Brown Peter: Status of Redundancy Payments Bill — Instruction to Committee In Committee 
Brown Peter: Status of Redundancy Payments Bill — Instruction to Committee In Committee 
[Volume:615;Page:11561] 
PETER BROWN (Deputy Leader—NZ First) 
: 
 I want to take up a few of the points raised by various members. First of all I would like to correct any impression I gave to Paul Adams that only employees are working people. I accept the point he made. I know that self-employed people are working people and that they work very hard and I hope the member takes my correction. 
I would like to talk about the people affected by the flood which was an issue that Lindsay Tisch raised. If I heard him correctly he is saying that employees of a small business in one of the flood-stricken towns will have lower priority than a contractor who lives miles away and is not affected by the flood. The flood victim is going to lose his or her job yet Mr Tisch says that any payments made should go to the contractor who might live in safe surroundings quite some miles away. I find that to be an unusual argument to say the least. 
Mr Connell raised the point that all employers are subjected to heavy-handed tactics by union officials. He seemed to imply that. I think that from memory only about 20 percent or thereabouts of working people in this country are in a union. The vast majority of people who work for small businesses are not unionised and in all probability they do not have a redundancy clause in their employment agreements. So I do not know how he comes to the conclusion that small businesses will be highly saddled with union officials coming in and demanding this and demanding that when in fact no such clause will exist in most of the agreements. Nobody will come in after the event and say that the business should have had this and because it should have had it it has to have it and has to pay out accordingly. I find the argument a little bit unusual to say the least. 
In terms of the larger employers who do have a unionised workforce to suggest that the employers are weak-kneed or they cannot look after their own interests is rather insulting. I can only tell Mr Connell that if they are that bad I had better get in amongst them because there is still some steel in my spine. I had better get back there pretty damn fast because if employers cannot front up— 
John Key 
: Intimidated! 
PETER BROWN 
: Intimidated? I can recall employers who were so tough that they would make the lot of us here look like a bunch of juveniles. Do not go away with the impression that employers in this country are easy meat for anybody! They are hard-working but they are also hard-nosed. So members should not think that union officials walk into the room and these guys fall over and say: “What do you want? Where do we sign?”. It is a long way from that I can assure members. As I say for many years I was an employer in the association of waterfront employers and we had some right stoushes I can tell members. I do not think the unions got terribly much that they did not have to work damn hard for. Equally we employers achieved some quite workable agreements as a result of those stoushes. It is two-way traffic and a two-way dialogue. It is very demanding at the time but at the end of the day virtually all agreements are like that; there might be a bit of rough and tumble in getting there but they are agreements. I have yet to meet an employer who has had a gun put to his or her head literally or had his or her arm squeezed up his or her back or anything like that and signed an agreement. 
Hon Richard Prebble 
: I have. 
PETER BROWN 
: Oh the member has? 
Hon Richard Prebble 
: Most certainly and on the waterfront too. 
PETER BROWN 
: Well I tell that member that the waterfront unionists used various tactics but I have never seen them go to the extent of the physical action of putting people’s arms up their back or whatever. I tell Mr Prebble that some of the employers in the days that he is talking about were what I call phoney employers. They did not actually employ the labour; they represented the shipowner who put the ship through the port and they bowed to pressure that they should not have bowed to. But since port reform where I had a positive role things have changed quite dramatically. 
Hon Richard Prebble 
: I had a minor one. 
PETER BROWN 
: Mr Prebble did have a minor one. In fact I remember advising people on what they should say to him when he was the Minister. I was quite pleasantly surprised when they came back with the right answers.