Union leader urges Minister to stay

Press, 24 June 1986, Page 3

Union leader urges Minister to stay

By

PATRICIA HERBERT

in Wellington

The secretary of the National Union of Railwaymen, Mr Don Goodfellow, urged the Minister of Education, Mr Marshall, yesterday not to resign should Wanganui’s East Town workshops be closed.

"We would be very reluctant to see Russell Marshall resign. We think he is an excellent member of Parliament and an excellent Minister and we don’t want to lose people of his calibre,” Mr Goodfellow said. Mr Marshall told the Wellington newspaper, the “Evening Post,” yesterday that he would have to reconsider his political future if the workshop closed because he had given assurances that it would stay open. “On one occasion I said that this is symbolically so important to Wanganui and Railways has been such an important employer here it is worth more than my job,” he was reported as saying.

He also said he had not been a party to the Rail-

ways Corporation restructuring package and had learned the details only when they were announced publicly. Mr Marshall said that for the Cabinet to support the proposed closing would be a breach of faith and that he would fight it all the way. The Prime Minister, Mr Lange, also said he would seek to dissuade Mr Marshall from taking up the threat of resignation, but said he did not think it was in character for Mr Marshall to “buy out of a fight” by resigning. Mr Goodfellow suggested that if anyone resigned it should be the Minister of Transport, Mr Prebble, because he was the one who had “broken the promises." He was referring to Mr Prebble’s “Save Rail” election drive which he said the N.U.R. had Interpreted under “the old idea that railways should be protected as a social service and a promoter of regional development.” Mr Lange conceded that key supporters of Labour’s “Save Rail” campaign may have taken it

to mean the preservation of railway jobs and conceded also that Labour had not gone out of its way to disabuse them of that notion. Mr Lange said, however, that Mr Prebble had campaigned very strongly to maintain a viable railway system and that it was obvious jobs would have to be shed to achieve this. “If some of the detail of that has meant a distortion of what was thought without access to that data and projection, that is a matter for regret,” he said. He defended the planned reorganisation as “a pretty valiant effort” to reconstruct the Railways so. that it provided employment and transport and so that it did not “collapse under its own inertia.” He also said it. was important to remember that those who did lose their jobs would not be “thrown on some sort of economic trash area” but would instead be offered retraining, relocation, or substantial compensation payments.