Woodhouse MichaelHon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National): Thank you Mr Chair and I appreciate the Minister—cognisant of the question coming before the maiden speech of our new member—coming back and clarifying that. It's why I couldn't find it in Part 3 I suppose. And that's good. Now the Minister says belts and braces"; I'm not so sure. I think it certainly highlights the possibility that there would be coverage overlap but I don't know that that's then going to prevent quite occasional instances where the chief executive then has to adjudicate on the impact of that and this dizzyingly complex process that then follows. And in the spirit of dizzyingly complex processes I want to talk about ratification of the vote—clauses 143 144 145 and 146. Now I thought the overlap stuff was complex. The way in which one assesses the number of people who get to vote and the number of votes there are is absolutely ridiculous. If one looks at Schedule 2—now I'm a big fan of universal franchise and I know my colleague and friend Paul Goldsmith who's spoken a lot about this in his justice role is a big fan of one person one vote. Why on earth would there be 15 votes for 10 people or 17 votes for 12 people? That's essentially what we've got for employers of small business in the ratification process. And my question is simply this: why did we make this so difficult? Why do we make it as if we need a degree—Simeon Brown: Well we're not making it Michael.Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: Touché Mr Brown. I accept. I withdraw that comment. Because one would need to have a very good scientific calculator and a degree in mathematics from the University of Otago to actually work out how many votes constitute the ratification at least by employers of this process. The employee ratification does appear to be somewhat more straightforward but the ratification process for the number of votes for covered employers ranges from two votes for one employee; 13.2—so they're not even integers; we now are into real numbers for the voting process—if one has eight employees; right up to 20.9 votes for 19 employees. It just completely underscores what a ridiculously complex process this ratification will be. And while I'm on my feet I wanted to just address the comment that Jan Logie made about this being a great day for unions. When this bill is passed this will be a crushing admission of defeat by unions: despite the fact that people are free to engage with a union and bargain collectively and have done so forever in this country they chose not to. Union membership in this country is despairingly low—not because the unions are not valuable. I certainly in my employment value the contribution of the collective employment agreement negotiations and the relationships that I had with the New Zealand Nurses Organisation and what was then the Service and Food Workers Union and the Engineering Printing and Manufacturing Union. But very few private sector organisations have union membership and this side would have you believe that it's because of some kind of punitive employer and bad legislation. It's not. It's bad marketing by the unions of the value that they provide to employees. So instead of marketing their services and the value that they can add they impose this ridiculous legislation—not even for collective bargaining at an individual level; it's now a nationwide bargaining and arbitration system that takes us right back to the 1970s. So my main question—speech over now—is: why on earth is the ratification process so incredibly complex? Why did we not just stick to one person one vote?"