Bradford Sue: State Sector Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Bradford Sue: State Sector Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
[Volume:610;Page:7365] 
SUE BRADFORD (Green) 
: 
 The Green Party will be supporting the third reading of the State Sector Amendment Bill today. We are glad to see it finally reach this point after lingering on the Order Paper since some time around the middle of 2001. Some of the bill seems somewhat redundant now given that the restructuring of the former Work and Income New Zealand happened ages ago but at least that merger will be retrospectively tidied up as of today. 
Overall the Green Party believes that there is nothing radical or distasteful about this bill. It is simply a common-sense step towards dealing in a sane way with what happens when Government departments are abolished restructured amalgamated or otherwise subject to one of the many forms of organisational change so popular in both the private and public sectors these days. It is sensible that from now on when new Governments come in they will be able to change the name and focus of departments without having to bring in new legislation each time this happens. However this does not change the fact that when a department is set up by statute legislative change will still be required to amend or establish its purpose and that is how it should be. 
The core of the bill comprises amendments to the State Sector Act that put into place general rules with regard to the technical redundancies that occur when Government departments merge or reorganise. When employees are affected by restructuring they will now have legislative protections including the right to substantially the same position and substantially the same geographical location and the right to be employed on terms and conditions that are no less favourable than those that they previously enjoyed and on terms that treat the new position as continuous in relation to sick and holiday leave and other entitlements. 
The Green Party would have liked to see similar provisions legislated for in clause 66 of the original Employment Relations Bill in 2000 as we believe that all workers should have protection such as these when their job is restructured or sold out from under them. However as it turned out clause 66 commonly known as “transfer of undertakings” was not to be. We are now looking forward to seeing what the Government comes up with shortly in its proposed legislation to reform and improve the Employment Relations Act. We hope that nothing in the State Sector Amendment Bill will limit the Employment Relations Act review and amendment process and we will certainly be seeking consequential amendments if the new legislation once again ignores transfer of undertakings or comes up with clauses offering less protection than those contained in the bill before us today. Above all what is needed is generic legislation that covers and protects all workers whether or not they are in the State sector. The Green Party will be doing everything we can over the coming months to make sure the Labour Government does not let workers down on that issue the second time round. 
A second aspect of this bill deals with two specific mergers of Government departments. One of those is the abolition of the Department for Courts and the transfer of its functions to the Ministry of Justice. This merger undoes the separation of courts from the justice ministry that was misguidedly brought in by National in 1995 as part of its peculiar and costly drive to separate policy from operations throughout the State sector. The Green Party welcomes the reuniting of the administration of courts and tribunals with the Ministry of Justice. It makes sense to us that unnecessary duplication of administration and other infrastructure functions is discontinued. The new ministry with around 2000 staff will be a department of a rational size rather than the Ministry of Justice having just 180 staff and being split off on its own. We also appreciate the fact that the passing of this bill means that as we understand it all staff involved will be offered their existing jobs or similar jobs at the same terms and conditions and that the Public Service Association will be involved in the merger process. 
The bringing together of the justice and courts departments is a useful consequence of the review of the centre and we welcome this particular restructuring which is geared to reducing fragmentation improving the two-way interface between policy and practice especially in relation to public law and creating a single rather than dispersed point of contact between the executive and the judiciary. 
 The second reorganisation that this bill specifically covers is that of the changes to the Department of Social Welfare and Work and Income New Zealand commonly known as WINZ which the Labour Government fortunately instituted as soon as it practicably could after the 1999 election. The era of Christine Rankin and WINZ will surely go down in history as one of the most unfortunate in the entire ramshackle annals of New Zealand’s social security system. This late 1990s flowering of the National Party’s approach to beneficiaries was characterised by a Government department focused on style rather than substance and by an underpinning “blame the victim” mentality that reached its epitome with the dob-in-a-beneficiary campaign on prime-time television at the same time as departmental staff senior-level staff were flown by private jet to a Wairakei resort for a so-called training weekend which was actually just a social occasion as far as I could tell. 
During that period both the people served by WINZ and groups served by the department such as those served by the Community Employment Group suffered hugely. The Hunn report carried out shortly after Labour had regained the Government benches was a fairly accurate and revealing reflection of what had gone wrong in those years. The Green Party at the time welcomed the Government’s decision to change WINZ’s name in the wake of that report because the branding of “WINZ” had become totally contaminated by the excesses of that particular era. We also welcomed the bringing together of social policy income support and employment functions into one department and the quite different and far more positive approach to leadership taken by both the Minister and the new chief executive officer Peter Hughes. While the Ministry of Social Development which is retrospectively mandated by this legislation is not without ongoing and substantial problems the Green Party unhesitatingly supports the changes made in this bill. I just hope I live to see the day when people will stop using the now very out-of-date term “WINZ” in describing the department because it carries with it a legacy of contempt for beneficiaries and for staff that I hope we will never see again.