Development and Opportunity Minister Terry Lister will meet with representatives of the business community today to hammer out their submissions on controversial CURE regulations.

Mr. Lister received the submissions on Friday and while he would not reveal their contents, he was upbeat about today's meeting and sounded confident that agreement would be reached "very quickly''.

Although he may not have welcomed the action at the time, Mr. Lister now says he's glad that the CURE regulations did not pass the Senate in March.

In a recent public meeting in Warwick on the regulations, he held that the hold-up has given him the opportunity to correct a negative undercurrent that may have stuck with employers well into the future.

The regulations, which will compel employers with ten or more employees to fill out forms on the racial make-up and placement of their work staff, was turned back from the Upper House as Opposition and Independent senators responded to a portion of the business community who said they had not been consulted.

But Mr. Lister, putting the matter in chronological context, said the delay has not compromised progress.

Minister confident in working with business on CURE regulations "We're trying to fix some things and they go back some 100 years as we moved from an agricultural community to a mercantile community,'' he said.

"We're trying to get that all sorted out. Whether we get the regulations passed in March or in June it really doesn't make that much difference does it? "If we had had the good fortune of having the regulations passed in March we could have gotten on with this, using April 1 as the start date,'' he said.

"But we would have had an undercurrent in the business community that for years would always be saying, `We really were not consulted. This wasn't fair.

We were not on board. They made us do this.' "Now sitting here in June we have the business community making an honest and sincere attempt to respond to this,'' he said.

"I will graciously accept it. We will work to revise the regulations and then we'll go to the House and get something passed and it should pass the Senate and it should have the support of the business community because they did have input.

"When you consider where we want to go for the next fifty years and carrying the country forward, I think that three month holdup was to the benefit of all of Bermuda,'' he held,"so I am very pleased that it came back.

" When you believe in God you know that everything that happens to you happens for a good reason no matter how bad it may appear, there is a lot of good in this. We have come out of this in very good shape.'' But at the same meeting Mr. Lister earlier defended his actions, pointing out how he managed to overlook input from the businesses. He explained his error was in the misconception that the Bermuda Employers Council was the `union' of employers and represented the entire business community in Bermuda.

"CURE and the new Government had worked very closely with the Bermuda Employers Council and so we felt that when we were talking to the Employers Council we were talking to business,'' he said.

" The Employers Council promote that they represent 27,000 employees,'' he continued.

"There are only 34,000 employees in Bermuda and those who fall under CURE are something like 26,000, so they had more employees they represented than CURE and the regulations involved so we quite rightly thought that we were talking to the business community when we were talking to BEC.'' Mr. Lister also pointed out that attendance at a Government sponsored series of seminars was good, and that he took this as a further indication that he had been consulting with the whole business community.

" At those seminars we had 150 different business organisations coming to the one or two day sessions,'' he said.

"We realise that 504 is the number of companies we were trying to get registered and we knew that for 150 to come to a seminar was a pretty high turnout figure statistically,'' he added.

Mr. Lister admitted he failed to go to the Bermuda Hotel Association, and the Chamber of Commerce's International Companies Division (ICD).

" We didn't talk to people like the Hotel Association,'' he said.

"We didn't talk to the Chamber of Commerce because we had had meetings with them and agreed that when we were pushing forward legislation under consumer affairs then we should be talking to them but that when we're dealing with employment issues like CURE, we should be talking to the Employers Council,'' he added.

While careful to point out that the mix-up is now behind them, Mr. Lister said the International Companies were partly to blame also.

"ICD never spoke to us under any circumstances under anything,'' he pointed out. "And when this big kerfuffle came in the Senate, to be quite frank I was quite surprised when ICD in particular got very angry and got their backs up about the way they had been treated.

"When I met with them I said: `You could have called me any day of the week I would have taken your call. In a year and a half you never called and I never thought that I should be talking with you, so its a two way street.' "It's really up to the employers and us to work together,'' he added.

"What's in the past is in the past. We're on the right track now I think we all understand where we need to go and I think we're going to get there.'' GOVERNMENT GVT