Curran Clare: Debate on Crown Entities Public Organisations and State Enterprises — In Committee 
Curran Clare: Debate on Crown Entities Public Organisations and State Enterprises — In Committee 
[Volume:673;Page:19324] 
CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South) 
: 
 Last Thursday was a tragic day in Dunedin and it was a tragic day for our skilled workforce in this nation. Last Thursday 41 skilled jobs were announced as being made redundant—41 skilled jobs in the critical area of manufacturing in this country which is the bedrock of our workforce and the bedrock of our rail engineering business. Forty-one skilled jobs will go; 41 families will be affected; 41 incomes and the tax paid will be lost to the local economy and that tax will be lost to the country. There will be 41 potential extra additions to the dole queue in Dunedin—and for what? 
Steven Joyce said today on behalf of the Prime Minister that no analysis had been done by his Government of the lost income the lost GST and the extra cost of benefits caused by his Government’s decision to have these lay-offs. It is just extraordinary. Yet in the Budget a few weeks ago we heard from both the Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance that somehow miraculously 170000 new jobs were going to be created in this economy over the next 4 years. When the Acting Minister for Economic Development was put on the spot about this last week in the Commerce Committee and was asked where those jobs are coming from and what analysis has been done by him or his department on what sectors the jobs would come from the answer was that they had not done any analysis and they do not know. They just think it will happen. 
Jobs have been lost in rail engineering and KiwiRail and mythical jobs are supposedly being created. Dunedin has been lied to. When the Minister of Transport Steven Joyce was asked last Thursday in this House about those KiwiRail job losses he said that KiwiRail must be able to operate without political interference despite promising last May that there would be plenty of jobs for the workers at Hillside. This also directly contradicted KiwiRail’s chief executive officer Jim Quinn who has been consistently saying that he has to take that narrow commercial focus because of Government policy. 
So somebody is not telling the truth here. Either it is Government policy that KiwiRail takes a narrow commercial approach and is not interested in the economic flow-on effects to the local economy of investing taxpayers’ money in those jobs and in that industry or it is not. It makes a mockery of the attempts in Dunedin for the last 18 months by a group of committed people including the Dunedin City Council the Chamber of Commerce the engineering cluster of nearly 70 firms in Dunedin all of the MPs the rail union and KiwiRail itself—until it basically got gagged—to sit around the table and try to come up with a strong economic case for keeping work in Dunedin and for keeping rail engineering business in this country. It is a mockery. 
What has happened since those redundancies have been announced? The local National list MP has been strangely silent. He sat around that table. He said he was committed. He said he was taking the case to Wellington. Where is the evidence of that case being taken to Wellington? And where is the evidence that the Government is listening? There is no evidence at all. It has been obvious for 2½ years that this Government is not committed to those workshops. It is not committed to the rail engineering business in this country and wants to get rid of it and will get rid of it. That is Government policy. 
KiwiRail will not guarantee the future of the rail workshops. Instead the Government has clearly signalled that there is no future for a rail engineering model that is about building and refurbishing our rolling stock. Any jobs that will remain will be maintenance and repair—probably not in Dunedin. Where is the local National Party member on this issue?