Bayly AndrewANDREW BAYLY (National—Port Waikato): Thank you Mr Chair. Given that we're all revealing ourselves tonight I think I'm the—DEPUTY SPEAKER: I hope you're speaking metaphorically Mr Bayly.ANDREW BAYLY: —yes yes Mr Chair—only one left on the committee that actually passed the original legislation. So whilst I haven't been involved in this particular—and I was a freshly minted MP actually and at the time I owned a business that actually was a very large worm composting business. Actually during the process of the original bill I put it through the lens of what it would be to be a person conducting a business or undertaking that involved lots of heavy machinery. That was the lens I actually assessed it at. The Minister Michael Wood's statement saying that this is about making sure we've got safe health and safety practices at work—no one disputes that at all and in fact that was the original intent of the legislation. But the Minister used the word absurdity" and I think it is absurd that one worker—and I take Chris Baillie's comment just there: does that or does that not include the owner or owners? Potentially under this bill one employee could say "I want to see in place a health and safety representative." Of course that would have to be them I assume but they could then under new section 66—inserted by clause 5—also request a committee be set up of one person. That seems absurd and I think the Minister has confirmed that.So the question—and it was quite a deliberate line of questioning—is that when we put the original legislation in place we did it quite knowingly pitched at 20 or fewer employees but we also were conscious of making sure that those industries and businesses operating in high-risk areas did have the requirement to establish them if the workers so wished. So that was a pragmatic approach. My good friend the Hon Michael Woodhouse's questioning around what has changed and where's the evidence—I haven't seen evidence of that yet and eagerly await the response from the Minister.But the question is: why was there no minimum threshold? First of all why was it like that you have to have a minimum of five? Why did the Minister allow it to go to one? Why wasn't there any consideration that it should be a majority of the workers? In many workplaces you have difficult people just as you have difficult people in political parties—I'm sure if I looked across at the other side there we'd find difficult people. You might have one very difficult person who actually decides because they can't work with the team—Labour—to come join another party over the other side of the House. Now we just think that those arrangements might have at least considered a majority arrangement of the employees. So you deal with the aberration but you still have in place an arrangement where if there is sufficient combined view or majority view that that should be the case that should be the case and people have no issue with that.But this has been compounded furthermore by removing the risk element of the business which means that as Michael Woodhouse points out that's now drawn in a huge number of additional businesses and one just must ask themselves why. I just ask the Minister: what was the logic train that got him to the position where he thought that any worker no matter how many employees they've employed in that business can initiate this process even if all the 99 percent of other workers in that business felt that it wasn't necessary?"