Moroney Sue: Employment Relations (Statutory Minimum Redundancy Entitlements) Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMoroney Sue: Employment Relations (Statutory Minimum Redundancy Entitlements) Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 10 July 2013. Volume:692;Page:11920. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]SUE MORONEY (Labour):That speech was from the party of privilege. Was that not enlightening? From the party of privilege people apparently choose to be made redundant under the National Party’s view. Apparently there is a freedom of choice about your job being taken away from you. Well I would like those members to share exactly how that works. I think that nothing shows more about how out of touch that Government is with the day-to-day realities than the sorry speeches we have heard from the National Party on this Employment Relations (Statutory Minimum Redundancy Entitlements) Amendment Bill tonight.I am really proud to bring this bill before the House but I am not proud of the circumstances in which this bill becomes so relevant today. Since we started the first reading debate on this bill just a few weeks ago there have been hundreds more redundancies announced in this country—and that is just in the weeks since we started the first reading debate. That is something that the Government needs to take responsibility for. Since this debate started 500 jobs have gone at New Zealand Post right throughout the country. In Hamilton where I come from 129 jobs have gone from that city alone.When I did my speech at the beginning of this process I warned about the tsunami of redundancies. I warned about the second wave that was coming. That is the beginning of the second wave. When 129 pretty reasonably decent jobs well-paying jobs like New Zealand Post jobs come out of a community like Hamilton those wages get sucked out of that economy as well. And when those good wages get sucked out of the economyguess what happens next? More redundancies start happening because money is not getting spent any more at the companies and the local businesses where those people once spent their wages. So the next wave of redundancies is not the one that you will read about in the newspaper. The redundancies will be the one job here the two jobs down the road and the three jobs at the other company down the road as well. They are the ones that we will not hear about.The National Party has focused on this somehow being a personal choice. Those 129 workers at New Zealand Post in Hamilton and the 500 of them throughout the country have apparently got a personal choice about being made redundant. Well here is the reality: they do not. They do not have a personal choice about being made redundant. Fortunately they are members of a union and they will get redundancy pay but those ones twos and threes—the redundancies in those other small companies that I talked about that are coming round the corner—are the ones where people have not had the personal choice to actually negotiate redundancy.What is it that makes the National Party feel so comfortable about the thousands of people being made redundant in this country every month and the fact that 80 percent of them—yes 80 percent of them—have no entitlement to any redundancy protection? Because that is the reality. That is the National Party’s personal choice for us: the personal choice to actually have your job taken from underneath you—not you Mr Assistant Speaker but thousands of New Zealand workers—and have no rights and no protection at all. That is what the National Party has just told us it is completely relaxed about. Well it is all right for the National Party to be relaxed about it but those workers and their families are not relaxed about it because they are facing no income and the prospect of no job. When those 129 jobs go in Hamilton I can tell you those people will be lining up with hundreds of others for minimum wage jobs at the local supermarket. That is the destiny that they have in place for them.It is clear. It is clear with this debate which party is focused on the real issues—the real issues that affect New Zealand today. Because here we are debating a very real issue which was promoted by the Labour Party and voted against by the National Party. Can I in closing thank the Green Party New Zealand First theMāori Party Mana and Brendan Horan for having the decency to stand up for everyday New Zealanders in support of this bill. Thank you.