Parmar ParmjeetDr PARMJEET PARMAR (National): Thank you Madam Assistant Chair for this opportunity. It was really interesting to hear this from Minister Lees-Galloway in his first contribution—that he accepts that this legislation is clearly to support union activity. And we can clearly see that it's all about union activity. Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 153 in the name of the Minister—I'd like to comment on a couple of things in that SOP before I talk about the SOP in my name.SOP No 153 amends clause 2(a). My understanding was that when the bill was delayed in coming up for the second reading maybe New Zealand First would be able to advocate for businesses but no looking at this SOP New Zealand First clearly did not advocate for businesses. They clearly advocated strengthening this legislation for unions because it is about delaying the introduction of the bill. And this delay to introduce the bill is not to help business but it is to help unions prepare their material that they will be providing through employers to new employees. This is to help unions prepare for new people signing up as members. And clearly they are really desperate because we have seen the figures because it's only 17 percent of employees that are members of some union. So definitely they want to increase that number—80 percent of employees are not union members. This is to actually help unions not to help businesses.And then we look at the clause 5 changes proposed in this SOP No 153. So for health and safety reasons as well employees that are not union members will be able to ask the union to come and provide help at their workplace. So this is again to strengthen unions at all kinds of workplaces. So what is the role of MBIE under this Government? The Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment—why can't this Government think of providing more support to MBIE to respond to such situations? No. They don't want to support MBIE to support employees in these kinds of situations. They want to actually provide more support to unions to be able to provide that support. And that is again clearly to strengthen the role of unions in various workplaces.We know that union activity is not a new activity but nowadays the kind of union activity that we are seeing is quite aligned with political activities. Clearly here we know that our unions are aligned with some political parties and as a result of that I'm not quite sure if this legislation is actually really addressing workplace situations. This is actually addressing the situation of unions because unions at the moment are not going that strong. That brings me to my Supplementary Order Paper 145 which is to delete clause 24 clause 25 clause 26 and clause 27. This is because the clauses as they stand provide a new ground for discrimination against a person involved in union activity by specifically inserting a new provision as to the individual's union membership status. Why would we clearly want to state that an employee is a union member? There can be two reasons for this. One reason is to avoid discrimination as the Minister would like to interpret. Yep I am a union member. Don't touch me even if you are restructuring or doing anything else. Even if it's some kind of disciplinary action that the employer wants to take don't touch me."—that will be some kind of discrimination. But in this there are two meanings. One is to clearly state that that employee is a union member to create that fear in an employer's mind that if something happens to that member that will be seen as a kind of discrimination. I would really like the Minister to explain how actually these clauses remove discrimination. In my view actually they're adding to the discrimination that will happen and will create a big divide between employees that are members of some kind of union and employees that are not members of a union. So this is clearly about political gain and in these clauses—clause 24 clause 25 clause 26 and clause 27—how many times do we see the words "employee" "employer" or "business"? It's all about unions unions and union activity. So clearly these clauses are supporting of course the whole motive of this bill—Hon Aupito William Sio: Such an anti-union party—shame on them. Dr PARMJEET PARMAR: —which is to strengthen unions. Shame on those Labour members sitting there and supporting unions and not supporting employers employees and businesses. It is the employer that takes the risk—[Time expired]"