Boyack Rachel; Tuiono TeanauRACHEL BOYACK (Labour—Nelson): Thank you Mr Chair for the opportunity and can I begin Mr Chair by acknowledging you on your role and congratulate you on your appointment to be one of our Assistant Speakers. I look forward to being part of a House which has you in the Chair Mr Tuiono.I have two questions for the Minister—and I just note I don't seem to have a clock so that's helpful Mr Chair. The Minister in her earlier reply made some comment around the need to maintain a system that allows individual employers and employees to be able to bargain with each other. I just wanted to make some observations around that because one of the purposes of the original Act was to actually strengthen our collective bargaining system. I'm just interested in the Minister's comments that she's already made about why it is that that would be seen to be a superior framework for negotiating wages and conditions. There is evidence—and I'm interested in what advice the Minister has received on this—that when people do bargain collectively particularly people in low-wage industries it leads to higher wages. So I think it's important that we hear a little bit more detail from the Minister about what evidence has led to those statements that she made in her earlier contribution.In my reading of the Employment Relations Act it actually stipulates that one of the objects of the Act is to promote collective bargaining. So this original legislation would have strengthened the ability for workers to come together and negotiate better terms and conditions.In terms of the second question I've got I was just reading through the departmental disclosure statement and I just want to add some more comments to my colleague Camilla Belich's contribution earlier around the lack of transitional provisions within the bill. In the departmental disclosure statement it specifically talks about whether the Privacy Commissioner was consulted and raises some concerns around the fact that there have been a number of fair pay agreements that have been initiated and are under way already in process. We've heard that there are for example supermarket workers bus drivers—there's close to 300000 workers that will be covered by these fair pay agreements. And so I think it's right to have some concern if the repeal is successful around what actually happens to all of that data that has been collected about those workers and who holds that data. I note in the departmental disclosure statement that the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment (MBIE) intends to work with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner to put some guidance in place. But my question to the Minister is whether the Minister actually considered whether it would have been helpful to include some transitional provisions in here. Because I think that for those workers—and remembering that many of them are very vulnerable workers—knowing that their information would have been disclosed to their employer their information would have been disclosed to a union their information would have been disclosed to MBIE do have the right to have an understanding that their private information is going to be held securely and also under the Privacy Act used for the purpose that was intended to be gathered for.I'm concerned that there could be some time frames around how long it takes to develop those guidelines how long there might be information sitting there being held by the various parties that have been involved in the bargaining of fair pay agreements and whether it would have been more appropriate to include some transitional provisions within the bill so that we could give some certainty to those workers that actually there is a plan around how their data will be protected given that the legislation will actually be repealed. So I'd be very interested in hearing from the Minister about what analysis was followed through that. And also I just note again from my first question—obviously I've got two questions here for the Minister that I'd like to hear from her on. The first was that I would very much be interested in what research and analysis was provided around the benefit of collective bargaining against the benefits of individual negotiations—recognising that in some professional industries individual negotiations are absolutely fine and deliver for people. But when we're talking about—as we've heard from others—young people people who don't have that high level of bargaining power they might be new to employment. They might be someone that's traditionally discriminated against maybe because of a disability and there's actually a lot of benefit for them in being able to bargain as a collective. So I'm just interested in a little bit more analysis about how the Minister came to that position in her earlier comments. Thank you Mr Chair.CHAIRPERSON (Teanau Tuiono): I thank the member for bringing the debate back to the relevant part.