Goldsmith PaulClauses 1 to 6 and the ScheduleHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): That's very decent of you Mr Chair. As I was outlining to the committee in a perfect world there would be no restrictions on sick leave and everybody would be able to take whatever leave they felt they needed. In the real world where you have a couple of hundred thousand small businesses operating in this country surviving in a tough trading environment day to day there do need to be rules and restrictions. So for a very long time we've had five days of sick leave. On average across the country the average take-up of that sick leave is 4.7 days. So the experience is that employees do use the sick leave fully. There are some not all who see it as essentially an entitlement as part of their business arrangements or their employee arrangements.Now this bill doubles that to 10 days. So there's no magic or there's no money tree or anything like that. What will happen is that there is a very likely outcome that more sick leave will be taken and it may well be that people will expand to take the full entitlement of 10 days—who knows? There's been no evidence put forward and maybe if the Minister knows of any detailed research that's been done by his officials estimating the likely outcome of this I'd be very interested to hear from him on that.I'd be interested to know what the Minister thinks will be the consequences for those small-business owners for this extra cost imposed and in combination with higher minimum wage costs and so forth what impact that will have on the ability of some businesses to stay in business and whether or not we're going to make it more difficult for those little companies those family companies to survive. I was at a celebration—well a fund-raiser actually—on Sunday night with the Indian community and there was real anger amongst people there small-business owners primarily about the way that this Government keeps on adding substantial costs to those businesses without apparently any thought of how that is going to be paid and how the businesses are to stay in business—white hot anger to the Government. So a related question I have to the Minister is: what does he say to those small business operators who are the backbone of our economy and ultimately the employers?Now it may well be that some companies will be able to pass on the costs and so it will be consumers that ultimately pay. But there are of course many many industries where those costs can't effectively be paid on and if you think of the simple cafe if it does become too expensive to buy a coffee then people always have the choice not to buy the coffee. So they're discretionary businesses and they fold up if it all becomes too expensive. So the question that we have is around timing given that at a time when the economy does continue to struggle and we hear how wonderful things are—well the economy is struggling and many businesses are struggling. Is this the time to be doing it? Then when it comes to any trade-off in terms of productivity where is that? What research is being done to indicate that if you have fewer days worked there will somehow be a quid pro quo and higher productivity levels because of it? The other issue that came up during the select committee process that I'd be interested to hear from the Minister about is the decision not to pro-rata the entitlement. So if you happen to be like a woman I was talking to a couple of weeks ago who owns a bookshop and employs a number of people who work one day a week—so they effectively work 50 days a year. Now it's quite possible that in theory they could take 10 days of sick leave out of those 50 days a year if they were to take their full entitlement as well as the holiday leave. And this Government's added an extra public holiday. So if it happened to fall on that day if they were working Fridays or Mondays one day a week then it is very significant. The Government refused to consider making this entitlement pro-rata as well. So I'd be interested to know what his thinking was behind that. Thank you very much.