Logie Jan: Employment Relations Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLogie Jan: Employment Relations Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 22 October 2014. Volume:701;Page:183. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAN LOGIE (Green):Thank you Mr Chair and congratulations on your appointment. I do look forward to what you will bring to the role. Just before I get into it—and I want to speak quite substantively around clause 11 of the Employment Relations Amendment Bill in my speech tonight—I would just like to acknowledge that after the nice leisurely 1.5 hour dinner break that is set into our programme for every evening it feels particularly ironic to be coming into this Chamber to remove the rights of ordinary New Zealanders to that predictability and security. It makes me very uncomfortable in my role as a parliamentarian to feel that there is such a distance between the conditions I expect and I experience in this place and what New Zealanders can experience in their lives. It seems to me it would be better if this Parliament returned a little bit more to focus on ourselves and connecting to the reality of average New Zealanders rather than undermining the conditions and experiences of those people.Tonight I would like to speak to clause 11 of this amendment bill which provides employers with the ability to opt out of multi-employer collective agreement bargaining. That sounds like a really technical thing. I think it is a hard thing for most people in New Zealand who are maybe not members of unions or who are not part of a collective contract to understand what on Earth this might actually mean be about or mean in practice.Tonight I would actually like with the indulgence of the Committee to relay an oral submission that was given to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee about this bill and what it may mean in practice in our mental health services in hospitals. It was a submission given by a staff nurse at Te Whare O Matairangi the mental health recovery unit at Wellington Regional Hospital—a staff nurse called Grant Brookes. He clearly recalled the state of Wellington inpatient mental health services before the current national multi-employer collective agreement was put in place in 2005. He recalled for the committee that in 2011 a service user left the ward and climbed into a tiger cage at Wellington Zoo where he was mauled. Another young man jumped to his death from the roof of Wellington College before he was even noted as missing from the inpatient unit. In 2004 another man jumped six storeys from the ward in the hospital to the car-park below. A young woman allowed out on day leave walked in front of a train and killed herself.This was the state of our mental health services in Wellington at that time. It was a service in crisis. Yet the nursing staff had clear ideas about the roots of the problem which were reported in the nursing journal Kai Tiaki Nursing New Zealand in October 2005. It was noted that the 29-bed ward had been caring for up to 50 people at a time and that throughout 2003 and 2004 the time of those deaths and terrible incidents patients were bunking in lounges in the TV room and in the telephone room. They were even sleeping on mattresses on the floor in the corridor. Nurse-to-patient ratios were as high as 1:10 and 1:20. Grant Brookes told us that this was a result of the Employment Relations Act and the fact that there was not a multi-employer collective agreement in place.He told us that the staff at the time had a clear idea about solutions but there was no mechanism for staff and management to collaborate on resolving the crisis. This is at the heart of what collective agreements can offer and what they have offered in the health context. Managers had cancelled all meetings with the nurses organisation. Communication had broken down and the acting clinical director basically denied that overcrowding or overstaffing in any way contributed to those events describing staffing ratios in the ward as “very good”. Then in 2004 a third of the staff resigned understandably—