Goldsmith PaulHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Thank you Mr Speaker. I thank you for the opportunity to speak on this member's bill by Ibrahim Omer on the Crimes (Theft by Employer) Amendment Bill.Look this bill as the introducer of this bill said criminalises intentional failure to pay employees. That sounds like a very simple thing and nobody would stand in the House and defend non-paying employers. So what is the issue? Well the issue is that it is actually a reasonably complex area of employment law and this one-page bill which sort of just baldly states that anybody who intentionally fails to pay an employee goes off to face potential criminal charges. We in the National Party won't be supporting this bill as it is drafted simply because primarily it's unnecessary in the sense that the Employment Relations Act has mechanisms in place it has the duty to act in good faith and there are penalties if employers do not act in good faith. Secondly of course any actual theft of money is already dealt with in criminal law. What this bill in essence does is it can potentially turn disputes around employment practices—when you say intentionally failing to pay" it may relate to all matter of deductions from pay slips for example for a host of various things then there could be a dispute about that. An employer may have intentionally deducted something from a pay and it may or may not have been justified. Now that's all dealt with currently through the employment law. What this bill effectively does is shift that into criminal law and we don't think that is a justified or a sensible thing to do.The member talks about widespread and systematic practices of wage theft but he offers no particular evidence to back that up. I certainly think there is widespread concern around worker exploitation in the immigration space and that is a matter that does continue to need to be dealt with and policed effectively. If immigration laws need work in that space well then that's something we should continue to look at and I agree with that. But does that mean you change all the employment relations to deal with that?If it's in relation to modern slavery again that's something that Michael Wood promised was an urgent matter more than two years ago and promised to introduce legislation to deal with that. Instead we have Carmel Sepuloni giving press releases saying "We are tough and we are going to do something about that eventually. We are going to work on some legislation and it might be ready in three years' time." So I would encourage Ibrahim Omer to encourage his colleagues to actually get on with doing something in that space rather than just talking about it. Then of course if the worry is that the Employment Relations Act system that we have in place is not working because it's too slow and too complicated well then I think there is a very good argument that the Employment Relations Authority is quite slow and cumbersome. Unfortunately that's a reality in all the courts across the land and should be rightly a focus of any Government to speed up access to justice and get on with it. It's sad that after six years that hasn't been an area of focus for this Government and the justice sector and the employment relations sector. I'd encourage Ibrahim to encourage his colleagues to get on with making that work better. Then I noticed today when a story was running on Newstalk ZB that only 2.3 percent of retail thefts have led to an arrest. I suppose it's a bit ironic—DEPUTY SPEAKER: Mr Goldsmith you've had a pretty good run. Let's get back to the bill shall we?Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: Well the purpose of the bill is to criminalise wage theft and the only point I'm making is—right here right now this morning we've had a story saying that only 2.3 percent of retail thefts were actually leading to an arrest down from 50 percent in the previous Government. So I think before the members of this Government bring in new criminal offences they might look at whether the current ones are actually being effectively enforced and dealt with. That might be something to consider.Look the only point I would make is yes nobody would defend people taking money from employees and the current laws in relation to theft and in relation to the Employment Relations Act cover that extensively. What is being proposed here is to transfer disputes potentially around deductions from payslips and not paying from the employment relations space into the criminal space and we think that would have all manner of unintended consequences. It may well be that the proposer of this bill has thought through all those ramifications but there is certainly no evidence of that from the one-paragraph introduction to the piece of legislation that we have before us. No doubt the Government with its numbers will pass this bill at stage one it'll head off to select committee and we'll be very interested to see and get some details from the people who are engaged in the sector and from officials to run through the consequences of this. My only point is that on the basis of what we have in front of us we cannot agree to it at this stage. Mr Speaker thank you very much."