Foss Craig: Employment Relations Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Foss Craig: Employment Relations Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:633;Page:5098] 
CRAIG FOSS (National—Tukituki) 
: 
 Even though this is a wide-ranging debate I have quite a narrow speech ready to talk to the purpose of the bill. There were demands from Mr Jones on the other side for me to get up and talk some sense. We have actually had a lot of sense spoken about this bill because interestingly again similar to the KiwiSaver Bill which was rushed and bulldozed through the other night no Labour speakers have been speaking to the bill in this Committee stage apart from of course the Minister in the chair who had some words earlier on. 
I wanted to get up earlier to talk about the purpose of the bill so I will just touch on that right now. Quite frankly I think this bill obviously is purposeful. But I actually think its purpose is quite racist. I was listening to some of the speeches last night particularly Mark Gosche’s. He was talking about the cleaners and how they were mostly Maori Pacific Island etc. I actually think the intent of this bill is from what we have seen from Labour about its dependency culture basically a bit of a Labour mantra: “If they’re brown keep them down keep them dependent.” Because actually that is what this bill does. I find that quite disgusting in New Zealand in 2006 in spite of the rhetoric we constantly hear from them and the various placards and nonsense that they are putting out. 
Why is this amendment necessary? Well quite frankly it is payback time—payback time for the unions. I believe this is amendment No. 15 we are up to—the fine speakers earlier pointed that out. It is payback time and I guess those unions are shouting something at the Labour Party that it has heard a lot in the last few weeks. Those three words are “pay it back”. We asked the Labour Party to pay back the taxpayers’ money that it allegedly illegally spent on its pledge card during the election. I guess the unions are now saying “pay it back” for the hundreds of thousands of dollars they donated. Some of the amounts are in dispute according to an  
Investigate 
 magazine. But they are looking for a return—a payback—for the money they poured into the Labour Party to pull it up that last 3 to 4 percent in the last week of the election. The Hon Bill English pointed out earlier today in a very interesting press release how much—I think it was $1.1 million—the Labour Party spent to buy the last election. 
There has been a lot of talk and a few heart-rending stories about vulnerable workers. It kind of misses the point. All workers are vulnerable. All management is vulnerable. All companies are vulnerable. This is the world in which we live unless we want to stick a great big fence around New Zealand want to not import one iota want to not export one iota and want to have an average living age that goes back to something like 35-years-old. Either we participate in the world or we do not. That means we have to compete; we have to compete hard. 
The only way we can grow the economy is through productivity so that the workers can be paid more—particularly the cleaning and service workers who I will be fair and admit are at the bottom of the wage chain. For some of the work they do they deserve an awful lot more. I feel incredibly sorry at the moment for the cleaners in the Beehive—I heard all sorts of nonsense from various speakers last night about this—who I believe are currently having to work double time and double shifts to try to clean up some of the mess and nonsense that has been going through the Beehive in relation to the various scandals right at the moment. 
From reading the purpose of this bill it is clear that Labour assumes we are stuck in Yorkshire textile mills in 1906. Well it should get with the programme; this is 2006. There is not a constant battle between labour and capital. We have moved on from there—it was a long time ago. I guess if one looks in a rear-view mirror—as the Labour visionaries do—one would therefore keep trying to resurrect what the environment and conditions were like back in 1906. That is exactly where the medium to long term impacts of this amendment bill will take us. In the short term the amendment bill will make some nice headlines—good on it—but over the medium to long term this will drag New Zealand back. 
If we need more evidence then we should think about where our unemployment rate was when we had rigid labour laws and contracts in the 1970s. Unemployment was nudging 10 12 13 14 15 percent—it went very very high. Now we are suddenly in a virtually full employment period thanks to high commodity prices etc. yet the rigidity of labour market regulations in this bill will suffocate New Zealand and strap it down as we look longingly across to Sydney to Australia and to all our friends and whanau who have moved over there.