Penk ChrisCHRIS PENK (National—Helensville): Thank you very much Mr Chair for the opportunity to contribute on the subject of the Employment Relations Amendment Bill. I'd like to speak quite tightly to the provision in clause 8A which would insert a new section 30A into the Act. This is the provision about employer's information-sharing obligations. It's worth noting that the obligations would belong to the employer not the information so it's not the employer's information but rather the union's information that the employer would be obliged to share and that much is made very clear as we go through and look at the detail of that provision.So the first thing that we see in the heading to section 30A as it will become is that the Union may provide employer with information about role and functions of union to pass on to prospective employees". I'd like to highlight the fact that it's significant that it would be prospective employees who would have this information passed to them. No doubt the intention of the legislation is that prospective employees would have the opportunity to find out information about the union such that that could be relevant to whether they enter into a collective agreement or not. But the difficulty with this is that what that actually means if this provision is to be meaningful at all is that the employer must share with the union the fact that someone is considering the possibility of working in that workplace. That might be something that is somewhat private to that person at that time and there might be a number of good reasons that a person is not keen for a prospective employment relationship to be known including for example that he or she is currently employed elsewhere and would not want that other employer to know about such prospective change of employment.But if I could move now to new section 30A(2) inserted by clause 8A we've got a subsection that I regard as somewhat nugatory. That's a word I haven't used in this Chamber before and despite the fact that it has the word "tory" in it I think it's quite relevant and appropriate and significant in the context of this clause. It's pretty meaningless really. We've got a situation where the union can ask the employer to pass on certain information and here we are told that the union must "specify the information" that it's asking to be passed on. Well it would be an extraordinary thing if the union were asking for information to be passed on but not actually saying what that information is—so so far so good. That's subsection (2)(a).Subsection (2)(b) is to "specify the form … of the information". Well I don't imagine that many employers would be passing on information for example in hieroglyphics when passed to them by the union in say for example the English language or the Māori language or New Zealand Sign Language or another official language or equivalent but nevertheless we've got that provision. We see as well that the union must provide information to the employer in the specified form.So we've got all the ingredients there for information to be passed to prospective employees notwithstanding the privacy implications of that and then we've got this so-called request that can actually be refused by the employer only in pretty narrow circumstances. So to you Mr Chair I submit that actually what we've got is not so much a request but a requirement that can be refused in pretty narrow circumstances. The first is that the information is confidential. Well that's fair enough. I don't know why such information would be confidential if it's information about the role and functions of the union but nevertheless we've got that and I suppose we could regard that as additional protection and therefore not objectionable in itself.But then we hear another reason that the information could be refused to be passed on which is that the information could be about the employer. Well it seems to me completely bizarre that we could even contemplate that the information would be about the employer because the only information that they would need to pass on is information about the role and functions of the union. So there's an element of self-contradiction in the way that this clause is constructed and it's somewhat baffling and that's before we even get to look at the question of who would be deciding the point in subsection (3)(b)(ii) which is whether it's "likely to mislead or deceive the prospective employee;". We don't know who gets to decide that; whether that's the union or the employer—perhaps it's the prospective employee himself or herself. The legislation is silent on that point.We look at the phrase "is likely to". Well that implies that some kind of standard of proof—again whoever decides—of 50 percent or more. So it's not just the possibility for example that deception or misleading would take place; it's a determination of the likelihood and that seems to me a pretty interesting threshold in the context of information that the employer is being asked to pass on. And then continuing to—[Time expired]"