White HelenHELEN WHITE (Labour—Mt Albert): Thank you Mr Chair. I want to take up my friend Ricardo Menéndez March's point there because I think it's a very good idea to carve out the areas that have actually already started bargaining. I'm particularly concerned about some of those areas being ones that are very vulnerable. I have put an amendment in in my own name about the hospitality industry in particular. I remember being a hospitality worker when I was young. It's quite often experienced by a young workforce. My daughter said to me just tonight that she found hospitality some of the hardest work she's done. We pay lower wages than Australia and I wanted also to comment on that and ask the Minister for her comments on this because she has commented that she believes this law will be good for productivity.Australia has higher productivity—I looked at some statistics tonight and I think there was 1.4 percentage growth in productivity here when there was over 2 percent in Australia up to 2019. It seems to me an incredibly important thing that we at least try a different approach which is more akin to Australia where people are paid higher wages and by carving out the group of industries that have actually initiated bargaining we have a number of industries we can look at. We can take out factors we can look at commonalities and we can trial this and see whether in fact it assists those workforces. I am very keen to see it happen in the industries that have already initiated because they are obviously hungry for that kind of trial. And it seems a very sensible place to start.I know that I have some different views on productivity but I also am concerned that we're about to dismantle the Productivity Commission and these are the kinds of institutions that have in the past been relied upon to give us advice. They have been saying as late as July last year that we need to move to a high-wage economy. Now the fair pay agreement process is really targeted at the scattered workforce who are not well paid not well represented and vulnerable. It really is targeted at the people who most need assistance because it is just a minimum floor.I would also like the comments of both the Minister and her colleagues in the purpose of this bill about flexibility of work because this seems to be a misnomer. Flexibility it seems always only applies to workers reducing terms and conditions to the bare minimum. Yet it never applies to employers actually allowing employees to move across the workforce and have the freedom to do so. You'll note that I've got a member's bill at the moment on what's called portability" of work which is a positive approach to flexibility. It says that workers should be able to move freely across a workforce in the lower-paid work so that they can actually get ahead of it and they can get higher wage rates.I also want to comment on the hospitality industry as one that I've interacted with strongly. I'm now the spokesperson on small business and I'm taking a particular interest in hospitality because in hospitality we have had extremely low-profit rates as well as low wages. Low wages don't seem to help with profit margins. We want to actually get that sector healthy. We are going to have to move to a different kind of economy which means yes we will have to pay our workers more but we also need to support our businesses to make sure that we do. There is more than one way to make a business grow in this country and that's why I'm asking about things like portability and other ways of actually getting the kind of productivity because the low-wage economy—because remember what you're talking about is going back to a system that we have now where those workers fall right down in wages—doesn't work; it hasn't worked. It hasn't worked for a sector like hospitality and it hasn't worked for your average worker.I want also to talk about the health and safety implications of this because if you think about the implications of this in the safety area—I take my daughter who I've just been spending the break with. She's a young woman and one of the hardest jobs she's ever done—quite a few of the hardest jobs she's ever done—was in the hospitality sector. In my own experience of that sector when I was young and I worked for a number of different hospitality groups you're very vulnerable to bad treatment. One of the things that this does is give people a floor. It gives them those basic rights and actually it means that employers who are paying a decent wage who are paying perhaps the living wage to their workers aren't competing with people paying a lot less.I would say to small business—and I would like you to consider this—that actually small businesses often benefit. It might be something they fear but they often benefit because the big multinationals can't squash them with this kind of process where they are constantly in a situation where they are tying up those workers often with restraints of trade and they are lowering the wages. They are using the small businesses as a kind of stalking horse and saying that it's for their flexibility when in fact it's about driving conditions down across vulnerable industries.So I would love your comment on these things and whether you've thought about them. Even if you disagree with me Minister I'd like to understand how on earth you are justifying this and how you see the way forward in New Zealand—how you see high-wage work happening if we don't do something differently. Because we have been doing this Minister for quite a long time now and it has caused a whole lot of people a whole lot of pain and we have industries like hospitality where there is no money being made. It is heartbreaking for those small businesses. They are not able to compete with the big multinationals that are coming in. They are having those wages dragged down.I'd also just like to tell one story from when I practised as an employment lawyer. I was practising for 25 years. I had a call from an Australian company. They rang me because they wanted to set up shop in New Zealand and they said to me "What do I have to do? What do we do? How do we pay our employees?" They fully expected that there was going to be some sort of agreement which they had to buy into and I said "Well actually we have the minimum wage but that's about it. There's the Holidays Act. There's the minimum wage. There's sick pay. That's it." And they said "But surely if we've got people on call if we've got people that are casualised we'd have to pay them an extra 20 percent wouldn't we?" I said "Actually you don't. You don't have to do that. You don't have to do any of those things under New Zealand law."Now hopefully this kind of arrangement of fair pay agreements would mean that some of those things that we would negotiate in would be minimum floors and it would be fair on the employer who's already doing those things and paying good wages because they would be on an equal footing with one that wasn't. But my understanding is that you're saying that's not the way forward here. Those Australian employers were well able to pay a lot more and there are situations I know at the present time where the same employer works across Australia and New Zealand and pays its retail workers or its hospitality workers so much more than its New Zealand workforce. And it makes such sense when we talk about the drain to Australia—how we are going to stop it. So that's my other question here for you tonight Minister. How are we going to stop the drain of young talent going to Melbourne to work as a barista if in fact in New Zealand we cannot offer the same kind of wages because everybody is going to the bare minimum all the time and hoping that that will sometimes make a profit?Minister I know that you're aware that the Productivity Commission has said we have been working harder than almost any other country for less money. We have been doing that. We do a lot of hours and the only productivity gain we seem to get—that's what they are saying—is actually out of working more hours. That's how our productivity goes up in this country. That's not a good model. That's not smart. It's not what I want for my children. It's not actually what I want for myself. So I'd ask you to answer those questions. Thank you for your time."