Seymour David: Employment Relations Amendment Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSeymour David: Employment Relations Amendment Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 30 October 2014. Volume:701;Page:453. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID SEYMOUR (ACT—Epsom):I rise on behalf of the ACT Party in support of the Employment Relations Amendment Bill. Before I give some of the remarks I have prepared I have to say there is a certain unreality in what we hear from the Opposition. We had one member saying that we are going towards Third World conditions. Has he really seen what labour conditions are like in Central America or Africa or South-east Asia or the Middle East before he says that we in New Zealand are falling short of international standards? There is an unreality not only in space but also in time. I was not surprised to hear some of our opponents saying that we are going back a century. One even said that we are going back two centuries. But the unreality is this: they are insulting the people who fought for better rights in the 19th century. They do not really understand the differences and that is why they are so out of place in 2014 in New Zealand.I would like to congratulate the Minister in charge of the bill the Hon Michael Woodhouse the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee the submitters and the officials involved in getting the bill this far. I would also like to acknowledge the work of my ACT Party predecessors in improving this bill. Most of all I would like to thank my fellow Epsom electors. This bill more than any other has acutely demonstrated the role that the Epsom electorate plays and has played in ensuring stable centre-right Government in New Zealand. This bill has been advanced stalled and now advanced again in each instance due to the presence or absence of an ACT MP from Epsom in this House.I can hear the Labour MPs’ frustration. Not only can we move towards best practice public policy without them—Richard Prosser: They’re not saying anything.DAVID SEYMOUR: I have heard enough of it Mr Prosser but ACT has absolute certainty about who its leader is. This is also a teachable moment not only in politics but in public policy. Listening to the Opposition members during the latter part of this debate they seem to assume that human relations such as employment relations are a static affair. They seem to assume they can shift outcomes by legislating the conditions under which people work and that people will never change their behaviour in response to a change in public policy.An easy way for the Opposition to see the fallacy here might be—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): I am sorry to interrupt the member. Members on their feet other than those speaking cannot interject from the floor of the House; only from a seated position.DAVID SEYMOUR: An easy way for the Opposition to see the fallacy might be to imagine some of the bill’s provisions or proposals in reverse. We might imagine that employees should not be able to abandon a so-called vulnerable employer. Perhaps we would propose that an employee be compelled to keep working for such an employer regardless of what a poor employer they turned out to be and regardless of what other opportunities presented themselves to that employee. Fanciful? I ask the members to think carefully what the logical difference is between that scenario and the situation in which large employers continue to be placed under this Act. Or we might imagine an Act wherein employees were thought most likely to tire of bargaining but it would require them to conclude an agreement unless the authority saw fit to absolve them of this default obligation. Or we might imagine a world where it was the norm for employers to partially withhold payment when dissatisfied with employment conditions and to expect no partial reduction in work ethic as a result.This bill even after amendment let alone the kind of bill the Opposition would have passed is about giving rights to employees by imposing duties on employers. The thought experiment of reversing the roles of employer and employee shows how misguided it is to attempt to improve outcomes by interfering in the contractual arrangements that employees and employers would otherwise enter into. The Opposition and any sensible person would reject these hypothetical laws. It is plain to see I am sure those members would say that employees either would not take such jobs or would expect to be paid more in return for accepting such duties. They might even say that such rules would be silly. Far better to relieve employees of such Draconian duties and allow them to negotiate their own conditions I am sure they would say if the proposition was put in reverse.Why then do the opponents of flexible labour markets in general and this bill in particular not see the futility in trying to legislate a different outcome in the labour market and the damage it is likely to do? Why indeed has the National Government compromised on the vulnerable worker clause and the requirement to conclude bargaining when these should be removed entirely? The answer lies in another fallacy and we have heard about it from the earlier speakers today. It is over 150 years old and has been disproven every single year since. It is the fallacy that labour will fall in value vis-à-vis capital. It is a failed hypothesis most recently resurrected by a particularly trendy French populist author that we are heading for hyper-capitalism and comrade the revolution is just around the corner. Well it has been coming for 150 years and it still has not come. In reality it is labour not capital that has risen in value since those members’ mate Mr Marx wrote about it.These economic trends have real implications for politics and policy today. They explain why the Labour Party has lost its base and why new members of the Green Party who are very literate at economics might make very effective leaders in the future. But the reality is that the employers in the Epsom electorate and up and down this country have fixated on the challenge of attracting and retaining staff. Competition for workers amongst employers is as aggressive if not more aggressive than competition for jobs amongst workers. Those employers must look askance at the Opposition’s assumption that workers have no other options are a dime a dozen and are easy come easy go. That simply is not the reality of the New Zealand workplace in 2014. It is a market place where competition works both ways.Hon Member: Somebody put him out of his misery.DAVID SEYMOUR: And if the gentleman calling out there has any doubt I entered the workforce working 60 hours a week for $7.50 an hour.I support this bill because it is a step in the right direction towards more flexible markets. Like all attempts to improve public policy this amendment is imperfect. Economic reality and experience suggests it should have gone further. Governments cannot legislate market outcomes but can influence them.Let me leave the Opposition which I concede has some good intentions with two initiatives that might better help New Zealanders achieve pay and conditions improved upon what they have now. Nominal pay rates are worthwhile only to the extent that they are useful for buying real goods. The price of houses for example has doubled relative to incomes over the last two decades and overwhelmingly this is due to local authorities prescribing an urban development pattern incompatible with the housing that people actually want. Far more could be achieved for working New Zealanders by improving the responsiveness of the housing market than by making futile attempts to shift bargaining strategies in the labour market.Another contributor to the outcomes in the labour market is the skill level of employees. Employees with greater skills earn more and this factor is growing in importance. Indeed increases in inequality of market income in the Western World can be tightly attributed to increasing returns for skills. You can earn more and more increasingly if you are more literate and more numerate.The real work achieving the Opposition’s purported objectives I am pleased to say is actually already being done on the supply sides of the housing and education sectors and I am proud to support and encourage this Government in this work. I am proud to support this bill and hope that this Government will one day pursue best-practice policy by confronting the fallacies that underlie too much of our labour law legislation. The duty to enter into and conclude bargaining should be gone. The duty to retain staff almost unconditionally under Part 6A depended on the type of employee and now the type of business should also be gone. Doing so would put us in touch with the labour market. Doing so might also put the Labour Party in touch with the labour market. It would put us in touch with 21st century businesses that succeed or fail based on their ability to attract and retain workers. Those are the people I speak for Mr Seymour – Mr Speaker. We have not heard enough from them so far. I commend this bill to the House.