Wood MichaelHon MICHAEL WOOD (Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety): Firstly can I recognise the deep-set and genuine fears and anxieties that the member has about unions. It's a wonder the poor man can sleep at night; he's so worried about what they might do if they organise and achieve better pay and conditions for working people! That is one of the intents of the legislation. In respect of his particular anxieties and worries in respect of clause 13 we know that clause 13 is primarily about ensuring prohibition on preference—that is that you can't sort of push people one way or the other. He's been very excited and very concerned about the fact that it is possible for a union to then within a fair pay agreement (FPA) negotiation negotiate for—it's not required but they have the ability to negotiate for a payment to go to union members up to the level of the union fee that applies across that FPA. It can be justified very simply. It's about the fact that the benefits of the FPA go to all workers regardless of their union membership status and so in effect the union members are paying for that bargaining process to occur; non-union members are not paying. And it can be I think very simply justified that a payment to the level of the union fee of those union members effectively puts everyone on a level footing in terms of their contribution.Here's the other interesting point about this: Mr Goldsmith might want to go back to the Employment Relations Act and recognise that under our existing collective bargaining arrangements that is allowed. It is explicitly allowed and it was explicitly allowed for the entirety of the nine years in which the National Party was last in Government. So the suggestion that this is somehow a significant new inhibition on prohibition of preference is news to me and presumably news to the National Party because they allowed it for nine years under previous arrangement and indeed some collective bargaining arrangements included it on that basis.In terms of his worries and anxieties around the right to strike again I affirm that this legislation does not allow strikes or lockouts to occur in pursuit of an FPA. The member is simply wrong when he says that there are many other things that unions can strike on". There are only two things that unions can strike on under the Employment Relations Act and that is in pursuit of a collective employment agreement and around health and safety matters and those are pretty strictly policed. Any union or union member that goes on strike undertakes that decision pretty seriously; they don't do it at whim. They lose pay when they do it. They can only legally do it in pursuit of those means. And I don't think it would be a surprise to the member to know that that is tested out regularly in the Employment Relations Authority and the courts if the other parties don't agree that that action was taken lawfully. It is also the case that were unions and workers to engage in the right to strike under those mechanisms it's unlikely that the coverage would match up to the coverage of fair pay agreements because by definition employees undertaking the right to strike in pursuit of collective bargaining in nearly all cases are only doing so at the enterprise level rather than at a sector or an occupational level. So I think the member's just got that wrong. Then when it comes to clause 19 this is basically modelled off section 32 in the existing Employment Relations Act as many of the provisions are here. So it won't be new or novel to either employers or unions. It effectively sets out the good-faith process that the expectation here is that parties remain at the table and they give their best endeavours to continue bargaining. And just because you get stuck on one thing doesn't mean that you shouldn't continue good-faith bargaining in other areas. That is what happens now under collective bargaining. And that is the way that you try and make progress towards reaching agreement without getting stuck on one particular thing. If you get to the end of that and you can't you've then got other dispute resolution mechanisms that come into effect."