Mike Hosking: This Government's about to muck up workplace laws

Jim Bolger oversaw the unlocking of an indisputably successful policy, but has now returned to undo it all in an inexplicable brain explosion.

COMMENT: Here's one of your bigger political ironies.

The committee looking into fair pay agreements has come back to the Government with their recommendations - this is a major upheaval to the New Zealand workplace. It is a rocket fuelled boost for the power of the unions, and will ultimately damage the Government in terms of workplace relations, growth, and electoral support.

But, for now, they're into it like a robber's dog. This is the Labour Party paying back the labour unions for their support.

There are a number of recommendations to be deeply worried about, but right near or at the top is the end of individual contracts. Individual contracts are the contracts most of us are on. When the Employment Contracts Act came along under the 1990-99 Bolger government it revolutionised the workforce.

People were given a choice: back yourself, or stick with collective deals negotiated on your behalf by unions. Most chose to back themselves.

Bill Birch was the key driver of the Employment Contracts Act. His Prime Minister, and here comes the irony, was the same bloke who is now the head of the Fair Pay Committee making these retrospective and Orwellian recommendations.

Jim Bolger liberalised the workforce, and now he wants to return it to a time, he must know full well, didn't work for this country, hence he did something about it.

The Contracts Act, not unlike the end to farming subsides in the government before Bolger's, led by David Lange, was highly controversial. Unions vehemently argued that it was the end of the world, no good could come from it, and we were off to hell in a handcart.

And yet, would anyone of us go back? Would anyone of us argue to adopt subsidies? Would anyone of us argue our place in the trading world hasn't been immeasurably enhanced by the deregulation of the economy, and our ability to make product and sell it to international markets based on its merits?

We, as we speak, have watched our Prime Minister argue for fewer tariffs in Europe to afford an FTA with a region still deeply immersed in economic falsities and hocus pocus. And yet it's the same Prime Minister who presumably is going to embrace the Bolger recommendations to once again lock up our workforce, shackle our various industries to sector-wide agreements.

And those agreements will be triggered by the vote of 10 per cent, one in 10 of those working in the area. And lock them down to a one-stop shop, one size fits all, no room for merit or individuality type agreements that we so progressively got rid of 30 years ago.

And the man who oversaw the unlocking of that indisputably successful policy, has now returned to undo it all in an inexplicable brain explosion.