Williamson Maurice: Employment Relations Law Reform Bill — In Committee 
Williamson Maurice: Employment Relations Law Reform Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:620;Page:16185] 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON (National—Pakuranga) 
: 
 I am delighted to take a call in this debate on the title of the Employment Relations Law Reform Bill. All I can say is that that title is not even close to what it should be. It should really be something along the lines of: “How do we find the mechanism to get money out of the workers and fund it through the union movement so that it can help Labour with its election campaign coffers?”. 
Hon David Cunliffe 
: That’s unworthy. 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: No that is exactly what it is. I say to Mr Cunliffe who is the man more hated by his colleagues than any other member in this House that had the National Party ever been passing legislation through this House late at night and had the Business Roundtable—[ 
Interruption 
] 
The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson) 
: I am sorry to interrupt the honourable member but interjections should be rare reasonable and relevant—or witty if possible. I invite members to look up Speakers’ ruling 56/1. 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: There is no chance of any of those three coming from Mr Cunliffe. Had the National Party been passing legislation late at night and had the Business Roundtable or Business New Zealand been sitting out in the back room the Labour Party absolutely would have been waging war about that. I ask members to look at who is pulling Labour’s strings and to look at who is the driving force behind the Labour Government. Of course National was absolutely never prepared to have that. It never happened and never would under a National Government because we made our own decisions. Who was skulking around in the lobbies just straight through the wall in the little briefing rooms and acting as an adviser we are now told? 
Brian Connell 
: Who? 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: Ross Wilson the head of the Council of Trade Unions that is who. 
Brian Connell 
: He wasn’t allowed here. 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: No I did not think he was allowed in here either. We have had an interesting ruling from the Speaker that the Minister or the Minister in the chair who is running a bill has the right to have whomever he or she wants in the precincts of Parliament. There are some phenomenal implications for that. Let us imagine if when the Prostitution Reform Bill was going through we had had some prostitutes in the back room giving the Minister advice. What sort of a headline would that have given this Parliament? 
 But no Ross Wilson was sitting out the back string-pulling: “This is what we need in the Labour movement.” What they want because this is the most important element of this bill is the pseudo-compulsion of joining a union and paying a bargaining fee. The sting in the tail is that if one does not want to join a union or pay a fee but still wants to be a free member of society and just get on with one’s job there is a second double-sting that says: “You don’t have to compulsorily join the union and so on”—that sounds good except for one thing—“but you still have to pay money through the form of a bargaining fee.” If members have ever heard of: “We catch you if you go left; we catch you if you go right; we catch you anyway” sort of trick then that is what this bill is. Why? Well the union coffers have to be built up with money. This has nothing to do with principle and nothing to do with workers having an individual say in their employment contracts. 
At the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee we heard over and over again the following comments from a plethora of really decent honest good employers. I will give members an example. A man called Bill Dalbeth runs the Howick bus company in my area and he is a really nice man with a good family who are well respected. They run their private bus company and do it very well. If members were to go and have a talk to the employees of the Howick bus company they would be told that he is one of the best employers in the country. At the committee I asked him how many of his staff were unionised and he said it was probably two-thirds. I asked him how he felt about that. He said that it would be easier for him if they were all unionised and he would be very comfortable if they joined up but he respected their choice not to do so. So it is not like he is anti-union because he told us that it would be easier if all his employees were unionised. I said to him: “After you’ve negotiated your collective agreement each time with those who are organised in the union what do you do with the other third?”. He said: “Quite simply we do not want a second class of citizen. We do not want to be accused of treating our staff in different ways. We just say to them: ‘Look guys this is what we’ve agreed to with the two-thirds who are unionised and it’s the same for you. OK. Nothing different nothing special nothing extra.” 
How sensible is that? Who would not support the right of employers to say that they did not want two classes of citizen or two standards for their employees? But this Minister says: “No we’re not going to have that. If you’re in the union you can have a sweetheart deal but if you’re not the only way you can get it is by paying a bargaining fee.”