Connell Brian: New Zealand Trade and Enterprise Bill — Instruction to CommitteeCWH In Committee 
Connell Brian: New Zealand Trade and Enterprise Bill — Instruction to CommitteeCWH In Committee 
[Volume:609;Page:6312] 
BRIAN CONNELL (NZ National—Rakaia) 
: I want to focus my contribution on clauses 76 and 77. It takes skill and experience to merge organisations. It is not something where one wakes up and thinks that today one is going to merge an organisation. What one needs to do is call on people with expertise and experience. If one is to determine which staff members will be transferred to the new entity one will need to know on what basis one will be doing that. It occurs to me that if two small bureaucracies were thrown together we would get one big bureaucracy. When one is merging organisations one needs to take the best parts of those organisations—the ones that have synergies—and merge those together. 
I hear a couple of members yelling from the other side of the Chamber. I know that the tough part is when one says that some members of those organisations will not transfer to the new one because they are just not needed. It is tough because those people have families. But if one believes that what one is doing is the right thing then that is the action one needs to take. 
What should follow before people are transferred across is that one should look at what economies of scale will flow from the merged organisations. There should be less management fewer staff fewer compliance costs and a better focus on core business. Before that determination is made one needs to do some sort of cost-benefit analysis. I know that when members of the select committee sought answers about whether a cost-benefit analysis had been done they could not get cogent answers so they asked the Minister whether he had done a cost-benefit analysis. He said something vague along the lines that that work is still being done which implies that he had not done a cost-benefit analysis before he started to merge the two organisations. 
How does one merge multimillion-dollar organisations and know that one is doing the best by the New Zealand public if one has not done that type of basic work? In fact the Minister said that the work was being done and economies of scale would follow. My question is: how does he know? One actually has to have the experience in order to do that. Many of those employees are well paid. Surely one has to be clear before one determines the terms and conditions as set out in clause 77 that employees must have a very clear understanding of what it is they will be doing. I picked up an article by a spokeswoman from Industry New Zealand that stated that Industry New Zealand was a type of dating agency that would put businesses together so that it could help them work their way through the bureaucracy of government. 
Hon Tony Ryall 
: Jim Anderton is a sort of earlier Charlotte Dawson or something isn’t he? 
BRIAN CONNELL 
: Charlotte Dawson - Jim Anderton? Beggar the thought! She should be saying that Industry New Zealand will advise businesses how not to get engaged in bureaucracy because its job is really to help business diminish bureaucracy rather than engage in it. Someone needs to tell that spokeswoman that her job is to help business not just build up compliance costs. The Manufacturers Federation does not want this. It was not consulted. When employer bodies were asked whether they had been consulted by Mr Anderton they said no they did not know what was needed and they did not know what types of employees they needed. They would have expected that that sort of work would have been done first.