Hague KevinKEVIN HAGUE (Green): I want to thank the member in the chair the Hon David Parker for that contribution. I was not part of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee and I must say listening to the debate today I have actually been a little bit confused about some of what the bill says. I suspect actually that some of the members on the Government benches have not understood what the bill does either and I noticed actually as David Parker was speaking that Alastair Scott was nodding along. I think that probably suggests that David Parker has the right on his side. I do have some questions about the bill and I want to come to those but first of all there are some remarks of a more general nature that I want to make arising out of what other speakers have raised in the debate so far. To some extent this bill goes to the relationship between society and the economy and social arrangements and the economy and there is a parallel around the environment as well. I think that we have set up an economy that people need to serve. Any economics student will tell you that capital will extract as much value as it can from labour if it is allowed to do that. The observations around the changing share of surplus going to capital and to labour I think illustrates exactly this point. Capital when it can will extract as much value from labour as possible. Clearly we do not believe it should be that way. We believe that we should start out with an aim of having a fair society and we should design and engineer our economic arrangements to deliver on that goal. The brake that we have currently on extracting the absolute maximum from labour by capital is the minimum wage and other protections for workers. But very clearly contracting out work is one of the mechanisms that capital has used to evade that brake. The result is that we are seeing more and more people—I think David Parker is right—exposed to that maximal exploitation as a result. I think that contracting out work goes hand in hand with the casualisation of the workforce. These are both mechanisms that are being used by capital to evade the brake of the minimum standards that floor that Governments have set. Of course capital will exploit contractors if it can. This is kind of a classic case of what do we do now when that situation occurs. Leaving it to the market to resolve—OK that is never going to work because it is the market that is the problem. One of the roles of Government is to step in in those cases of market failure where the market will not deliver the social results that we as a society need. I think it is unfortunate that Government members are now speaking against taking that role—taking the role of Government to step in and fix that market failure to actually protect those people who are employed through contractual arrangements. I guess I want to come to the particular question that I have and this may be as a result of not having sat in on the select committee. My question relates to schedule 2 and I would like to hear from David Parker about how exactly those particular occupations have been selected. [Bell rung] Thank you Mr Chair. When I look at schedule 2 very clearly these are functions that are often associated with the contracting of work but what I am failing to understand—and I would appreciate hearing from the member—is why these particular ones have been selected and why there is not I guess a more general specification of the nature of that work rather than the approach of itemising and listing that has been taken here. It does seem to me that a problem that is typically associated with this approach is that if we get it wrong then we end up in an invidious situation where something has been excluded and properly it should be included. We also have the problem of I guess futureproofing the schedule for the types of work that may emerge in the future that we do not currently have to deal with—relating to the issue that I have raised about the general situation that capital will always be looking for ways to extract more value from labour. What we are likely to see I think is that where we have this tightly defined list the types of work themselves may actually change to enable that to occur. I will not take all of this second call but that is the first of the big questions that I have. Perhaps we could return to some of those other questions in subsequent calls.