Hipkins Chris: Employment Relations (Film Production Work) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee 
Hipkins Chris: Employment Relations (Film Production Work) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee 
[Volume:668;Page:14983] 
CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka) 
: 
 This is the first opportunity that I have had to take a call on the Employment Relations (Film Production Work) Amendment Bill; I am sure that it will not be the last. I say first of all I am very pleased that  
The Hobbit 
 is to be filmed here in New Zealand. I am absolutely delighted that it is to be filmed here in New Zealand. I am probably one of the only members in the Chamber who has actually read the book— 
Hon Members 
: No! 
CHRIS HIPKINS 
: Oh well there must be others. That is good to hear. I am very concerned about National’s approach to this legislation which is to take the George W Bush approach: “You are either with us or with the enemy.” No subtlety is involved in that but actually it is a load of rubbish—an absolute load of rubbish. 
I went to the movies a few weeks ago; I do not do that very often. I went to see the movie called  
Made in Dagenham 
 which was about the women at the Ford factory in London who went on strike and campaigned in order to be paid the same as the blokes. The women were not very popular at the time either— 
Paul Quinn 
: I raise a point of order Mr Chairperson. I have listened carefully to the speaker. This particular debate is focused on the title clause and he has not mentioned that clause once so far. 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: It is of course possible in a debate on a clause to go right through a speech without actually mentioning that clause and for the speech to still be entirely relevant. I think that when the member opposite gets a bit more experience he will understand that. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Eric Roy) 
: There are some accepted norms about process. One is that a title debate is a very close and tight debate. There is also another expectation that when a bill has not been to a select committee there is a slightly wider tolerance than usual. I stress that this is not a general debate. The Chair tends to show a little more tolerance about examples being brought into the process. We are debating clause 1 which is the title clause. 
CHRIS HIPKINS 
: I am getting to that. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Eric Roy) 
: Then I invite the member to convince me that that is the case. 
CHRIS HIPKINS 
: Thank you very much Mr Chair. Twenty seconds into my speech I am getting to the title. I think it is perfectly acceptable to make some preliminary remarks. What I was talking about was—I will come to an alternative title to the bill in a moment—the film  
Made in Dagenham 
 and the fact that the women who campaigned for equal pay with the blokes were pretty unpopular at the time. But they kept on going and ultimately they got what they wanted. As a result of that around the world now Governments have adopted equal pay legislation. 
With that idea of either being for us or against us which we have heard about from the National members they might as well call this bill the “You’re for Us (the Warner Bros - National Party) Or You’re Against Us Bill”. They may as well call the bill that because effectively that is what they have come into this Chamber and argued. It is absolutely ridiculous. I tell members that the women who went on strike in Dagenham were not anti-car. They were not showing that they were anti-car by going on strike at the Ford factory. The people who are opposed to this legislation are not anti- 
Hobbit 
. In fact I am very keen to see  
The Hobbit 
 filmed in New Zealand and I am delighted that that is to happen. I am very pro- 
Hobbit 
. We are very pro- 
Hobbit 
 on this side of the Chamber. 
So I support Mr Mallard’s amendment to clause 1 which suggests removing the words “Film Production Work” and inserting the words “As Requested by Warner Bros” making this bill the “Employment Relations (As Requested by Warner Bros) Amendment Bill”. From the minute that the Warner Bros representatives got off the plane were met by VIP cars at the airport and were swept away to Premier House they would have been rubbing their hands together and thinking: “Gosh we had better up the stakes a bit here. We were going in a bit low; we will go in a bit higher. We will demand more because we know that we have the Government over a barrel. It’s sent these VIP cars out to the airport to meet us. Maybe we can demand whatever we like now because this Government will just give us whatever we like.” 
The Government has raised the cost of keeping  
The Hobbit 
 in New Zealand. The Government’s mishandling of this issue has raised the cost of keeping  
The Hobbit 
 in New Zealand. That is why the Committee should agree to the amendment put forward by Trevor Mallard that this bill should be called the “Employment Relations (As Requested by Warner Bros) Amendment Bill” because that is why we are here. We are here because the Government is basically doing whatever is requested of it by a large multinational company. That company makes millions if not billions of dollars a year in profits and the Government is giving it more in taxpayer subsidies. The Government is giving the company more in taxpayer subsidies because the Government mishandled this issue from the very beginning. It did not have a relationship with Warner Bros at the very beginning. The Government came into this matter only late in the piece after it looked as though the Warner Bros studios would be pulling out of New Zealand altogether. 
