Wood MichaelHon MICHAEL WOOD (Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety): Thank you Mr Chair. Running through a number of questions that have been asked by members both before and after the dinner break we do have a number of questions relating to the overlap issue. I did explain to Mr Woodhouse previously that a number of the provisions around avoiding overlap as much as possible at an earlier stage had been dealt with in a previous part so I will apologise to him. I think I might have referenced Part 3—actually in Part 5 there are some of the operative parts. I do apologise. Clauses 104 and 105 provide some guidance there but also at the initiation stage there are also incentives through the consolidation process to avoid overlap as much as possible. Mr Goldsmith asked about the ratification process and why there are different time frames for employees and employers. The reason there is more time allowed for unions is that there's an additional opt-out process that is built in for employees at that stage. I think members of the committee will be aware that there is an opt-out stage at the beginning. After initiation there's another opt-out stage that occurs at this point so a little bit more time is allowed there for unions to run that process. Erica Stanford had a number of questions there. She asked effectively the same question about when an overlap is determined which I've responded to in my response to Mr Woodhouse. In respect of Jan Logie's tabled amendment and the issues that she raised I do hear what she is saying but we have tried to strike a balance here to try and have a system that is as simple to administer as possible and also that avoids absurdity. So as I hear it under the amendment that she is proposing an employee could potentially choose a fair pay agreement (FPA) that was significantly beneficial to them even if that FPA only covered a very very small component of the work that they did. We think that it is better and fairer and more balanced to have a relatively simple and objective test that focuses on the most work that the employee does as being the key criteria for which FPA they are covered by.Mr Uffindell's points which he has made on a number of occasions I think come back to a general debating point around the merits of having industry- or sector-based standards. There is just a disagreement between the Government and the Opposition in respect of that. He asked: why does the Employment Relations Act (ERA) have the role of determining these matters in respect of the better-off overall test? I think it's important to note conceptually these are not employment agreements in the way that individual or collective employment agreements are employment agreements. Fair pay agreements are the establishment of a minimum standard and so the function of the ERA here is to determine for a group of employees overall which is the better minimum standard to apply to them. There was a fair bit in there so I hope I haven't missed anything there but I think that probably responds to most of the points—there was one other point sorry that Erica Stanford raised and that related to the different time frames between clauses 137 and 153. This is because in clause 137 the authority is undertaking two functions both for assessing compliance and for assessing the coverage overlaps. They have to do both of those things there; whereas in clause 153 the compliance assessment has already been done. This is after the agreement is moving into the ratification phase. So it's effectively a smaller task that the authority is undertaking at that stage.