Fenton Darien: Construction Contracts Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeFenton Darien: Construction Contracts Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 11 June 2013. Volume:691;Page:11016. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DARIEN FENTON (Labour):I rise to take a call—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): It is a split call. I am sorry to interrupt the member. It is actually a split call.DARIEN FENTON: No it is not a split call.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): It is not a split call. Thank you.DARIEN FENTON: I am pleased to take a call on the Construction Contracts Amendment Bill. As my colleagues have said we will be supporting this bill and voting for this bill to go to the Commerce Committee. However I also agree with my colleagues when they say that this is a weak bill. It does very little. But we think that during the select committee process there will be an opportunity to canvass a range of issues in the construction industry because frankly the construction industry is in a bit of a mess. It is in a bit of a mess and we see that no more clearly than we do in Christchurch at the moment where the failure of this Government over several years to train skilled workers to provide for trade training is coming to a head in Christchurch where we are going to need something like up to 18000 workers in the next few years. We are going to be relying on bringing in skilled migrants from overseas and that has already begun.I think that what we will hear in the select committee process are the many disputes that are coming out of the Christchurch construction process. We are already hearing some of the stories where large companies are employing contractors subcontractors and sub-subcontractors and about abuses of migrant workers where they are being put into accommodation where 12 of them are supposed to live in four rooms and there is no attention to their rights as far as I can see. As far as I can tell the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment has not put any extra resources into the enforcement of workers’ rights around the construction projects in Canterbury. It is not just workers who are employed in employment relations; it is workers who are employed as contractors. We all know that there is a huge problem there that needs a lot more work. Labour is committed to doing a lot more work around the small guy—whom Tau Henare says he is standing up for—to make sure that they actually have some protection because quite frankly at the moment they have very little.When a company like Mainzeal Property and Construction fails it is as David Clark said the little guy at the bottom of the chain who ends up getting nothing. Let us remember what it is like to be a sub-subcontractor. You are not an employee. You do not have rights to holidays or sick leave. If a family member is sick well you just have to take a day off and go without pay. You do not have the rights that other employeesdo. At the bottom of the construction chain we are talking about some very vulnerable workers. I think those issues need to come to the fore as well in this select committee process.The other disgrace going on in the construction industry is health and safety. Look I give credit to the Government for its Independent Taskforce on Workplace Health and Safety but we do know that one of the high-risk industries is the construction industry. Why is that? It is because of the deregulation that has gone on over the last 20 years. In fact the taskforce pinpointed the deregulation of the labour market that happened in the 1990s as the beginning of the problem that we have with health and safety. Construction workers get killed. They get injured. They get killed and injured in numbers that happen only in other high-risk industries like forestry. The Government is saying that it has a code around that and that it is going to work. Well the truth is that we are going to have to do an awful lot more in construction. It goes to the heart of the little guy and the relationships they have the pressure on them to earn a living and the pressure on them to work when perhaps they should not and to take risks. That is the heart of the problem in the construction industry as well as in other industries like forestry.The other thing about contracting of course is that it is full of rorts. It is full of rorts. It is good that this bill is going forward and that there will be some mild—very mild—amendments to provide for dispute resolution but as we have seen with Mainzeal Property and Construction there needs to be a lot more done as well. It is not only just what happens to the sub-subcontractors and their rights and what happens in health and safety; it is also how they are protected. It is the subcontractors and the ones at the lowest level who are hit the hardest when a construction company fails. They are always last in the creditor queue. They often miss out on money they are owed. If you take that in conjunction with the fact that they do not get holiday pay they do not get sick leave and they have no savings mostly because they are working from job to job often on jobs that go for a couple of weeks or that might go for a month and then their company goes bust and they end up with nothing—Hon Christopher Finlayson: You’re off on a tangent again. Concentrate.DARIEN FENTON: Chris Finlayson will not know anything about that because he has never been near a construction site. He would not have—Hon Christopher Finlayson: I was the Acting Minister of Labour and did a great job.DARIEN FENTON: I beg your pardon?Hon Christopher Finlayson: I was the Acting Minister of Labour and started the report.DARIEN FENTON: Oh you were Minister of Labour for about 2 weeks and what did that Minister do? He defended health and safety in the forestry industry and a code of practice that is hopeless—that is hopeless absolutely hopeless. But as I was saying the subcontractors are almost always last in the creditor queue. They miss out on money. When you put that together with the fact that they have so few rights they are trying to run their business they do not even get a holiday and they do not even get holiday pay or sick pay or any of the other things that employees get it is not fair. It is not fair and that is why Labour has been doing something about it by talking to the industry to look at some sensible cost-effective options that offer a fair deal without loading cost on to the sector.As we heard a lot of people were dismissive of the fact that the Hon Clayton Cosgrove has been going around the country but may I tell the House that he has had an excellent reception as have all of us in Labour who have reached out to contractors who have actually met with them and spoken with them had meetings had breakfast meetings and talked about the issues. There has been a very good reception. It has been interesting because they have said to us: “Well at least someone is listening.” At leastsomeone is listening because that Government is not listening to the issues that are going on in the construction industry and the issues that are going on for contractors. So we have done a whole lot of visits around that and we have looked at some proposals: one is contractors’ liens and the other one is statutory construction trusts. We are taking those options to the industry for assessment and comment.We are being constructive about this. We are being constructive in that we are supporting this bill to go to the select committee but there are many issues that need to be canvassed apart from the very narrow purpose of this bill. There are very many issues that need to be canvassed. One of the other ones that I think may come through—and I have talked about the immigration issues in Christchurch—will be other immigration issues that come through as well. Once again I was pleased last week that Simon Bridges took the credit for the fact that we are seeing more abuses of migrant workers being dealt with but I have had construction workers come to see me. They have talked to me about the fact that they have been lured to New Zealand and they are stuck. They are stuck on a work permit that is tied to a job. They are being exploited. They are not even getting their entitlements—they are not even getting their entitlements. So I think those issues will come through too. Yes let us hear about the issues in the bill but let us also talk about what is really going on in the construction industry. Let us talk about what it is really like for contractors and get some more protections for them. Let us talk about health and safety. Let us do something real for a change.