Cosgrove Clayton: Employment Relations Amendment Bill — In Committee Recommittal Third Reading 
Cosgrove Clayton: Employment Relations Amendment Bill — In Committee Recommittal Third Reading 
[Volume:651;Page:452] 
Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE (Labour—Waimakariri) 
: 
 I want to pick up where my colleague Annette King left off and raise a couple of other points. I made a statement to the Minister who resides occasionally in my electorate of Waimakariri. In my electorate there is a two to three-teacher school called View Hill School. At a candidates’ meeting in the Rangiora War Memorial Hall the issue of what Anne Tolley had said was raised. Anne Tolley said that the Employment Relations Amendment Bill would not apply to teachers. I recall the member who is now the Minister of Labour addressing the meeting with a lot of weasel words. I think Kate Wilkinson might have called me a liar at the meeting; in fact I am sure she did when I addressed her about her ambiguous statements. She said at that meeting that those provisions would not apply and that I was lying. If that is the position and they do not apply then I ask her to tell us now as the Minister—she has the warrant the authority because it is her bill—to confirm what she said. The Minister should get up and do that now because if she does not the counterfactual prevails and then we will know that those provisions do apply to teachers. 
Why will the Minister not get up and confirm an answer to such a simple question? Surely if the Minister is not bright enough she could turn to her officials and ask them. They will give her the answer they can pass a note and then the Minister could perhaps put at ease the student teachers and the teacher population of New Zealand. 
I will raise another issue in respect of occupational safety and health. What happens to a worker in a sawmill who is employed under the 90-day probation provisions and maybe there is a shonky employer? The worker does not want to use the saw because it is not safe as there is no guard on it so he says to the boss: “I don’t feel right about this. I might cut my hand off. I might injure my mates when I am using it.” The worker may say: “You have not trained me within the 90-day probation period to use it properly so I am concerned that I might injure myself or injure my mates. Will you train me?”—because we know there is a cost in training. The boss then gives the worker a pink slip and tells him to take a hike. 
How will the Minister and her department police that? When that person has been sacked it is his or her word against the word of the boss. How will that worker be protected? He or she has no personal grievance rights no rights to anything—they have gone—and all the worker asked for was a safe workplace. 
I remember that Minister bleating at every candidates’ meeting in my electorate when we talked about things like workers having safe workplaces. It actually makes sense to a boss to have a safe workplace and most bosses have safe workplaces because it saves them money of course. That member bleated that this was all nanny State. She loved going around saying “nanny State”—that to have a safe workplace is to have a nanny State. She said: “Nanny State it’s time for a change choose a brighter future.” but she will not actually get up now and answer questions. The lips flapped away during the election campaign but she will not get up now—on her quarter of a million dollar salary with the cars and the offices and backed up by all the officials—and confirm two questions. The first question relates to occupational safety and the second relates to the status of migrants on specific work permits. They are basic questions. There are several reasons why she will not confirm them. Either she is horribly embarrassed and ashamed but I would say she is embarrassed because she is not ashamed of anything or she will show up Anne Tolley big time or she does not know or she is weak. The truth is probably that she does know. We are right she knows we are right and she does not want to tell the people of New Zealand and have it on the record of the House that National is seriously vulnerable on all counts on this legislation. Those can be the only answers. 
I invite members opposite some of her more experienced colleagues to give her advice and to say that the job of a Minister is to confirm critical legislation so as to give stakeholders in the community certainty. The Minister is all for giving the bosses certainty—absolutely! Fire at will! But she will not give certainty to any of the stakeholders—the teachers migrants and people who are concerned about occupational safety.