Williams ArenaARENA WILLIAMS (Labour—Manurewa): Madam Chair thank you so much for the opportunity to contribute to this debate. This is a brand new point and if you will allow me this will be a short call because I hope that the Minister can give me an indication of what her thinking is. Then perhaps I can propose to her some amendments which may help the situation that the House finds itself in now.So the particular part that I'm talking to is clause 2 the Commencement" in the new bill which is the Act "[coming] into force on the day after Royal assent." This is not a point about the commencement date which my colleague Rachel Boyack has raised; it's a point about the Royal assent itself. Those two things are different: the commencement and the place of the Royal assent in our constitutional framework.So the questions that I have for the Minister which I will flag first up so she can consider them: when will the Royal assent be sought? How many proceedings are under way that the Royal assent will cut across? How have participants to the proceedings been notified that the Royal assent will extinguish their proceedings and any legal rights that ensue from those proceedings? What natural justice issues does the Minister anticipate given the Royal assent will cut across those proceedings? And how will parties be compensated for costs of the proceedings under way?Now let me take the House through how we end up in this situation that we're in now with the proposal to grant this bill Royal assent. Royal assent is a recognition by the Governor-General as the representative of the Queen that a bill has come into effect and that it has gone through the processes of this House to give it the effect of law. So the situation that we find ourselves in is that we have a bill here which hasn't been through the ordinary processes through the House through a select committee—and we acknowledge on this side of the House that there will be certain situations where the Government has a prerogative to take things through urgency; that's not at issue here.What the issue is is that because we haven't been through the ordinary public process we haven't had the benefit of the regulatory impact analysis and we haven't had the benefit of time that would usually be given to the sort of legislation where a Government might consider cutting across proceedings that are under way currently parties to those proceedings haven't had time to adjust and to change their approach.So what we see here is that the fair pay agreements were a new piece of law enacted in 2021 that allowed parties to come to the table to renegotiate longstanding issues which had been in court before or they were party to mediations that were already under way. They then came into a new process set out by that Act in good faith knowing that they would have to give up their court proceedings; knowing that they would have to give up their mediated processes but entering into a new format in good faith and working with the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment that was facilitating the process through mediated proceedings.So here's the scene: we have a group of say cleaners who are represented by their union E Tū that give up their other proceedings in the court to come along to this new set of proceedings. And they are investing in this because they think it's a process that they should be participating in because that was the Government's intention at the time. They are paying lawyers they are paying representatives they are paying mediators. At the same time we have a number of commercial firms who employ these 35000 cleaners around New Zealand who have also engaged their own representatives and have come to the table in good faith to bargain around a floor for conditions be it pay or—in the case of cleaners—training. Extra training in the industry for cleaners was a particularly important part of their claim. That was something that also came out of their original proceedings and into the new proceedings that fair pay agreements (FPAs) allowed them to take.So we now have this situation where they are in this example parties that have come to the table: on one side cleaners represented by their union over 1000 of them to enter into this process; and then multiple commercial parties. My questions to the Minister are around whether those commercial parties have been given notice of this so that they may prepare themselves for an extinguishment of the process which is going on currently and the potential of further action being taken by those cleaners' representatives in another judicial body.Because we acknowledge also that with FPAs not being able to be used by these commercial parties that we then have much more costly proceedings that will need to be re-entered into in some of these cases. Some of these cases go back 20 years. They have been litigated and relitigated on things like conditions but particularly training because this relates to the training that cleaners might need when they are alone and dealing with chemicals. They also relate to health and safety issues—and there are a number of health and safety proceedings also on foot which this will impact. So my questions to the Minister—Madam Chair may I have more time?"