KEY POINTS:
Act MP Heather Roy has got stuck into Labour MP Mark Gosche for getting stuck into Spotless, the company that is in dispute with about 1000 cleaners and kitchen staff it employs in various district health boards around the country.
Maybe it was not so unusual that Gosche joined the picket lines when Spotless locked out the workers last week.
In life before parliament he was the fairly militant secretary of the Service Workers Union, the union leading the action against Spotless for not signing up to the same deal that other employers and DHBs have.
But now as a senior Government MP, a former cabinet minister and chairman of the industrial relations select committee, he is demanding that Spotless get out of public hospitals - then challenges the DHB members to get off the board if they can't tell Spotless to cough up.
"The DHBs should cancel the contracts with Spotless, take the work back in house and save the profit margin this company sends back to its overseas owners,"Gosche's statement says.
"I see no reason for having this type of company involved in the delivery of public hospital services as they add no value at all.
"The elected DHB members in the boards that employ Spotless cannot hide behind convenient legalities and say it is none of their business what Spotless does with their employees.
"The DHBs pay the bills and decide whether to contract to these companies or not. They should tell Spotless bluntly to pay like everybody else is or get out of the public hospital business."
Roy says Gosche should mind his own business and that, in the interests of patient health and safety, Spotless was right to instigate a lock-out.
The parties are due back in negotiation today according to radio reports.
It's a long time since union militancy was really big issue here - and often as not, there is a great deal of sympathy for the strikers (nurses, teachers and doctors have superseded boiler-makers, seamen, and wharfies). The Employment Contracts Act decimated the unions and Labour's Employment Relations Act didn't repair the damage.
Government MPs getting involved in industrial disputes is a big deal. I remember Laila Harre caused a crisis in the coalition Government in 2001 when she wanted to address striking workers from the Herald.
Helen Clark and Jim Anderton stopped her. The difference was that she was a minister, and acting Labour minister at that. The crisis was created when Anderton put his leadership on the line over it and effectively said: "It's Me or the Herald, Laila."
Across the Tasman Labor's industrial relations policy, finalised by hardline deputy leader Julia Gillard is set to be one of the key points of difference in the election later this year.
Even some of the Labour left here think it is too radical and could cost Labor the election. Gillard does have some out-there ideas. In a blend of Blairism and the Cultural Revolution, she has decided that Canberra's bureaucrats need some re-education.
Federal bureaucrats will be forced to work in "socially excluded communities" to get an understanding of frontline service delivery, under a Rudd Labor government, The Australian reports her as saying.
* Is it just me or have others noticed the increasing number of images we see on television news of New Zealand police officers carrying guns, as we did again at the weekend in Dunedin?
