Prebble Richard: Employment Relations Law Reform Bill — Second Reading 
Prebble Richard: Employment Relations Law Reform Bill — Second Reading 
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Hon RICHARD PREBBLE (ACT) 
: 
 I rise on behalf of the ACT party to speak to the Employment Relations Law Reform Bill— 
Darren Hughes 
: The only one left. 
Hon RICHARD PREBBLE 
: —dream on—and to advise the House that this bill should be rejected. It is our view that the bill will result in a significant deterioration in industrial relations and in fairness in the workplace and that there will be a loss of productivity and over time a loss of jobs and growth. This bill is not as various Government Ministers have attempted to describe it a tinkering with the Employment Relations Act. The proposed changes are comprehensive and they will have a significant impact. 
On that point it is true that I said that the Employment Relations Act when it came in would have a significant impact. What Labour members fail to mention to the House is that amendments made to it—some moved by myself and some moved by National members as a result of submissions from employers—meant that it was significantly better legislation than the original bill that the Labour Government had introduced. [ 
Interruption 
] The member should listen; this is important because a number of the very damaging amendments and clauses in the original bill have now been reintroduced in this amendment bill. 
What is wrong with the bill? Let me take the House through some of those amendments. First the bill extends the meaning of good faith in terms of employment relations beyond the common law obligations. The common law obligations are well known to lawyers and they are quite understandable. Good faith basically means that one has to deal with people with mutual trust and confidence. But the bill extends that term to mean whatever the Employment Court decides what it means. Some future Employment Court judge—whom no doubt we will criticise for being an activist—will decide that the good-faith provision has some extraordinary meaning that perhaps even members opposite have not conceived of. That is what happens when Parliament drafts vague amendments of that sort. We in this Parliament are not saying what “good faith” means; we are actually saying that any judge—appointed by Margaret Wilson—can make any sort of interpretation of good faith. That of course will create total confusion in employment relations and will lead to much more aggravation than there is under the present law. 
The next problem is this. If the court decides that there has not been good faith the Employment Relations Authority itself is entitled to determine what the terms of employment will be. So if one is an employer employing 50 people and one has worked out one’s budget and worked out how much the employees will be paid but an employee says that he or she was not dealt with in good faith because when that employee put some proposals to the employer the employer said “No” the State steps in. Members might think it is pretty reasonable to say “No” but we just heard from a Labour member that one cannot say “No” any more; one has to keep talking for hours. Well perhaps one wants to get on with making one’s widgets! [ 
Interruption 
] Then what happens is that the State—not the employer but the State which does not have to provide the wages each week—decides what all the terms of employment should be. There is a name for that and it is communism. That is a measure that we are introducing and its final ramifications could be to deter—[ 
Interruption 
] The member opposite has no idea what he is passing and he has no idea what it will actually mean. We could have the Employment Relations Authority setting terms and conditions of employment that would bankrupt the company. That is what this Government is prepared to do. 
The next purpose of the bill is to promote collective bargaining. Members have said that they heard employer after employer praising the present law. That is actually not quite right. What happened was that employer after employer said there was no need to change the present law. I do not recall hearing a single employer in the submissions I heard—I did not hear all of them but I heard a large number—say that he or she wanted collective wage bargaining. In fact what employers said was that they wanted the ability to deal with their employees directly. They did not want to be forced by unions and the State to have to sit down with their competitors and tell them what they were paying people or to have their competitors decide what the wages and conditions in their factory should be. I thought that the position that the employers put was a pretty reasonable one. 
We then have the most extraordinary abuse of State power in that the bill states that it is a breach of good faith for an employer to pass on the terms and conditions of a collective agreement to non-union members. The Government has said that it is a breach of good faith only if the employer does it in order to undermine the collective agreement. 
Dr Wayne Mapp 
: Just the effect is all that is required. 
Hon RICHARD PREBBLE 
: That is right. The member who interjected is a member of that committee and learned in law. He said that it is a breach of good faith if it has the effect of undermining the collective agreement. 
Well what are these amendments designed to do? They are certainly not designed to improve productivity. They are certainly not designed to promote job growth. The real reason for these clauses is to promote trade union membership and trade union power and they most certainly do that. Well is there a case to do it? If we go and ask employees whom members opposite say they represent we find that 90 percent of private sector employees do not belong to trade unions. So 90 percent of employees—outside the Government’s own workforce which is encouraged by I think illegal measures to belong to unions—are basically saying they do not want to belong to unions. They are quite happy to deal with their employers themselves and they do not need the help of the Council of Trade Unions and the like. But here we have a bill where the Government is saying that it knows better and it is going to help trade unions. 
The Government is intending to introduce—I do not know whether the Supplementary Order Paper has arrived yet—a freeloader clause whereby we will have compulsory unionism without the bother of the union having to represent members. It is— 
Rodney Hide 
: Just pay. 
Hon RICHARD PREBBLE 
: Yes. If the union bargains with the employer for maybe just five people the 90 employees there who did not belong to the union will get a bill for the fact that the union bargained with the employer. We received no evidence at all that trade unions have actually introduced better conditions. In fact employer after employer came along and said that when they had renegotiated their agreements nearly all the advances and new ideas had come from them and the unions had just sat there and said: “I want I want.” Well why should one have to pay a bargaining fee to a union that one does not even belong to? 
I say to the House that that is an American idea. Yes it happens with American unions in American unionised states. What happens to that bargaining fee? Is there any requirement that it has to be spent for the advantage of the person who pays it? No there is not. There will be no requirement that it be spent on bargaining. We all know where most of that money will go. It will go to promote the Labour Party. This bill is actually a bill between the Labour Party and the trade unions whereby the Labour Party will give them a bargaining fee—wink wink nod nod—and next election the unions will give a large part of it back to the Labour Party. It is a sort of—I was going to say deal—[ 
Interruption 
] Well it is worse than that; it is actually a triangle because the bureaucrats in the Department of Labour who under the Employment Contracts Act—which employers said they liked very much— 
Darren Hughes 
: We call it the Pipitea clause. 
Hon RICHARD PREBBLE 
: The member says he calls it the Pipitea clause; I call it a monstrous step back towards compulsory trade unionism.