Goldsmith Paul; Salesa JennyHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Well I'm conscious I only have 2½ minutes left according to the allocation but I'd be interested to know given the fair pay agreements how the employers will be represented by employee associations and given the New Zealand businesses' indication that they won't be fulfilling that role who will? And how will they go about coming together? If you take a sector you might have thousands of employers all around the country doing their own thing no association. They've got three months to come together to form a negotiating half to go into negotiations with the unions. How does the Minister expect that they will actually form themselves into a group? Who takes the lead on this? Who pays for it importantly? Who is nominated as the employer lead? How does it all work? Then if it falls over and the backstop is brought in which he brought in as an addition to this legislation after two years of getting it all organised—he wasn't well organised and please explain how that happened—it goes to a fall-back position whereby a default bargaining party will be appointed. Who will do that and how will this default party be able to really engage effectively with all the employers and businesses involved in order to get their views and to represent them properly? I'd be interested in the detail from the Minister of how that will be organised. Finally I'd be very keen to know from the Minister how these complicated mandatory union deals being imposed on businesses up and down the country under this proposed so-called fair pay legislation—how that is going to make New Zealand businesses more agile and more flexible to respond to the massive changes that they're dealing with on a daily basis on a monthly basis and a yearly basis at the moment so that they can continue to survive. How will it make them more agile and flexible? I know he doesn't have an answer. I know he will engage in cheap political points attacking us and dreaming up nonsense about productivity over the last couple of decades which is quite wrong—the figures that he outlined before—but I'd be grateful if he could give us a clear unpolitical answer as to how these fair pay agreements will make those businesses more agile and flexible so that they can continue to survive and thrive in a changing world.CHAIRPERSON (Hon Jenny Salesa): Before I call the Minister may I just remind members that the session for workplace relations and safety actually ends at 8.45 so there's still a bit of time left. Hon MICHAEL WOOD (Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety): Briefly in response to the member I mean I think to a large degree in the previous interchange I responded to the member's final question. We actually believe that employers and workers working together can improve outcomes for businesses and for sectors. In fact we've seen that over the course of COVID where repeatedly workers unions and employers have come together to deal with a fast-changing and extremely challenging situation. We've been able to work through the challenges around for example workplace vaccination issues by having employers unions Government working together in a tripartite way that hasn't actually taken away flexibility. It's enabled each party to bring its views to the table and arrive at good solutions and I expect the same to happen on a sector basis. Of course none of that takes away from the very many fundamental ways in which individual businesses will continue to make their own decisions. In respect of the more specific question the member asked about employer bargaining units employer associations exist across many sectors and we expect them to have a lead role in terms of taking on that role in fair pay agreement (FPA) bargaining. They will have a duty of good faith to engage with the employers that they represent in the course of FPA bargaining and that duty of good faith will be similar to the duty of good faith which currently exists in collective bargaining. So for example across a large multi-employer collective agreement like the metals agreement the employer representation organisations have to go back and engage with a large number of employers in that sector. In respect of many collective agreements unions have to represent in good faith sometimes many thousands of members and engage with them get their views and report back to them. The same will need to occur in respect of fair pay agreements for both the union party and also the employer association.In the event that the employer association is not able to form for some reason there is the ability for Business New Zealand if it wishes to in accordance with the parliamentary paper to take on that role. If they do not wish to then there is a facility for that agreement to be determined. In respect of support and where costs might be assisted with the Government in the Budget last year did confirm that up to four FPAs per year would have financial support provided to them to assist with some of the costs that will be incurred by both parties on each side.