Goldsmith PaulHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): We come to the punitive side of the legislation which is very much in keeping with many of the things going on. The keen observers of this debate will have noticed that Labour I think started off at the start of this committee stage—but it might have been the second reading—with 65 votes in favour. They are now down to 64 following the exit of one Dr Sharma who I don't feel would think he had a fair pay process—Hon Member: Irrelevant.Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: You're quite right; it is irrelevant and so I won't go any further.CHAIRPERSON (Greg O'Connor): I'm just not sure whether you're commenting on a member who is out of the House or not but we'll give you the benefit of the doubt.Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: OK. Now the point I'd make around the penalties is what happens here is so we've got this mandatory union deal in place—or a fair pay agreement as the Government would call it. Now they bring in penalties and the penalties for an individual are $20000 and in the case of any other person $40000. So what can lead to these penalties? And then if you look at that in clause 201: Any action … at the suit of one of the following parties": any employee any employer and any bargaining party. And that starts the process that leads to these penalties and a big sort of process. And I suppose it doesn't take much imagination to see that this creates an open book for individuals and groups of workers to initiate proceedings against their employer and create merry hell. You might say "Well that would never happen." Well it very well might happen on many occasions. Just think about it. So what would be a breach against the fair pay agreements? Well it's who's included. It's a 25 percent threshold. So one day you've got workers merrily working away in your small business your people have said—I've referred to Hokianga too many times but you've got a Four Square up in Whangaroa or something like that you've got three or four employees happily working away and one of them has been sort of working apparently 20 percent of their time on an issue covered by an occupation—it may be cleaning; it might be 20 percent of their time cleaning—and he's only doing eight hours a week or whatever so that's not very much. It might be two hours or one day he does two and a half hours. Woompha! He's over the 25 percent; he's done two hours and 40 minutes. He's over 25 percent and lo and behold he's breached the agreement and the employer is dragged before this process. It's another process. The only point I'd make is that the small-business operators who are you know juggling ram raids and smash-and-grabs and trouble and strife wherever they look and are worried about how they're going to pay their interest rates are worried about their prices going up and are worried about the fact they can't find any workers because there's no immigration. They're worried about all these things and now thanks to this Government they've got another thing to worry about: that they might get their ratios wrong and that they might have somebody who they think is 20 percent there who turns out to be 26 percent there and—woompha!—they've broken the agreement and they're in trouble. All it takes is somebody who is of a mind to cause trouble to cause trouble and they'll be going through this long drawn-out process. And so the question I have to the Minister is: can he really assure the House that this is tightly focused enough? Is there any sort of threshold in terms of the severity of anything that can start a procedure? Is there a threshold or any case of a breach of the fair pay agreement? That's all that's required; it could be a technical breach but there's a lot of things that could be not quite got right because we don't live in a perfect world. It's fine if you've got 10000 employees and a huge team in your human resources department but if you're a small business you haven't got that. It's easy to make mistakes in this area. So it just joins the long list of things that business owners have to worry about. And I'm sure they won't be grateful for this new addition."