Roche Denise: State Sector and Public Finance Reform Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRoche Denise: State Sector and Public Finance Reform Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 02 July 2013. Volume:691;Page:11604. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DENISE ROCHE (Green):I want to start my contribution by thanking the staff who have been involved in the process during the Finance and Expenditure Committee examination of this bill to bring this State Sector and Public Finance Reform Bill to the Committee. I also want to acknowledge both the Labour Party and the National Party members who worked together very closely and very diligently to bring effectively a new bill to the Committee—a bill that has been softened from the original—and I particularly want to pay tribute to David Cunliffe for the work that he put into that. The Green Party position however is that at the end of the day workers in the State sector will be worse off as a result of this bill’s passing.I have checked with the Public Service Association tonight which also says that it does not give unqualified support to this bill. However it does acknowledge the work—particularly the work of the Labour Party and the members from that party—in softening and in making amendments to the bill and it says that that strategy has meant and will mean that the workers are not as badly off as they may have been when the original bill was before the House in the first reading.I acknowledge that the amendments that have been softened include the restrictions around redundancy. The redundancy provisions have been loosened since the first reading. However it is still a restriction.I have put forward Supplementary Order Paper 265 for discussion and consideration tonight. It talks about actually restoring one of the provisions that was lost from the original 1988 State Sector Act and that is the provision that relates to the transfer of employees to the transfer of functions and duties to new agencies and to giving the workers the right to apply for those jobs. This bill actually contains an amendment that gives chief executives that right but that right has been taken away from public servants.This is a really important amendment if you consider that last week the first reading of the Health and Safety (Pike River Implementation) Bill was before the House. One large part of that bill was about the provisions whereby workers and health inspectors who are currently employed by the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment can transfer to a new agency that is being created through that legislation which is before the House. That has to go into legislation for every piece of new legislation that is developed that creates a new entity or a new agency and that is because it is being taken out of the State Sector Act. We will have to do that time and time again every time a new agency is formed and there may be times when they are.We will also not be supporting this bill because of the things that have been left out—not just the transferral arrangements but other things including in the purpose statement the equal employment opportunities mentioned in the first part of the Act which is around the purpose. Equal employment opportunities are not stated explicitly elsewhere in the bill and you can combine that with another change from the original Act which is again in the purpose statement for State sector employers to be good employers. It has been changed to “meets good-employer obligations;” which is a slight tweaking but also a weakening. So when you put the loss of the specific mention of equal employment opportunities together with that we are starting to look at some weakening of some of the overarching principles of the Act which works against workers. It does not work in their favour.I think we have to remember that we do need equal employment opportunities—we need equal employment opportunities—and that is because the State sector the Public Service is female-dominated a lot of the time. Yet for all that women in the State sector are still earning sometimes 8 percent sometimes 10 percent or sometimes 12 percent less than their male counterparts. Before 2009 this Government was actually exploring and investigating what was happening to pay rates between male and female employees in the public sector and that was an investigation that was being undertaken with the Government’s support. However the Government pulled that support in around February 2009 and the reason it gave at the time was that the Minister at the time Tony Ryall said that we could not afford to increase levels of remuneration.We have had equal pay legislation in this country for over 30 years and we still have an average weekly income for women that is 23 percent less than the average male weekly income. When you consider that the Public Service has been the bastion of good employment practices and it has been a leader in setting decent standards for workers—standards that the private sector frequently follows—then we must fight very strongly to maintain the provisions in the bill that will protect those workers.Again I do acknowledge the work that has happened particularly the Labour Party’s efforts to soften the bill and make a heck of a lot of amendments to it. However we will not be supporting the bill.