers who have to let staff off to negotiate. 
This provision tilts the table enormously in favour of the trade union movement. If the parties cannot agree then employers know that economically it will cost them because they have to keep fronting up. It does not matter to the unions but it matters to the employers. But what did we hear tonight? At 5.40 this evening we heard Trevor Mallard Minister of State Services and Paul Swain Minister of Labour announce a new bureaucracy attached to the Department of Labour. This was probably the bureaucracy that Ross Wilson was telling the department officials would come when he was in the meeting room with them yesterday. Tonight we were told of the establishment of a new $1 million bureaucracy. The Government is fronting up with $1 million for a semi-autonomous unit attached to the Department of Labour as an advisory group for unions and employers when they cannot agree and have to keep on meeting. 
The Government said that it will legislate to keep the parties in the room and then chuck another $1 million at the Department of Labour and set up a semi-autonomous not totally autonomous unit. So the Minister’s grubby little fingerprints will still be on this unit—a semi-autonomous unit attached to the Department of Labour—so that it can sit there to do I know not what. We have to believe that the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions will be all over it because in the press release the Council of Trade Unions President Ross Wilson welcomed the move and we heard nothing from business. In fact did Business New Zealand and the business groups even know it was coming? Have we in the Department of Labour under this Government totally given up any pretext of trying to straddle the fence? It looked like it in the select committee. It looked like it with the advice that we were getting. It certainly looked like it in the lobby last night—it certainly looked like it there. 
Brian Connell 
: It looks like it tonight. 
Hon ROGER SOWRY 
: It looks like it tonight as my colleague is saying. It is a shabby deal stitched up to indirectly give the union movement another $1 million of partnership advice for the public sector to grow the bureaucracy while all the time it is aimed at keeping the employers at the table until they cannot afford to stay any longer and they give up. 
I want to say to the Minister that I was in Nelson recently. Hospitality industry people told me that they were outraged that their staff would be able to say that they did not agree they could not agree but that the employers would have to keep fronting up in their time and that they would keep the employers at the table for as long as it took to break them. 
Jill Pettis 
: Oh! 
Hon ROGER SOWRY 
: I tell the member that that was what the restaurant owners in Nelson were saying.