Little Andrew: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Little Andrew: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
[Sitting date: 29 January 2013. Volume:687;Page:7584. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
ANDREW LITTLE (Labour) 
: 
 Mr Speaker let me begin by wishing you and all members of the House a very happy New Year. I just want to say I enjoy taking the call but I am called upon to respond to what is dubbed the Prime Minister’s statement but what was in fact the Prime Minister’s panegyric. It was a very disappointing speech in the House and it was a very disappointing statement tabled in the House earlier today. 
Simon O’Connor 
: What were you reading? What was being read over the summer break? 
ANDREW LITTLE 
: A panegyric Mr O’Connor—you understand exactly what that is. The message is very clear in the Prime Minister’s statement: nothing will change. Certainly nothing will improve. Nothing will get better but nothing will change. Never mind 7.3 percent unemployment and let us remind ourselves what 7.3 percent unemployment actually means. It means 175000 people unemployed. It means 295000 jobless. It means 113000 looking for and wanting and needing extra hours of work. Never mind a shrinking manufacturing sector and never mind falling median wages—3 percent last year alone. Never mind any of those things. Never mind growing poverty grinding poverty and never mind growing inequality. Little or nothing in the Prime Minister’s panegyric will address any of these issues. 
The big announcement we have had—we had it in the statement today we had it in the speech this afternoon and we had it in the Prime Minister’s speech last Friday—is the apprenticeships scheme. The Government has discovered apprenticeships. It is only a few years late but it has discovered them nevertheless. Never mind that everybody else has known that there has been a skills shortage in this country for at least 5 years—and a skills shortage in the construction sector that has been deeper and more severe than at any time we have ever known and certainly in many of the other trades—and never mind that the need for a major rebuild in Christchurch has been known about for at least 2 years so quite why the Government has discovered apprenticeships now one can only wonder. But at least we now have a scheme. 
 Earlier in his speech in the House this afternoon the Prime Minister has already claimed as an achievement the creation of 14000 apprenticeships. That is what the target is over some years and it does not start until January next year but he has claimed it as an achievement. Of course there will not be many new apprenticeships in the motor trades now that we have taken away one of the warrant of fitness checks that most cars are subject to. What is interesting about that of course is that the Government wants to save drivers $50 a year from one warrant of fitness check but when it had the chance to reduce the ACC component of the registration that every motor vehicle owner has to pay it left in place the levies that were paid last year when it had recommendations to the Cabinet to reduce them. That is going to cost motor vehicle owners $75 a year more than they need to pay. So much for saving on the warrant of fitness. Drivers will be paying that and more on their continued unnecessarily elevated car registration fees. 
Anyway we have got the apprenticeships scheme. We have got the claim that it is going to create new places. Never mind of course that at the same time this Government is encouraging employers to recruit workers from overseas and let us not forget that it was 20 years ago that it was the National Party in Government that destroyed the apprenticeships scheme we had then—destroyed apprenticeships then. No wonder we have had a shortage of apprentices growing over many years since that time and no wonder we have the crisis in trades skills that we have at the moment. 
What the National Government in the 1990s did when it trashed the apprenticeships scheme then was that it handed it all over to employers—mainly to employers—through the industry training organisations. Some of the industry training organisations had union representation on them and it kept them on an even keel and some of those ones did well but most of the industry training organisations that did not have union representation or any strong union influence handed over the administration of apprenticeships and industry training to employers and they ran it down. They could not do it. They could not handle it because they forgot that one of the great successful factors of the old apprenticeships scheme was that it was tripartite. It was not just the employer; it was the rest of the workforce and it was the Government as well. Everybody played their role and nurtured young people in their trade skills and grew those skills and developed them. We had a world-class apprenticeships system which this party in Government ran down. 
The building industry has had an interesting experience under the National Government apprenticeships scheme since 1992 and it is that by 2008 50 percent of apprentices in the building and construction industry were so-called independent contractors. They were labour-only contractors. They had no certainty of employment no security at all and no commitment by those who were ostensibly their employers and engaged them to see them through their time. In fact it is the apprentices in that industry who have had one of the highest rates of non-completion that we have had in the last few years. That is what happened when the National Government took over the apprenticeships scheme trashed it and handed it over to employers. 
So now National has announced a new scheme where it is going to shovel barrow-loads of money at employers—and at the apprentices too and I do not question that—but in the absence of any other change what is going to happen? More labour-only contractors in the building industry signed up as apprentices more non-completion fewer tradespeople actually completing their time. So let us not look at this with rose-tinted spectacles. This is another disaster waiting to happen. 
Remember too it was only 2 years ago that this Government took $55 million out of industry training. It has now announced a new scheme that from next year is going to cost $25 million a year so we are still $30 million down from when it rorted the last lot. So this is not any great achievement of this Government; this is desperate measures because it is behind the eight ball. It has waited too long. It is too little too late. More as I say needs to be done than just announcing more apprentices and shovelling more money at it. 
Let us look at what else this Government has said in its statement and line that up against the great apprenticeships scheme. A good apprenticeships scheme delivers an apprentice a young worker learning their trade when they need certainty and security and some direction from their employer. What is this Government and the rest of its policy platform for this year offering? It has trotted out the old weasel words. “Labour market reform” it is going to say. It says it is going to boost labour market flexibility. Well I can tell you what. There are 2.4 million wage and salary earners who know exactly what boosting labour market flexibility means. It means fewer rights less job security and less chance of a pay increase. And the Government says it is going to improve collective bargaining. What it means is that it is going to improve the rights of employers to curtail it to truncate it to minimise it and to keep downward pressure on wages. That is what it is promising—so much for 14000 new apprenticeships! 
With no job security and with no certainty for young workers this Government is not committed to retraining and re-skilling New Zealand. This is all just smoke and mirrors as my leader David Shearer described it—just smoke and mirrors. This is just another recipe for more of a low-wage economy more job insecurity and more inequality. 
You know the funny thing is that the Prime Minister talks up Taranaki as an example of the part of the New Zealand economy where there is comparatively lower unemployment and there are higher wages. I come from Taranaki. I am a Taranaki boy and a New Plymouth boy. I spend most of my non-parliamentary time up there. I know New Plymouth very well and I know its industries. I know the industries that pay very well but I also know the industries—and there are many of them—that do not pay very well at all. Taranaki is a two-speed economy—a classic two-speed economy. If you work in engineering and oil and gas you will do OK. If you work in the service industries you are going to be struggling to make ends meet. But if Taranaki is so important and is so good and is such a model and when Taranaki has several National Party MPs some long serving—Shane Ardern the longest-serving Taranaki MP we have had in a long time and we have had MPs like Chester Borrows who has served the party well—why is it that in the Cabinet reshuffle not a single Taranaki-based MP was promoted given extra responsibility or actually put into the proper Cabinet? None at all. This is not a Government that takes Taranaki seriously at all. It is taken for granted and it is not treated seriously. 
What we are seeing in this Prime Minister’s panegyric is classic Tory politics—shovelling more money in the direction of those members’ mates to line their pockets and no real addressing of the real issues facing real Kiwis hard-working Kiwis who are looking for a break and looking for a better deal.