SpeechJAN LOGIE (Green): Thank you Madam Speaker. I'm pretty stoked to get to stand up and take a call on this piece of legislation finally. Sitting in this part of the bench we're not always in agreement with the Government but I can tell the House this evening that tonight we are 100 percent celebrating this piece of legislation.The Green Party believe that at the heart of a fair society one of the key cornerstones are decent wages stable jobs and safe working conditions. All of those things have been significantly under threat in this country for the last three decades. We've seen international evidence—and I've heard from the National Party members this evening about how great and how much better things are now than they were before the economic reforms of the 1980s and 1990s. Things are so much better! We are so prosperous now—so prosperous—that the incomes of the top 1 percent have doubled in that time period—prosperous! But the disposable incomes of the poorest 10 percent have flat-lined basically since the 1980s. The money rather than trickling down has funnelled and been pulled up to the wealthiest to the point when 50 percent of the collective wealth in this country is less than 1 percent of the wealth held by the top 1 percent. Like I can't even get my head around those numbers. It has been an absolute transfer of wealth from the majority of us to the minority of us and that is the prosperity that the National Party has been talking about and they are fighting to protect this evening. That is not something the Green Party wants to support.We believe that our collective effort the benefits of it should be shared across those who are doing the work. And the international evidence is really clear: strong unions and collective bargaining frameworks are the best tools for delivering decent pay stable jobs and safe workplaces. And they are our best tool for reducing inequality as well as not at all magically improving performance and productivity. We're being told by the National Party that the interests of working people are in opposition to productivity and collective effort. It is just simply not true. The reverse is true. Since the 1980s—and we've got to a point where now less than one in five working people are covered by a collective contract in this country compared to the 70 percent that it used to be and before those radical right-wing reforms of the 1980s and 1990s. I just want to also challenge the idea that's been put forward by the National Party that this is left versus right. This is radical right-wing versus actually the majority of the rest of the world and including conservative right-wing people like the Hon Jim Bolger who led the working party that came up with this proposal. This is not right versus left; this is radical thinking versus the rest of us. The Greens are very happy to stand by the restoration of decent conditions because those reforms from the 1980s and 1990s that took a sledgehammer to our social structures and employment laws resulted in more people being in precarious work; more people being on low wages; the voices and experience of working people—and most of us will have had this experience—not being valued or heard in their workplaces; and poor decision-making happening as a result; an entrenched what I would describe as a health and safety crisis where our rates of workplace injuries and deaths are so much higher than comparable countries; where productivity has not kept pace with other countries. And we heard from the Minister how productivity growth in Australia where they have sector-based bargaining is 46 percent higher than it is here since we got rid of sector-based bargaining and where employers have been competing actively on wages not service not innovation not product—on wages; where a previous National Party Prime Minister was proud to say that we were competing internationally on the benefit of our low wages—on the benefit of our low wages. And the consequence of that has been two out of five children living in poverty in this country were in working families where parents did not and do not now have the time to spend with their children that they need to where they don't have the time to engage in their community to return to their homes to reconnect to their marae and do not have the time or the money to be able to keep a roof over their head. We've seen increased transients and poor educational outcomes as a result and we've seen a crisis of mental health. These things are not disconnected; this is the result of policies that undermine our sense of collectivity as a country that undermine the voice and the value of working people in our country.And through the pandemic to me it's been incredibly obvious that the country has come to a realisation that actually things have been a bit out of whack that these essential workers—there's cleaners and security guards and bus drivers and retail workers—who have put themselves and their families' lives on the line on the daily to look after us have been undervalued. We've seen such strong support for an increase in wages to ensure that they are all on a living wage. But we've had no mechanism as a country to be able to do that because we have no sector-based bargaining model. This will enable us as a country to say thank you to enable those employers and those employees to be able to work together to come up with some decent wages and conditions to say thank you that essential jobs in a pandemic are essential jobs every day that we need to be valuing the work of every person in this country and that exploitation has no place in a decent society.So the Greens are so pleased to be supporting this bill. I will say there will be some things that we will be looking at in select committee that we want to explore and maybe see if we can strengthen. So for the Greens we know that the Government has other work going on around contractors but penalties will apply for employers who try to avoid fair pay agreement coverage by misclassifying employees as contractors. This is a really important area. We do not want to have any system that enables employers to create more precariousness by moving people into contracts out of employment to avoid this. And we need to make sure that the work around the rights and employment conditions for contractors goes alongside and is connected to this work.We also would like to see the restoration of the recommendations of the fair pay working group around what should be mandatory in agreements. The current proposal is that it's wages hours and overtime. The initial proposal was that it also include redundancy flexible working skills and training and leave. And we would also want to see health and safety because of the crisis that we have in our country around health and safety in our workplaces. So that is something we'll be exploring.We'll also be exploring the denial of the right to strike because the Green Party are very very proud to continue to support the importance of the right to strike. And we've seen the impact on Allied Health workers recently on them being denied that right to strike and how it protracts and extends wage negotiations when that right is taken away. We want to make sure this works though we do support the right for determination.Anyway finally it's a bloody good day and we're very happy to support this.