Lees-Galloway Iain: Home and Community Support (Payment for Travel Between Clients) Settlement Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLees-Galloway Iain: Home and Community Support (Payment for Travel Between Clients) Settlement Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 18 February 2016. Volume:711;Page:9167. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North): I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. I just want to clarify whether this is a 5-minute or a 10-minute contribution.Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: It is normally the Green Party that takes the first call in this slot.IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY: That is right. Yes.Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Is the Green Party expecting to—Eugenie Sage: Mr Lees-Galloway can have 10 minutes.IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY: It would be my pleasure.Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: There is your answer. Congratulations.IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY: Very good—thank you. Labour backs having an economy that works for all of us not just for the privileged few; a country where our kids can hope to one day own their own home; a job that pays well; security to live a fulfilling life with the people we care about; and a world-class health system that is there for you when you need it. Labour in short stands for the Kiwi Dream and it is our mission when we are in Government to restore the Kiwi Dream and security and opportunity for all New Zealanders.It is not just the Labour Party that is the champion of the Kiwi Dream. It is the wider labour movement as well—working people who have chosen to work together collectively through their unions to get a better deal and a fairer outcome for themselves and for other people working in their industry and across New Zealand.This is a prime example of the labour movement at work—the labour movement striving to ensure that all New Zealanders can realise that Kiwi Dream. So I want to acknowledge the Public Service Association (PSA) and E tū for the work they did in bargaining with the employers then taking the test case and then sitting down with a centre-right Government and getting a positive outcome not just for the union members but actually for everybody who works in this sector and for the people that they care for and leading the way for other work that has to happen in order to provide fair pay and conditions for people working throughout the health care system.I think this is a wonderful victory for working people and it is a demonstration of the important role that unions still hold in the modern New Zealand workplace. Even during a period of time when the Government has changed the law to diminish the role of unions to make it harder for them to do their job and harder for them to get positive and fair outcomes for their members and for other workers these unions—the PSA and E tū supported by the Council of Trade Unions—have been able to achieve a fantastic outcome. And it is good for the industry as well.Denise Roche made a very good point and that is that this was a bargaining situation. Things were traded and an absolutely legitimate claim for back-pay was forgone by those workers so that they could establish a system that is going to be fair for themselves and for future generations of people working in the home-care and community support sector. That is not the outcome you get when you get the sort of cowboy “no win no fee” lawyers. It is the outcome you get when employers and the Government work with unions which have as much of a vested interest in the long-term survival and success of the industries that they operate in as the employers the owners the Government and everybody else.It is tripartism at its best—the Government the employers and the workers working together for a positive win-win outcome that is good for everybody. So I want to congratulate everybody involved in getting to this point. Yes there have been times when pressure has had to be applied. Yes there have been times where people have had to go to court. There have been times when perhaps it has felt more like the parties were on opposite side of the fence than on the same side but they worked through it. It took time. It took strong people like Jenny Goodman standing up and being prepared to put themselves in the public view and eventually after years and years and years of hard work they got there. The fact that they got there under a National Government is no mean feat and it should be acknowledged. They have done extremely well to get there at this point in time. What they did is they made sure that the public was on their side and that frankly the Government of the day no matter what colour it was had no option but to work with them and to get the appropriate outcome put into place.There is an aspect of this legislation that has not been spoken about all that much that I think is really important and it is important in the context of the ongoing issues and the other matters that still need to be addressed. That is the fact that by virtue of the legislation that we are passing today the home and community support workers are defined as employees. That is important because not everybody working in New Zealand is entitled to the rights that we ought to be able to take for granted. Not everybody working in New Zealand is entitled to a minimum wage. Employees are but contractors are not. Not everybody in New Zealand is entitled to join a union and to bargain collectively. Employees are but contractors are not. So defining these workers as employees is actually astonishingly important because it provides them with basic rights that every worker in New Zealand should actually be able to take for granted.I want to acknowledge that before the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee right now is David Parker’s bill the Minimum Wage (Contractor Remuneration) Amendment Bill which would provide the right to the minimum wage to all workers in New Zealand. We also need to start work on matters such as dependent contractors—people who are called contractors but who are actually fundamentally employed by one employer. They are employees in all but name and in all but the rights that they get.These are issues that this House urgently needs to address and this legislation in a limited way for these people makes really important progress. That is another thing that we should celebrate and we should use it as a prototype for future work to extend those rights and those privileges to other people working in New Zealand as well.This is a day to celebrate and I do not want to hold this legislation up so I simply want to end by saying that unions are relevant. Unions are still even under this Government gaining enormous successes for their members and for workers right across New Zealand and today is a day on which we should celebrate unions and unions should celebrate the work that they are doing.