Fenton Darien: Employment Relations (Secret Ballot for Strikes) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Fenton Darien: Employment Relations (Secret Ballot for Strikes) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 21 March 2012. Volume:678;Page:1197. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
DARIEN FENTON (Labour) 
: 
 I wanted to speak to my amendment to insert new clause 5B and inject some sense back into the debate after that tirade from the member Tau Henare. But before I do I just want to record my pleasure that good sense has prevailed in the ports and that Ports of Auckland has agreed to go back to collective bargaining and not to contract out the workers or make them redundant so I am very very pleased about that. I think we will see a return to productive employment and I hope productive employment relationships which is indeed what Labour’s legislation was always about. It was always about good faith about productive employment relationships and about mediation as a first call in disputes. But gradually what we have seen from this Government of course is interference in that and that is what this bill is too. 
My amendment to insert new clause 5B is to make sure that indeed if this bill goes through there is not more interference in the right of workers to have a secret ballot which is what the member insists must happen. He insists it is about democracy but actually what we have at the moment thanks to this Government is an impediment to access to a workplace. Under this Government workers and unions have to get permission from the employer to enter the workplace. It is getting harder and harder. 
In fact Talley’s AFFCO as everybody knows is locked out. We are not talking about strikes here and we are not talking about secret ballots of Talley’s shareholders we are talking about illegally locked out workers. There are stories coming out about how the union was illegally denied access time and time again to its workers in the meat plants. By the time the union got to them of course management had been in their ears had threatened them and had put them on an individual contract. 
So my amendment is to make sure that that situation is avoided because if the member and the Government insist that there must be a secret ballot of workers before the strike is in then as my colleague Andrew Little says most unions carry that out already but they should do it in their own way according to their own rules and according to their own democratic processes. However if the member insists on it the union should not need to obtain consent for access to a workplace in order to hold a secret ballot because if the employer can stand in the way of a union obtaining access for the purposes of holding a secret ballot how on earth is the member’s objective of requiring a secret ballot before a strike going to be met? How is it going to happen? How is that the purpose? 
He says it is all about democracy crying all the rubbish that he talks about from his 30 years ago when he was the worst union organiser in New Zealand’s history—all the rubbish from that. However accepting all of that I am sure that the member in the chair Tau Henare does not want to see the provisions of his bill impeded by employers who can deny access to unions who come in in order to carry out the requirements of his bill. [ 
Interruption 
] Yes and it will be very interesting to see what happens if an employer chooses to deny access for the purposes of holding a secret ballot. 
Does that mean that the workers can just carry on and have a strike because they have been denied access to a secret ballot? Does it mean the employer has broken the law in terms of allowing a secret ballot to be held? Does it mean the union has broken the law because it has not been able to hold a secret ballot? These are things that I do not think the member has thought through. 
As I said in previous discussions on this bill we genuinely tried to assist the member to meet his objectives by doing it in a very very simple form. That was in the previous amendment to insert new clause 5A which was about simply putting in unions’ rules a requirement that there must be a process for holding a secret ballot. But what his bill will do is make sure that there can be interference by employers which there already is in places like Talley’s. It will make sure that there will be interference not only in the process of secret ballots and challenges in the courts tying up the courts and compliance costs on unions like the Oceania Group workers who are just trying to make sure that their workers their members who are on $13.61 an hour—11c an hour above the minimum wage; shocking—