Roche Denise: General Debate 
Roche Denise: General Debate 
[Volume:678;Page:1398] 
DENISE ROCHE (Green) 
: 
 Nga mihi nui ki a koe Mr Speaker and to my esteemed colleagues tena koutou tena koutou tena koutou katoa. 
I am increasingly dismayed by the climate of inequality that this Government has fostered. Quite aside from the short-sighted and punitive welfare reform which is a debate in itself the chipping away that this Government has done to workers’ rights and union rights is creating an environment where bad employers think they can run riot. In the last few months we have had strikes by rest home workers simply trying to negotiate a decent pay rate. Many of them are on $13.61 an hour. We have had 1200 meatworkers locked out by Talley’s which owns the AFFCO meatworks processing plant in several small towns across New Zealand. And of course in the place where I come from we have the ongoing dispute with Ports of Auckland. The thing that these three disputes all have in common is that their workforces are unionised. Frankly this Government is pursuing an anti-union agenda as part of its strategy to create a low-wage economy at the expense of workers. Guess what people? This is why people are flocking to Australia where strong unions deliver sound wages and working conditions. 
When I look closely at the Ports of Auckland dispute with the Maritime Union I become increasingly worried. The ports have been a highly profitable council asset owned by the ratepayers of Auckland but the sheer mismanagement of the entire dispute and the hard-nosed approach taken by the port bosses and board to the workers makes me wonder whether they are deliberately running down the reputation and productivity of the ports in order to flog them off to their mates. And they do have mates. The Ports of Auckland board chair Richard Pearson is mates with Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing who was sniffing around looking for a port to buy in New Zealand in 2008 and had to settle for buying Wellington Electricity instead. The chief executive officer Tony Gibson is mates with Maersk shipping because he used to work for it. 
This whole dispute hinges on the fact that the board and management wanted to make the ports more productive and we can make the ports more productive but not by casualising or contracting out the workers. We need a national port strategy so that the shipping companies cannot drive down the prices and we also need to remove the exemption that the shipping companies currently have under the Commerce Act to prevent them from acting like a cartel. When you look at the Ports of Auckland— 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson) 
: Order! When the member uses the word “you” you are referring to the Speaker. You bring me into the debate. You cannot do that. 
DENISE ROCHE 
: When one looks at the actions of the Ports of Auckland bosses they do not seem to care about productivity. For purely economic reasons good managers would ensure that there was a good employment relationship but since December in this dispute they have negotiated in bad faith during the contract negotiations; shown an unwillingness to settle even when all their demands for more flexibility were met; displayed reluctance to enter into mediation; decided to contract out jobs to private companies while negotiating the collective agreement; allowed workers’ leave details to be leaked to the media and a right-wing blogger; made a mockery of the facilitated agreement they had reached last Thursday with the Employment Court to go back to negotiate in good faith; illegally locked out workers based on the port bosses’ unfounded and unproven beliefs that the union members would harm the other staff; and issued a lockout notice for an indefinite period following next week. 
From that list you have to conclude that the management practice is seriously flawed at the ports. Either they are madly incompetent or else they are pursuing the same badly thought-out privatisation agenda that the National Government is. Maybe that is what this Government and Rodney Hide had in mind when they forced the amalgamation of the Auckland councils into the Auckland super-city and removed accountability for our council assets from our elected councillors. This Government is union busting it is into privatising and it is anti-democratic.