Franks Stephen: State Sector Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Franks Stephen: State Sector Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:610;Page:7311] 
STEPHEN FRANKS (ACT NZ) 
: 
 I have been brought to my feet in some excitement by the comment made by the Minister in the chair because if I heard correctly this bill will deal with that long-running sore that the Minister was so hot about in 1999. According to his comments this bill would in some way change the outcome if Mr Murray McCully again had to deal with dud directors or dud employees—I think he referred to the Tourism Board as the example. 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: I did not say it applied to Crown entity boards. 
STEPHEN FRANKS 
: From what the Minister told us I understood that this bill would have made some difference to the dumping for $400000— 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: No. 
STEPHEN FRANKS 
: The $400000 was explicitly mentioned. That is what I heard from the Minister. When I heard that and looked at the title of the bill I started to think that I must have misunderstood. I thought: “We should be voting for this bill.” It occurred to me that if there were a way of getting rid of these rorts—these claims by duds this abuse of the legal system these horrendous golden farewells these things that inflame ordinary people directors business people and Ministers alike—and if the Minister had had the courage to bring in something even if he was sliding it under the title of State Sector Amendment Bill and had the courage to do something about the abuse— 
The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson) 
: The member may not question the courage of any member of the House let alone a Minister. 
STEPHEN FRANKS 
: I am sorry. If the Minister had had the openness and fortitude to do what he said he was going to do in 1999—that is get rid of the law that held businesses to ransom when they were getting rid of a dud senior employee—we would certainly be voting for it. ACT would be absolutely into this bill if the Minister were doing anything more than just making an empty political speech. 
I have scanned the bill as best I can and see that there is a clause in it that would perhaps justify the title “State Sector (Ministerial Decree) Reorganisation Bill”. That might be a little bit of an example. There is the provision that states that the Minister can by Order in Council do things that up until now we thought would require reversion to Parliament. But I certainly do not see anything to do with the address the Minister gave us two speakers ago when he referred to Mr Murray McCully. But if I have misunderstood the bill—if there is something in it that does address the issue—then the misnaming of the bill will certainly not stop us from reconsidering our opposition because it is a very long-overdue reform that the Minister— 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: ACT should support this bill. It does not support double-dipping for public servants. 
STEPHEN FRANKS 
: We do not support double-dipping but we certainly would support the Minister if this bill contains what he implied it contains—that is the ability to return employment to at-will terms. What I understood from the Minister’s intervention is that he supports at-will employment for senior executives as does every sensible economist employment lawyer board of directors and senior employee. They know that when they are taken on there is an allowance in their enormous salaries to reflect the risk of being dumped should they be found unsatisfactory. 
If this bill actually contains something along the lines of what the Minister intimated then we certainly would need to reconsider our opposition. From looking at the actual words and not the Minister’s description the best we can tell is that it does nothing of the sort. In fact it expressly preserves all the existing rights and entitlements. The effective reorganisation is said not to affect existing rights and entitlements—other of course than the minor redundancy he is trying to tackle. That presumably concerns those sorts of technical redundancies that the Government imposes on the private sector—the redundancies that the Hon Margaret Wilson was very happy to try to trigger with her proposals for a law that would attack transfers or reorganisations of private businesses. But for the State sector the attitude is: “Oh no we can’t do that.” 
Simon Power 
: Different kettle of fish. 
STEPHEN FRANKS 
: It is a different kettle of fish. No we will take State employees and make sure that they do not get the kind of windfall opportunity that the employees of  
The 
Dominion Post  
got for example.