Simmonds Penny; Wood MichaelPENNY SIMMONDS (National—Invercargill): Thank you Mr Chair. Following on from both of my colleagues on the matter of the penalties—and look I do note in clause 200 that the authority would give regard to the matters that are listed there the nature and the extent of the breach. But throughout the whole process of the submissions employers expressed their concerns with how heavily weighted against employers this legislation is. I suspect most employers have not had terribly happy dealings with the Employment Relations Authority over a number of years and so I'm just not sure that this will be giving employers a great deal of comfort in terms of thinking that if they found themselves unwittingly in breach of the legislation the authority might take matters into account particularly favourably for the employers. I think about a number of bits of legislation that this Government has brought in in the last wee while and how much is putting the emphasis back on the employer to know the details of the legislation. I think it was last week we were talking about immigration and how it was an expectation that the employers would intimately know changes that occurred in the Immigration Act so that they weren't in breach of the Immigration Act. But I just feel Minister that this is not recognising the situation that businesses and employers are in at the moment in terms of incredibly short of skilled employees so many employers are working 16-plus hours a day in their business. In fact I spoke to a hospitality business over the weekend. They had taken note of the discussion that had been going on around the immigration legislation and they were just despairing that they were expected to have that level of detailed knowledge as well as running their own business coping with skills shortages coping with paying higher interest rates and all the inflationary pressures on their business. So now again this legislation has very high expectations on the employer in terms of the level of detail that they have to know; about how many days they've got to let employees know about things and how many days they've got to be consulting. So there's constantly information in here that would be putting pressure on an employer to be spending time and as my colleague the Hon Paul Goldsmith said that's fine if you've got a big HR department; it's not fine if the HR department is you spending a couple of hours each week trying to keep up with all the legislation the health and safety the immigration the fair pay agreements. This is putting another burden on employers to be able to have time to keep up with this as well as running their business—which is what we want them to be doing—but also them having faith in the authority taking into account whether they were unwittingly or knowingly breaching the obligations. And I was interested to see too—and it's an area that we canvassed earlier about the privacy issues around the information that the unions will hold on employees—that there doesn't seem to be any reference to penalties on the unions perhaps breaching obligations that they have of using the information and what might happen if they use it in an inappropriate manner or whether they are lax with their security on the information. So I think that's a whole area Minister that seems to be missing but perhaps it is implicit here and perhaps you can clarify that for us. Thank you.Hon MICHAEL WOOD (Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety): I accept from the member's comments that she does not support the legislation as a whole and believes that it imposes a regime that she does not think is necessary. But to the extent that the legislation is passed by the House it is not unreasonable that there are penalties for all parties if those parties are in breach of the law and that is what this part deals with. I do note that while the focus of the member's comments were on the effect of penalties on employers who might be in breach of the legislation in nearly all respects across the bill penalties apply equally to all parties who might be in breach of the legislation including unions and including employees. Specifically in respect of the member's last question I can't recall which part it is in precisely but I can assure the member that there is indeed a penalty in the legislation if a union improperly uses employee information.