The amendment put forward in the name of Trevor Mallard is in fact a perfectly reasonable amendment to the title clause of this bill. 
Hon Tau Henare 
: What is it again? 
CHRIS HIPKINS 
: It is to remove the words “Film Production Work” from the title and replace them with “As Requested by Warner Bros”. 
Hon Tau Henare 
: I’ll think about it. 
CHRIS HIPKINS 
: Oh Tau Henare is to think about it. He is in charge; he is in charge of everything. With all of the bitter twisted resentment that he has over there on the National backbenches it is good to know that he has still kept his sense of perspective and that he will consider the amendment put forward by Trevor Mallard. Mr Henare is in National these days; it is hard to keep track of him. 
The critical point here in the debate on the title clause is what the appropriate title for this bill should really be. I am not convinced in any way shape or form that in the suggested title the words “Film Production Work” reflect the true intent behind this bill. John Key is actually—I will give him this—a very very clever politician. He is a very clever politician and he wondered how he could do something that he would not normally get away with: how he could turn this situation into something that would allow him to push through legislation that would not normally gain public support. That is why National came up with this amendment bill. I reckon that the Government members went into the negotiations with Warner Bros thinking that they would use this issue as an excuse to push through legislation that they would not normally get away with. What did we hear from Heather Roy before? Heather Roy let slip and revealed the true National Government agenda behind this legislation: those members do not want this legislation to apply only to the film production industry. 
That is why the title of this bill is misleading. We will be back here—in a matter of months I suspect—to debate the extension of this provision to every worker in the country. That is just what the Government did with regard to the 90-day legislation which started out as a trial period. National said it would affect only a small number of people. But what do we know? Within months because the ACT Party told National to do this the National members have come back here and are pushing through further changes to extend the 90-day probationary period to everybody. 
So the title of this bill which is the Employment Relations (Film Production Work) Amendment Bill is actually misleading. We know what the true agenda is. National should just be honest about it and call the bill the “Employment Relations Amendment Bill”. It should remove the words “Film Production Work” from the title altogether. We know that that is not what National is aiming for here. It wants to set a precedent here so that it can come back in a few months’ time and say it does not actually think film production workers should be treated any differently from other workers and this measure should apply to the entire workforce. All of a sudden all those people—and they are quite vulnerable in some cases—will be pushed out into contract work and they will lose all their rights to bargain collectively. The cleaners and caretakers those types of people will suddenly find themselves deemed to be contractors and they will lose a whole lot of the employment rights that they have fought hard for many many years to gain. So the title of this bill is misleading. It is unfair and it does not give New Zealanders a true glimpse of what the National Party’s real agenda here is. 
I am very supportive of having  
The Hobbit 
 made in New Zealand and I absolutely reject the notion that by being opposed to a change to the employment relations legislation we are somehow anti-film or anti -  
The Hobbit 
. That is absolutely ridiculous. It is like saying the women at the Ford factory who campaigned for equal rights were anti-car. It is like saying the Labour Party by arguing against giving Murray McCully sweeping veto powers over the Rugby World Cup is anti - Rugby World Cup or anti - New Zealand which the National members claimed yesterday. That is absolutely ridiculous. The public of New Zealand deserve to have more than those types of sweeping generalisations from the Government. We have not heard from those members any detailed arguments about why this legislation is necessary. They have given us a lot of platitudes about wanting to support having  
The Hobbit 
 made in New Zealand. I support having  
The Hobbit 
 made in New Zealand but they have not given us any detailed reasons as to why this legislation needs to go through. Why is it imperative that a person who cleans the offices at a film production studio should be treated as a contractor and not as an employee which is what this bill does? 
That is one of the reasons—and I come back to the fact that we are debating the title clause—why the words “Film Production Work” in the title clause are misleading. They are misleading because this legislation applies not just to actors the extras the technicians and so on but also to anybody employed in any way in the film production industry. It includes the people who clean the studios or answer the telephones at a film production studio. It extends far wider than the title would suggest.