Fenton Darien: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
Fenton Darien: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:674;Page:20444] 
DARIEN FENTON (Labour) 
: 
 It is a pleasure to take a call in the estimates debate on Vote Labour. I will start my contribution tonight by acknowledging the staff of the Department of Labour for their hard work and contribution particularly in Christchurch and the tragedy at Pike River. That has been very challenging for those staff and I just want to put on record my appreciation. That is despite the endless restructuring and the low morale that has come about since this Government came into office and the Minister took charge of the Department of Labour. 
This debate is an opportunity to have a look at the record of the Minister of Labour Kate Wilkinson. It is fair to say that her record as Minister of Labour is less than distinguished. In her time as Minister we cannot see anything that she has done to show leadership in this very important area of labour. Earlier on Minister Paula Bennett talked about employment. If I may say Vote Employment is a very very small part of the Department of Labour so I think she overstated that issue. This debate was a chance for the Minister of Labour to talk about her achievements but I have seen nothing from this Minister in her 2½ years in the role to motivate or encourage better employment relationships higher skills development productivity improvements and higher wages. That is one of the critical roles of the Department of Labour. However unfortunately the Minister’s approach has been one of a race to the bottom as fast as John Key’s Government has let her. She has made working people the target of change and it is unproductive change. It is backwards-looking change. 
Sadly when we look over the tenure of this Minister in what we know will be her last term as the Minister of Labour—thank goodness—and her last term in charge of the appropriations of the Department of Labour and we look ahead we see nothing but deficits. I am not talking financial deficits; I am talking a deficit of imagination. We heard it earlier in the debate from the ACT Party member who talked about youth rates. That is a deficit of imagination— 
Hon Steve Chadwick 
: From ACT. 
DARIEN FENTON 
: —from ACT—but we get it from National as well. The truth is that John Key’s National Government has given up on trying to improve Kiwi wages. He is now trying to attract investment to New Zealand by saying that having wages that are 30 percent cheaper than Australia is a competitive advantage. That is what Bill English said and that is what he told the Australia New Zealand Leadership Forum earlier in the year. 
What we have seen under the tenure of this Minister of Labour is a pretty disgraceful record. Not only has she done nothing to try to improve critical areas like productivity and skills but she has done a whole lot of other things. She sold out a whole lot of New Zealand workers. That started with low-paid workers but last year we had the disgraceful exhibition of her Government being subjected to Warner Bros control. That multinational company came to New Zealand to take away the rights of New Zealand workers. If we look at the statement of intent for this year’s estimates we will see that one of the jobs that the Department of Labour is doing is having a look at other groups of workers who are called contractors and providing clarification. What I read into that is that their rights will be on the chopping-block as well. 
Next on the wonderful record of this esteemed Minister: from 1 April every New Zealand worker lost their rights to justice if they get the sack the right to be able to challenge an employer—a fundamental right—when a worker loses their livelihood because an employer made a decision. The Government made it easier for workers to be fired for no reason and without recourse to justice. It did that on the basis of arguing that this would create jobs. I will get on to that in a minute and then I will talk about the miserly minimum wage increase. 
When I talk about financial deficits I talk about a particular worker called Sam. I will talk about Sam in relation to the minimum wage. Sam is an invention of the National Government. He is an invention that is still on the website. Sam works as a store-hand at a supermarket earning the minimum wage. He is 19. He flats with friends and blah-blah-blah. He gets a tax cut of $13.82 a week and pays an extra $7.46 in GST. Overall he is $6.36 a week or $330 a year better off in theory. What we know is that actually since Sam was invented by the National Government the value of the minimum wage has gone backwards. Sam is now actually worse off by $16.80 a week. He is worse off because of the rising cost of living the cost of accident compensation increases the cost of GST and other things and also because of this Government’s miserly—miserly—25c an hour increase in the minimum wage earlier this year. 
What we know about this Minister is that she had advice from the Department of Labour from her own department and it went to Cabinet. It said that she could have given a bigger increase to workers on the minimum wage. She could have put up the minimum wage to $13.50 an hour from 1 April this year and that would have had almost no impact on employment. She decided that that would not happen. Of course what happened to Sam—and not only Sam but also a whole lot of other workers; people and families who rely on the minimum wage—is that he is $16.80 a week worse off. The extra 25c an hour that those people got on 1 April this year was wiped out in the first 3 months of this year. But those members do not care. 
Hon Nathan Guy 
: The same as your $5000 tax cut. 
DARIEN FENTON 
: No it has been wiped out. That member should have a look at his own figures. Then we saw the sad spectre of this Government of John Key raising the issue of labour market reforms yet again. We have had some of that in their term of Government. The Minister would like to claim that it has created jobs. The 90-day trial period for employers with fewer than 20 workers apparently created 13000 jobs. That is such poor research that the Minister keeps relying on. There is no evidence that that will make any change. Now we hear from the Prime Minister that his response to the global market downturn is: “Here we go again. Let’s have a go at the workers. Let’s cut some more things. Let’s go back.” This is an ideological burp. It reminds me of Bill Birch and Ministers even before him. Here we go again. When a Government has no answers to the economic situation what does it do? It goes after workers’ rights. It goes after those and it means cut cut cut. This Prime Minister has made it very clear that the Minister of Labour has no influence on him so he will just do what he wants. 
The funny thing is that when we start to look at what modern economies are doing and what the IMF and the OECD—never particular friends of the Labour Party—are saying we see that they are looking back at history. They say that one of the things that really made a difference to the global economic downturn was the collapse in collective bargaining. When workers cannot get their fair share they cannot pay their bills. That means they cannot pay their mortgages. That means banks go broke. So now we have the interesting situation where we see the IMF and the OECD saying that collective bargaining needs to be strengthened. This Government is planning to weaken it—it is planning to weaken it. 
Phil O’Reilly was on Radio New Zealand this morning. It was so depressing and we have heard it all before. He said something like “We’ve got to end the union monopoly on collective bargaining.” For goodness’ sake! I think the Minister and the Government do not understand that the workers of New Zealand have done their bit. They have pulled in their belts they have coped with the increases to the cost of living and they have accepted poor pay increases.