Parker DavidHon DAVID PARKER (Labour): I was challenged by the last speaker Dr Parmjeet Parmar to immediately take to my feet and respond to the question of what we do with a contractor who has got more than one principal. The member was on the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee and was there when the Parliamentary Counsel Office drafted an amendment at the request of the select committee. That very point which was a fair point had been raised by submitters and raised by rural delivery people saying: Look every individual contract that we have here would be insufficient but you take them altogether and we get much more than minimum wage. Please do not include us." So there was a clause drafted which is in Supplementary Order Paper 203 because that amendment was blocked by Dr Parmjeet Parmar and others at the select committee. It says in clause 10 on Supplementary Order Paper 203 adding clause 6A(2) to the Minimum Wage Act that this requirement to pay the minimum wage "does not apply to a specified contractor"—which is the terminology—"who is providing a service to more than 1 principal at the same time …". I think that is pretty clear. I am not going to refer to anything else that that speaker raised because all of those points have already been addressed quite well by either me or other members speaking in favour of the bill. I will refer to the premature release that we had from Business New Zealand. It has not really covered itself with glory on this bill. I read the opinion piece in the newspaper. In fairness to those at Business New Zealand they obviously had not read the amendments that had been proposed but been blocked by the National Party members in the way that we referred to earlier. I know that because having seen their misinformed piece in the paper which did not refer to all of the protections that address most of their concerns I met with them and gave them the form of the bill that had those amendments in them and they plainly had not seen them previously. Further I said: "Look if there are any other provisions here that you would like to have incorporated that would make this more practical I am open for business because I am really just trying to cure this social ill without overregulating things." They came up with three proposed suggestions all of which are in the Supplementary Order Paper. There is a transitional provision that says that this will never apply to contracts that are already in existence even after the Act comes into effect. So it will not affect those arrangements that are already in place. There is a provision making it clear that where there is an agreement as to what a reasonable time is that agreement is at the time the contract is formed not half-way through it. I thought that was pretty clear anyway but I was willing to clarify that. Then lastly there is a provision to have an equity and good conscience discretion so that for the labour inspector having taken all those things into account it still would not be fair to ping the person who was not paying the minimum wage—well they did not have to ping them. So that is in there too. Notwithstanding that this premature release from Business New Zealand shows that if it is right Peter Dunne is going to cast a vote against this at the Committee stage which is a shame. I am taking it that someone would have raised a point of order if the press release was right in saying that this bill has already been voted down at Committee stage because I have been here for the last couple of hours and hopefully I was not asleep so long that I did not notice that. The one other thing that I have not responded to was the question from Kevin Hague and the Greens who asked why we had gone for a list in schedule 2. The original form of this bill when it went under Darien Fenton's name at a previous iteration actually did not have a list; it applied to all contractual relationships. We actually put in a list to reduce compliance costs because we did not want to catch brain surgeons who are plainly paid more than the minimum wage so we went for a list approach. Really having gone through all of this if I was going to do it again—I think this bill is good—the better approach for a future Parliament is to actually have the approach that is taken in Canada which is dependent contractor legislation. This is because that then does go further and addresses the things that Dr Parmjeet Parmar says at least that she is worried about—because you could also clean up at the same time things like holiday pay unfair terms and conditions and contracts that prevent people who are in these dependent contract relationships even joining together and telling their boss that the terms are not good enough. I will wait until I hear any other new questions."