Prebble Richard: Employment Relations Law Reform Bill — In Committee 
Prebble Richard: Employment Relations Law Reform Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:620;Page:16066] 
Hon RICHARD PREBBLE (ACT) 
:  
I will take up that last point first. This is worse than compulsory unionism. Under compulsory unionism at least everybody who was in the union was represented. This is the sort of trade union paradise in which the trade unions get paid by everyone but do not have to represent them. Under this bill there can be 100 workers and only 10 belong to the union. That is quite a good analogy to make because only 10 percent of all workers belong to the union. The union comes along and says that it will negotiate on behalf of the 10 people and therefore the other 90 ought to pay. That is what the Government is proposing. It is called a bargaining fee. 
Lianne Dalziel 
: What percentage has to agree? 
Hon RICHARD PREBBLE 
: What percentage? Does the member think that having a ballot makes it right? I would ask that member where the provisions are to ensure that the bargaining fee bears any relationship to the work that the union does Where is the provision to ensure that none of the bargaining fee is used to finance that member’s election expenses? 
Dr Wayne Mapp 
: No provisions at all! 
Hon RICHARD PREBBLE 
: There are no provisions at all. This is an American proposal. It exists in America. [ 
Interruption 
] The member from the Green Party I know hates America and therefore probably does not even know that this happens. But yes it does. That is where the Government got it from. In the United States the union movement not only claims to have bargained for people who did not ask it to bargain but then spends the money supporting various causes. That is an outrage. 
Another outrage in the bill is that the concept of good faith has been extended beyond its common law meaning which is mutual trust and confidence. The new meanings are so confusing that they will actually be whatever the Employment Court says they will be. Does that matter? Yes it does. Because if someone is found to be in breach of good faith then the Employment Court—that is the State—can then start to fix the terms of employment. So a small business will think that it is employing people with agreements that were made between employer and employees but is then told that it has not met the good-faith test. That could be just because an employer has said no to an unreasonable demand. Then the State will decide how much and on what terms the business is employing people. There is a word for that and it is communism. 
We have another concept in the bill of “vulnerable” employees. No one has come along to explain what this concept means or whether it is needed. It is another huge extension of State power. I warn the Parliament that these are the provisions that the Government tried to introduce when it first introduced the Employment Relations Bill. Thanks to the efforts of my party the National Party and employers up and down the country we managed to have those clauses taken out. Then the Government said what a great bill the Employment Relations Act is when it is only as a result of the amendments made. Here we have the Government taking a huge step backwards towards compulsory trade unionism. I think it is worse than compulsory trade unionism. Trade unionists will get paid for doing nothing. That is an outrage. It will not help prosperity. It will not help employees in New Zealand. It will certainly not help employers and it will not help to improve industrial relations. This is a bad bill and it goes in the opposite direction to that which the Government was boasting about. 
Today I heard the Government boasting that New Zealand was a good place to start a business. This bill goes in the opposite direction and the Government cannot have it both ways. The consequences of this bill will not mean a collapse of the economy tomorrow but will mean that it will be harder for one New Zealander to offer a job to another. It will mean that people will have to pay money to a trade union that they did not join that they did not ask to bargain for them and that they did not ask to provide services. They do so because the Labour Party is abusing the power of the State to take that money from workers. This is a bad bill. It is some of the worst legislation that I have seen in this Chamber and I have been here for 27 years. This is very bad legislation and we ought to vote it down.