Chadwick Steve: Employment Relations (Film Production Work) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee 
Chadwick Steve: Employment Relations (Film Production Work) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee 
[Volume:668;Page:14992] 
Hon STEVE CHADWICK (Labour) 
: 
 I am pleased to take a call in the Committee stage of the Employment Relations (Film Production Work) Amendment Bill on the title. I would name this bill the “Warner Bros Film Industry Requirement Bill” and I would strip out altogether any wording about employment relations or film production. This bill is totally unnecessary. It is not what was ever required by Actors Equity. It was never ever an issue that the union said needed to be sorted out at all. 
In this Chamber are about four people who understand the film industry. I would give it to the Hon Gerry Brownlee that he has got to grips with the film industry. The other three people are the Hon Trevor Mallard Grant Robertson and I. In my role as arts spokesperson I have learnt a lot about the industry. What I have learnt about the industry is that both actors and technicians in the film production industry have a very lumpy income. It is an incredibly lumpy income. It needs smoothing so that they get a decent income over the year because they lurch from production to production. 
When the initial dispute that led us to be debating this totally superfluous and unnecessary bill in urgency tonight arose the actors said they were quite happy about their status as independent contractors. They simply wanted to negotiate collectively on their employment conditions. Minister Gerry Brownlee knows that because when the Screen Production and Development Association also started ringing to say that it needed to get together with the actors and that they needed to listen to one another the Minister for Arts Culture and Heritage ignored the offer to get the parties together that I had made to him 2 months before. He totally ignored it. All that needed to happen was for Gerry Brownlee to get them in a room together—and he did. He did. Both parties came out of that meeting and said that they had had a really good meeting and had clarified a lot. They said they had really moved on and had reached agreement. 
Lynne Pillay 
: They stepped up. 
Hon STEVE CHADWICK 
: Yes they definitely did step up. We were then put into the situation of believing that we were there that we had reached agreement that Gerry Brownlee had facilitated the reaching of that agreement and that both parties were feeling a lot better. Then something went terribly wrong. It was Warner Bros. 
Hon Gerry Brownlee 
: No it wasn’t. 
Hon STEVE CHADWICK 
: In charged Warner Bros and the Minister knows that. He knows that. Warner Bros received an email saying that the dispute was resolved and the Minister knows that too. But Warner Bros was just looking for leverage on getting the greatest deal. Its representatives are businessmen. They are hard-nosed businessmen and they wanted the best deal. They got good deals offered in the UK and they got good deals offered in the Czech Republic. So the Ministers were put into a position of having to negotiate and I do not envy them that at all. 
We in Labour are delighted that we have secured  
The Hobbit  
to be made in New Zealand but we have secured it at a price. I think the worst price is the stripping away of workers’ rights by this unnecessary law that we are debating in urgency tonight. That is the disgraceful price of getting this film secured in New Zealand. It is not what the actors asked for at all so it is definitely the “Warner Bros Film Industry Requirement Bill”. 
The title of the bill before us talks about relationships. We in Labour have been panned by National for spending $160000 on developing an enduring relationship with the film industry in Los Angeles. [ 
Interruption 
] Yes it is an enduring relationship—it certainly is with producers—and we are now in the position of providing $33 million of funding for one production. The total funding appropriated through the Large Budget Screen Production Grant scheme is only $51 million—$33 million of that has gone to one production in order to keep it in the country. It is simply a challenge—