I’m off to Australia this week, with partner John, to meet his two new grandsons, Chance and Chay (yes, well they are Australians) and so John can meet for just the second time his two-year old granddaughter, Mala - (and before you ask, we’re paying).
Because I can never separate the personal from the politics, I’ve made a list of things to look into including:
- Why Australian cleaners are now paid $21 an hour when ours are still paid $12.55, when they’re employed by the same contractors.
- What Rudd has done differently to Key to end the recession earlier and with lower unemployment than NZ.
- Why increasing workers’ rights in Australia is not seen as reducing productivity or harmful to business when in New Zealand it’s seen as the opposite.
- How many firms have really gone bust because they have to pay the same minimum redundancy pay I am proposing in my Redundancy Protection Bill.
- What’s happening with the National Transport Commission report that said that excessive client power and poor pay and conditions for truck drivers were a major cause of the high levels of deaths and injuries on Australian roads – and whether Joyce should take note.
- What forms of contracting arrangements for independent contractors do they have that give them more rights and collective bargaining power.
Should be a great trip! I’ll send photos.
Good list and good luck.
Yes, that is a good list, would love to hear what you find out.
You could brush up on your economics and read a bit more too, because Australia never went into recession. It posted GDP +0.4% in Q1 2009 and +0.6% in Q2.
2. Perhaps because of the smart economic management of John Howard’s government instead of the unwise spending by Clark’s (kiwirail…)? Just a thought!
I can answer the first one. Compulsory arbitration of wages.
Will Labour consider it?
I hope that you come back determined to give Labour a real, strong industrial relations system, rather than the neoliberal then rather middle of the road ones we’ve had for the last two decades. That’s the biggest reason why their wages are high and ours are low.
For instance bricklayers in Auckland charge $1.05 per brick.
In Australia it is less, 80c. Yet the wages of the bricklayers are less here. Same goes for the price of the bricks delivered, they are lower in Australia.
What Rudd has done differently to Key
Strip mined Western Australia!
GWW;
80c AUD is 97c NZD, so exchange rates explain 2/3rd’s of your price differential.
If the bricks are ‘manufactured’ locally, size and capacity of the plant/process probably explains most of the rest of the difference.
If they’re imported, transport costs will be a major issue to take account of too. Also the differing size of orders being imported to the two countries – Australia is more likely to get volume discounts.
Maybe you should pass on your findings to Dr Brash, who is allegedly concerned with closing the wage gap between here and Australia. It seems unlikely that he has cleaners in mind, but it is at this end of the spectrum that the wage gap is sharpest and least justified – running and Australia-wide concern might be more demanding, given the population difference, than the NZ equivalent, but cleaning is cleaning everywhere.