van de Molen Tim; Wood MichaelTIM VAN DE MOLEN (National—Waikato): Thank you Madam Chair. That just highlights how disconnected the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety is with the businesses around New Zealand. Now we've got a set of impositions here that quite clearly make it difficult. They raise a number of concerns that the Minister has just brushed over as though there's nothing to see here—no concerns to be heard whatsoever. There is nothing in here that gives any consideration to the potential implications of health and safety from a representative coming into the workplace. There's also nothing that gives consideration to the importance of a particular task being conducted by the employee at the time that may be interrupted by this meeting and the importance of that within the normal business operations of whatever entity it may be; for example someone that's on a farm maybe they have a particular deadline for picking or milking or harvesting or whatever it may be that fails to be met as a result of an imposition like this discussion taking those employees away from their critical task. You can look at other distribution businesses—chilled frozen products for example—where product might be left having been unloaded off one truck before it gets redistributed for delivery and that is left sitting there getting damaged or destroyed as a result of the employees being otherwise engaged in a conversation with a union representative who has turned up unannounced and actually doesn't even have to talk to the employer before they engage with the employees. So we have quite clearly a total disconnect between what the Minister is suggesting—and yes sure it's OK to say we should be able to have access for those discussions but actually business still is happening. This is the key thing that the Minister totally neglects that we are in an environment here where people are conducting business in some fashion that has certain expectations and requirements around the performance of their employee in that workplace. Some of those may be time-sensitive and this doesn't allow for that at all. So it would be nice to think that we could have some greater consideration.This comes back to the points I made in an earlier part this morning as well around the total lack of desire despite the Minister's comments that what we're looking to achieve here is to improve conditions. When you have these sorts of impositions that clearly favour the union representative coming in with no ability for the employer to have influence over the timing of some of those critical time-sensitive tasks that may need to be carried out then it totally undermines that goodwill or good-faith approach that the employer and employee should be taking. I think that's the real challenge here is that ultimately whilst the intent might be nice—and we see this from the Government time after time—good intent doesn't necessarily translate into good policy and good outcomes for Kiwis. I think we've seen that again here through clause 86 around the access to workplace and the conditions relating to access where it quite clearly doesn't allow for those time-sensitive time-critical tasks that can be a part of a business function particularly in the food manufacturing space for example. I'd be interested in why the Minister hasn't taken account of that.Hon MICHAEL WOOD (Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety): Once again I do respectfully encourage all members participating in this debate to read the clauses of the bill that they are commenting on. The member who has just stood up Tim van de Molen has said that the bill has no provisions in respect of access to take account of health and safety or normal business operations. I quote clause 87 two on from the one that the member is talking to: A representative of an employee bargaining party exercising the right to enter a workplace (a) may do so only at reasonable times during any period when any covered employee is employed to work in the workplace; and (b) must do so in a reasonable way having regard to normal business operations in the workplace; and (c) must comply with any existing reasonable procedures and requirements applying in respect of the workplace that relate to (i) safety or health; or (ii) security.""