Mapp Wayne: Employment Relations Amendment Bill (No 2) Health and Safety in Employment Amendment Bill (No 2) Human Rights Amendment Bill — Third Readings 
Mapp Wayne: Employment Relations Amendment Bill (No 2) Health and Safety in Employment Amendment Bill (No 2) Human Rights Amendment Bill — Third Readings 
[Volume:621;Page:16271] 
Dr WAYNE MAPP (National—North Shore) 
: 
 Eighty percent of all workers in our country—1.7 million New Zealanders—have said no to unions clearly and emphatically. That is what they said. When people have had a clear choice they have left unions in droves and have never returned. There is one reason only for this bill and that is to boost union power and membership. This is Labour’s debt repayment to the unions. It is the price it paid for the support of the Council of Trade Unions. There is nothing in these bills to promote productivity or workplace harmony but there is everything in them to promote unions to boost their power and to deny choice to New Zealanders to choose their own bargaining arrangements. Instead they are forced against their wills into unions in order to have money extracted from their wages and paid to the unions for funding the Labour Party. 
I make a prediction tonight that the only parties to vote for the bill will be the Labour Party the Green Party and the Maori Party. We have heard a lot of cant from the other side about conspiracies between the Maori Party and other parties in this House but on these kinds of issues members know where Labour is looking to. It is looking to the Maori Party and to the Green Party and that is the shape of the coalition it would put up to the country at the next election. New Zealanders have every reason to be afraid. 
This legislation is a return to the bad old days. For 50 years from 1940 to 1990 we had compulsory unionism in this country. Those were the years of New Zealand’s economic failure. We were consistently below the OECD in our growth rate. We started off in the 1950s with the third-highest living standards in the world. Forty years later we were twentieth and sliding rapidly. Why did that happen? Frankly it was due to union power. That is the simple truth. Unions extracted huge monopoly payments in particular areas—the wharfs the freezing works the railways. Workforces were grossly inflated and there was appalling productivity and feather-bedding all round. 
The reality is that even Mr Swain knows the truth of that. Any fair-minded people in this Parliament across all the parties would know the truth of that. I can tell members that people actually made the choice to join labouring workforces rather than go to tertiary education. Why did they do that? They did it because it paid more. The price the country paid was lower productivity and the reality is that our country went backwards. 
I have to acknowledge that that turned around starting I guess in 1984. That party will turn the clock backwards. What it is promoting is an effective return to monopoly union power. 
We will see multi-employer collective contracts and a constant pattern of strikes. Frankly we have already seen that happen. One has only to look at the first warning shots the wharf strike at Ports of Auckland. People came from Australia and from Tauranga with the clear and total objective of getting one national award across all the ports. What followed from that was lower productivity feather-bedding practices and strikes at critical times. 
Our economy is uniquely vulnerable. We are more dependent on primary-product exports than any other developed country in the world. Everyone knows that to be true. Therefore strategic strikes paralyse our country. They are intended to extract monopoly pricing and feather-bedding practices and this Government delivers precisely that to them. Why does it do that? Because its members are all unionists including the Minister. That is the truth of it and this is their pay-off to their old ideological allegiances. 
 We have six fundamental reservations about the legislation. The first is that the collective contract processes will be used to extract bargaining fees. The Minister will deny that but the essence of voluntary unionism is such that one has to join the union. Under Labour’s approach people will now have to pull out of the union. It is a fundamental reversal of the principle of human rights whereby people join the organisations they want to join and are not dragooned or forced into them as this legislation will do and then have to pull themselves out against no doubt antagonistic union members. 
The second objection is that the legislation promotes collective contracts over individual contracts. Right through the legislation there are a whole series of measures that force employers to sit down with unions in order to negotiate collective contracts. Employers do not have the right to say they object. That is prohibited to the point of incurring a fine. That leads us to the third fundamental objection. Honest and robust negotiations are likely to lead to fines. Do members know why? Because the union will say that honest and robust negotiations are a breach of good faith. 
Hon Maurice Williamson 
: That’s what they all say. 
Dr WAYNE MAPP 
: That is exactly what they will say and unions will go to the employment authority and effect fines of $10000. That is a chilling and dangerous precedent to set. No other Western country has that provision in its industrial law. This Government is sending us back to the sorts of practices we would expect to see in Stalinist Russia—the sorts of things frankly that I thought we had left behind 15 or 20 years ago. 
The fourth fundamental objection is that the authority will now be able to set the terms of employment contracts. The right of free will and the ability of people to negotiate their bargains is lost. We are going back to the old practice of national award-setting—of mediation whereby the terms of the deal are not just facilitated but are actually set. 
The fifth objection is that the legislation destroys value in businesses. This employment relations legislation can properly be called the “Business Value Destruction Bill” whose effect will be particularly acute for small businesses in the service sector. 
Finally there is a sixth problem. One would think it extraordinary that after a year of discussion on the issues of the treaty what does Labour do—a year after Orewa? The Government is bringing into employment law the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi. Surely the Minister cannot actually believe in doing that yet he is precisely promoting it. Maybe he is on instruction from Margaret Wilson because it is the sort of thing one would expect her to put into legislation. He is pursuing an agenda that is divisive for our country. 
Hon Maurice Williamson 
: “Swainy and the girls” now. 
Dr WAYNE MAPP 
: “Swainy and the girls”! I want to say very briefly what National will do. We will stamp out union preferences in legislation. We will fix up the personal grievance procedures. We will give young workers a real opportunity to get employment with probation periods for 90 days or thereabouts. Interestingly enough Mr Tamihere supports that but his voice is about to disappear from this Government and I suggest ultimately from this Parliament. This country is faced with a very clear choice: people can vote for Labour the Greens and the Maori Party and what they will get is union power—more and more of it over time. The other choice is the choice of freedom opportunity and prosperity—that is to vote National for the freedom of workers employers and the people of our country.