Goldsmith PaulHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Oh thank you Mr Chair. We're looking here at—for people who are just tuning in for this debate—Part 7 of the 11 parts in the Fair Pay Agreements Bill misnamed fair pay agreements" because it actually is around about mandatory union deals.One of the mandatory elements about it is in Subpart 2 of Part 7 which deals with the ratification process. So what happens is the unions and the employers—going back a little bit you know it only takes a tiny fraction of the potential workforce to start this process. Once this process starts the unions and the employers have to get together bargain and come up with a proposed agreement. Then that proposed agreement needs to be taken to (a) the employees and (b) the employers to ratify.Now if it doesn't pass that test and if 50 percent of the employers for example don't agree—and I can think of all sorts of reasons why they wouldn't agree. In fact I just got an email from Bernie in Te Awamutu for example who said on fair pay "At no time I've had anyone refer to the pay gap between tradespeople and unskilled workers. I do not think the living wage should be close to a trained person's pay and living wage." And the point he's making of course—and this might be one reason why an employee group wouldn't support this is—is that it's all very well for the Minister to say "It's all just about lifting the floor" and we lift the floor so everybody earns a certain amount and the minimum wage is what the country has which they've been lifting enormously—they're going to lift the floor even more.The problem is if the business is trying to operate in an internationally competitive environment and you raise the floor it means that the company has nothing extra to pay people who have spent a lot of time developing and learning and practising particular skills more. So the gap between people who have just rocked up—you know 18-year-old kids who have just rocked up to work—and somebody who might have spent 15 years working on the skills specific to the industry is becoming smaller and smaller and smaller. That is causing all sorts of tension within the workforce and it's something that's not acknowledged by this Government. It's one of the reasons why many employers might not be keen on this idea.So anyway we get to the point that you come along you've got the agreement and 50 percent of the people don't vote for it. Then what happens? Well then we go through and the chief executive of the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment (MBIE) has to go through that and if he's not pleased with the ratification that hasn't been met he goes and does it again. And so the whole process starts again and you have a revote—a bit like the Scottish nationalists; if you don't like it you have it again. But then if you still don't get the 50 percent then what happens? Well what happens is that it just goes off to the Employment Relations Authority (ERA) and they decide what the agreement is. So the whole thing is a farce because the employers are asked whether they agree with it they say "No we don't agree with it. We don't like it." "But you're going to get it anyway" says the Minister "I don't care."At that point the thing doesn't die. There's no freedom about this it's all mandatory in the sense that you go in you're forced into a process you have the process you develop a fair pay agreement in negotiation between the unions and employers then the employers vote against it they say "We don't want a bar of this. We don't want a bar of it." And then they go off to the chief executive of MBIE and he says "Yes they've voted that they don't want a bar of it. That's not good enough; do it again." If they vote again and they don't want a bar of it then what happens? It doesn't stop. It doesn't go away. There's no sort of point to the vote. What happens is that then it goes off to the ERA—a bunch of appointed judicial officers as it were in Auckland—and they decide what's going to happen and so the thing happens. So the point is: what is the point of this vote? Because it doesn't really mean anything. Because you can vote against it and you still get it. No—Hon Michael Woodhouse: Did you not know democracy's changed?Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: No does not mean no. And yes perhaps it's possible that this Minister Michael Wood has been talking too much to Willie Jackson who thinks that democracy has changed and you know there's this old-fashioned notion of people voting for things and having equal voting rights and all that sort of stuff is not relevant.Then we come to the question—Mr Chair I've got two seconds to go—[Time expired]"