Life is simple for politicians out of power. Problems can be presented as a clash of principles, issues painted in black and white. When they get into government they quickly find themselves working in shades of grey. No politician could attest to that better than the new Government's Minister of Workplace Relations, Iain Lees-Galloway.
He had barely found his Beehive suite before the local film industry was at his door, worried that he would repeal National's infamous "Hobbit Law". He told them, as reported in The Business on Friday, that while he wants to restore collective bargaining rights for New Zealand actors and production crews, that will not necessarily mean repeal.
He is treating the movie industry as a "complete anomaly" in this country's workplace arrangements, which is more or less what the previous Government said when it put through the Employment Relations (Film Production Work) Amendment Act in 2010 to ensure Warner Brothers did not take Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy to another country.
The problem then, as now, was the ability of actors and crew hired as independent contractors to seek a change of status in employment law part way through the production. The American studios were said to be unwilling to finance films here unless that risk was removed.
The industry is not such an anomaly in fact. Employers' use of independent contracting to bypass employment liabilities has been a recurring issue in industrial relations law since the 1990s. Actors Equity was well aware of that when made itself unpopular by opposing an exemption for Warner Brothers seven years ago.
