Simmonds PennyPENNY SIMMONDS (National—Invercargill): Thank you Madam Chair. I'm interested in at which stage the authority might be brought in. I didn't feel that there was a lot of indication given on this other than the bargaining sides having exhausted all other reasonable alternatives for reaching agreement or for a reasonable period using their best endeavours to identify.I think back to some of the negotiations that I had over the 23 years that I was negotiating with what was originally the Association of Staff in Tertiary Education and then the Tertiary Education Union. They can be very long and drawn out; I think in one instance we went on for two years. And so I'm just interested to know from the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety: will the authority tell the parties to go back again if the authority doesn't feel it has been long enough? What sort of examples could the Minister give of having exhausted all other reasonable alternatives? What length of time might the Minister expect? And I guess what sort of incentives and disincentives this might give to either hurry along the negotiations or conversely to draw them out if people feel that if they keep refusing to come to any sort of an agreement then the authority might come in. I guess that there'll be some precedents set over time and then each party will get a feel for whether it's advantageous for them to drag the negotiations on or not. So I could see the terms that the authority may fix. I could see that they can only make it if they make the determination if they're satisfied that this impasse had been reached. But I didn't get any real sense of what would be the threshold. And also obviously if there's been a deliberate or serious breach in the duties of good-faith bargaining—although good-faith bargaining has been notoriously difficult to actually quantify and decide what is good and what isn't good-faith bargaining. So yeah I think it would just be useful if we could get a sense from the Minister when he thinks that the authority being involved in making a determination might be triggered if he has a sense of the timing. Bearing in mind that these now are agreements that are going across the country and across a wide range of employers and employees and so going backwards and forth those that are negotiating might think that they are going down the track that is reasonable. And then when they have to go back to their respective constituents might find that that is not found acceptable by the majority of them. So you know I can see this being a much longer process. Thinking back again to the processes I've been involved in it was relatively straightforward but not that straightforward—the union having to go back to the staff in the local polytechnic—but then as you've got different branches across the country it got more difficult. And so I can see this becoming very convoluted trying to go back and get in a timely way feedback from so many different employees and so many different employers. So surely this sort of length of time that might have traditionally been considered that you've got to an impasse might actually be considerably longer under a fair pay agreement negotiation because there are just so many more moving parts and so many more people to consult with and get feedback from. So perhaps if the Minister could give a bit more clarity on how he sees that playing out.