Eight Ministers included on National’s ‘hit’ list

Press, 14 February 1986, Page 3

Eight Ministers included on National’s ‘hit’ list

By

PATRICIA HERBERT

in Wellington

The Minister of Labour, Mr Rodger, celebrated his forty-sixth birthday yesterday under a barrage of criticism as National pursued its campaign of this year targeting Ministers it considers “weak.”

Also on the “hit” list, according to the Leader of the Opposition, Mr McLay, are the Minister of Finance, Mr Douglas, the Minister of Education, Mr Marshall, the Minister

of Lands, Mr Wetere, the Minister of Defence, Mr O’Flynn, the Minister of Health, Dr Bassett, the Minister of Police and Women’s Affairs, Mrs Hercus, and the Minister of Employment, Mr Burke.

Mr McLay identified Mr Rodger on Wednesday as one of the targets, dubbing him "Sideline Stan” and describing him as not just a poor performer but a non-performer. Mr Bill Birch, the

party’s new spokesman on industrial relations, continued the attack yesterday, accusing Mr Rodger of not fulfilling his responsibilities. “He is ignoring his own legislation and has become a bystander in the process of extraordinarily high wage settlements,” he said.

Wages, he said, were being fixed not by negotiations but by strike and, listing a number of current disputes, Mr Birch challenged the Minister to indicate publicly how each might be resolved. Mr Rodger replied that in two cases, those of Northland Hospital kitchen staff and the South Auckland rubbish collectors, he was attempting to organise compulsopr conferences, and that in most of the others the parties were still talking. The dispute in the freezing industry he is only monitoring at this stage because he is convinced that there is little he could usefully achieve. (Report, front page.) The basis of the Opposition’s allegations of weakness, however, is Mr Rodger’s refusal to intervene except if the national interest is obviously affected and then usually only if he has the consent of the disputants. It is a policy which reflects his commitment to reduce the State’s involvement in the whole area of industrial relations and it is a policy he has stuck to against often considerable public pressure.

He again defended it yesterday while also acknowledging that there had been too many stoppages. “I believe it is for the employers and the workers to negotiate these things through. They are the closest to the scene,” he said.

He also said the history of Ministerial intervention showed that rather than bringing about a speedy resolution, it tended to slow the process as both sides waited for whatever initiative the Minister might choose to make. Mr Rodger put down the readiness this round to resort to direct action in part to the fact that it had in many instances proved successful in that it had "brought some rewards” for the unions involved.

This, he suggested, had encouraged others to take the same path. However, he said there were problems with the system itself; that the back-log of cases was causing time delays and that he hoped through the Green Paper Review to improve access to the Arbitration Court.

Mr George Gair, the Opposition spokesman on labour before the recent reshuffle, has persistently criticised the Government for not insisting on a wage guideline for the round. Mr Rodger agreed yesterday that the “hands off’ approach has led to over-high settlements but attributed the blow-out to the tensions that had been bottled up in the freeze and to the impact of the Higher Salaries Commission report which .he estimated had added 3 per cent to the wage movement. He also said he had advised both the unions and the employers that a guideline would lead to greater stability but that both had rejected it, the employers in favour of flexibility and the unions because they wanted a wages push for the lowpaid.