Clark David: Employment Relations Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeClark David: Employment Relations Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 23 October 2014. Volume:701;Page:241. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr DAVID CLARK (Labour—Dunedin North):I again have a question that I hope the Minister in the chair Michael Woodhouse can provide some clarification on. The Minister might like to follow the logic and explain to me whether I have understood it correctly or not. Part 2 refers to the new schedule 1AA that will be inserted into the Act and that schedule contains new section 8 which states that “Despite section 95B of this Act (as inserted by section 56 of the 2013 Act) an employer must not make a specified deduction of pay in relation to—(a) any partial strike that ended before the commencement of the 2013 Act; or (b) any period of a partial strike that occurred before the commencement of the 2013 Act.” The effect of that new section is that it means that although the proposed strike tax in clause 56 in Part 1 cannot be applied to partial strike action that has already occurred it can apply to partial strikes already under way from the date of the Act’s coming into effect which effectively means that workers who have already committed to strike action with no expectation of pay deductions could find themselves penalised.For me natural justice is at issue here. If the workers are already engaged in partial strike action and it is of an ongoing nature the Act comes into effect. They have already committed to that course of action and they can then be penalised for a decision that was made before the Act was even thought of or at least certainly before it was being considered by this Parliament. That to me raises an issue of natural justice and I am wanting to know whether the Minister is trying to create a precedent here that suggests that natural justice should no longer apply.I personally see some parallels in a local case in Dunedin North where we had some school buses that were taking students to their nearest State school and not much further but delivering them to other schools in the area. A rule was interpreted differently by the Government that was in the last Parliament which took away the right of students to travel on that bus unless they were going to the nearest State school. It was an interpretation of the rules that was different from that which had applied before. I am sure that the Minister in the chair is familiar with this example because he had a transport portfolio at the time and I did petition him at some length to consider the natural justice aspects of taking away the right previously enjoyed by students to travel to any school in the city on the school bus provided it took them only as far as the local State schools.Effectively once the rule was reinterpreted the students were then allowed to travel on the bus if they had the right uniform on and were not allowed to travel on the bus if they did not have the right uniform on. Despite the fact that they had signed up for that school despite the fact that their parents had invested in the uniforms for that school and despite the fact that they were engaged in the sports teams at that school those parents and those children who had invested in that particular school were then told that natural justice did not apply and effectively that they were no longer entitled to travel on that bus—The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): I am now going to interrupt the member and ask him to stop the novel and get back to the relevant. Thank you.Dr DAVID CLARK: I will come back to the point that I am trying to make which is one of natural justice. Where there is an expectation of one course of action when an action was initiated and there is a change of understanding—in this case a change in the law—that can have a very different effect. So in clause 8 the worker who is already committed to strike action with no expectation of pay deductions finds himself penalised. I am wanting to ask the Minister if this was the intention when this was drafted. Was this drafted specifically to punish those workers who had already committed to strike action in order to curtail their existing strike action or is this an unintended consequence?