Roche Denise: General Debate 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Roche Denise: General Debate 
[Sitting date: 27 February 2013. Volume:687;Page:8249. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
DENISE ROCHE (Green) 
: 
 In the last week or so the difference between how the Government treats the richest and the poorest in our country has never been clearer. On the one hand we had confirmation yesterday that the Government ignored Crown Law advice to change the industrial relations law of this country to advantage Warner Bros during the making of  
The Hobbit 
. This is the film that also attracted over a hundred million dollars in subsidies from New Zealand taxpayers and that so far has taken over US$1 billion in box-office receipts worldwide. It has dressed up these law changes and its dodgy dealings as something that deserves an award maybe an Oscar—a winner. The Government thinks it is the winner of the Oscar for nationalism but it is not. Government members are not Oscar winners because when you defrock what they have done their actions turn out to be a treacherous betrayal of vulnerable workers on behalf of overstuffed and overseas powerful interests. There will not be any golden statues for this act of betrayal this betrayal of decent Kiwi values. 
Those papers reveal the Prime Minister and his Government and their actions for what they are. It was always about union busting. The Prime Minister and his Ministers said that it was about protecting jobs for the 3000 workers that were involved in  
The Hobbit 
. By his own admission the international film industry now thinks New Zealand is an attractive location for movies because New Zealand has “a flexible labour market and an educated workforce which is not heavily unionised.” The Prime Minister’s own briefing papers from his trip to Hollywood in October last year show the growth in the film sector but also describe employment in that area as of “varying tenure and sporadic duration”. He has allowed for more precarious work for vulnerable workers. Changing the law has changed New Zealand into the sweatshop of the film industry. 
So what about those jobs eh? The same briefing said that almost everyone was a contractor with earnings that were relatively low or middle-income. With this ill-advised change the Prime Minister has added to the lack of security for a whole raft of workers. He has contributed to what Professor Guy Standing calls the precariat. These are fixed-term casual on-call contractors who sell their services for whatever they can get. They are unable to bargain collectively and the employment environment is not an even playing field so they often end up with low wages and poor conditions. Professor Standing calls this group and this sort of thing the commodification of work and workers. So what we got from selling our labour laws was a whole bunch of casualised low-wage work and I guess that as well as  
The Hobbit 
 being a vehicle to promote the gorgeousness of our country and hopefully attract tourists we also got an international reputation for screwing down workers’ rights. It is not the type of reputation many of us wished for. I want to make it clear and particularly to the previous speaker Chris Tremain that the Greens want to see a strong vibrant film industry but we do not think the way to achieve it is to pay poor wages and undermine workers’ rights. 
We want to see real jobs. We note that in the last year we lost another 17000 jobs in manufacturing according to the Statistics New Zealand household labour force survey that was released today and we are not seeing a hundred million dollars of investment in that sector despite the fact that these jobs were real jobs not casual and insecure. Our Prime Minister has also been doing dodgy deals with Skycity to build an International Convention Centre in Auckland and again he says this will create jobs but we have not done the cost-benefit analysis of what that will mean for problem gamblers and for those who deal with them—and pay for that—in Auckland. Contrast the cosy relationship of this Government with big business—Warner Bros Skycity—with its relationship with ordinary workers who received a 25c pay increase yesterday and are still earning poverty wages. Contrast that and you will see that the Government setting is towards the wealthy and not towards the deserving poor.