Goldsmith PaulHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Very gracious of you Mr Chair. Yes look I'd like to pick up on the comments from the Minister Iain Lees-Galloway—in particular his reference to the imbalance between employers and employees being the primary driver for a lot of this expansion of union power. I suppose the obvious point to make is that the New Zealand economy is not like your typical British one where the origins of the union movement developed with very large companies with thousands of employees working in the coal and other industries. It's an economy based on very small businesses with many of them being very small. So if we look at Supplementary Order Papers 111 and 114 it becomes relevant because if you look at a small business with three or four employees a couple of whom are union members—for example a little bookshop in the Mount Eden shops where I visit. They've got five employees and they are really struggling to survive in a very difficult industry with high rents with—Hon Scott Simpson: Retail is tough. Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: Retail is tough everywhere you go around the country. So it's a tough business. Every day they are struggling to pay the wages bill to find the GST in the months when it's due to pay the provisional tax—all the things that they're doing. Whether it's offensive or naive to think that the employer running around in those circumstances and struggling to stay afloat is all-powerful and the employees are somehow all weak—that's just not a realistic description of how the New Zealand economy works—Hon Scott Simpson: Ideological. Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: —and to say that that small employer with a handful of people and a couple of union members has to be liable for paying for the conduct of union activity during their working hours and to foot the bill for them to be doing whatever it is that they want to do I don't think is a reasonable thing. That's why I support Scott Simpson's Supplementary Order Paper 111. Then when we come to Dan Bidois' Supplementary Order Paper 114 it is about removing clause 13 which draws all employers into collective agreements concerning more than two employers and this brings in the regional setting. Again I mean everybody's trying to work out which are going to be the two industries that are going to fall into these multi-employer collective agreements that so many employers are worried about. The Prime Minister when she was under pressure to explain just what—there's so much uncertainty across the business community about what impact this will have on their businesses and we've combined all that uncertainty around—Hon Ruth Dyson: Stop scaremongering. Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: Well it's not scaremongering actually. It's about again this assumption that businesses are just there to be milked and that they are powerful. So all this uncertainty is out there about what impact this will have and what industries are going to be drawn into this old nationalised agreement. It's implying that you're going to have to deal in the same way for somebody employed in Auckland as you will on the Hokianga Harbour or down on the West Coast or over in the Wairarapa even though the circumstances of those businesses are colossally different. So if we go back to my example of the bookshop in Mount Eden it has to be—Marja Lubeck: Are we on Part 1 of the bill? Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: It is Part 1. [Interruption] I don't know what you're talking about. We're talking about clause 13 in Part 1 and that is what we are focused on here. We want to ensure that our small businesses have the ability to survive and continue to provide the opportunities not just for employers but for the people who are growing and building those companies themselves. These small-business owners are already being confronted with the prospect—and you might say scaremongering"; it's not scaremongering—of a capital gains tax on those small businesses that they're building. They are—Clayton Mitchell: It's got nothing to do with it. Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: The relevance to the bill—[Time expired]"