Curran Clare: Construction Contracts Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeCurran Clare: Construction Contracts Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 24 September 2015. Volume:709;Page:7101. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South): I want to speak to Part 2 of the bill and in particular to the adjudication clauses. Before I start I have got what I consider to be quite an important question for the Chair who I—The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): I think you mean the Minister in the chair.CLARE CURRAN: Sorry not you Mr Chair—although you are welcome to have a go—but the Minister in the chair Simon Bridges who I am sure is not just a pretty face. The officials are actually here. This is a serious question and I hope it can be answered quite easily.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): I am going to interrupt the member now. I have reflected on the comment that she made. There has been a bit of a problem this afternoon with some comments and in respect of the comment she just made about the Minister I think that if she reflected on whether it would have been an appropriate comment if the genders had been reversed she would have taken offence. So I am just going to ask the member to take care.CLARE CURRAN: Well I will apologise for that comment. What I would like to ask the Minister in the chair or the officials though is with regard to the Minister for Building and Housing’s Supplementary Order Paper and to the explanatory note. The most substantial part of this Supplementary Order Paper was around changes to the retentions part of the bill. But it also said that there were other minor and technical changes. When you look at Part 2 particularly with regard to the adjudication of disputes—which runs from proposed clause 10A through to probably around clause 18 or perhaps even beyond that pretty much up to Subpart 4 of that Part 2—there appear to be changes. But because we have not had an opportunity to have a select committee briefing on this what I want to know is whether the changes in that part with regard to the adjudication provisions are just very minor or whether they go to any substantive changes.The reason I am asking is as the officials will be aware that in the select committee there was a lot of discussion around this part of the bill and there were a lot of submissions. We had some private submissions given and there was a lot of discussion and changes that were made during that part of the bill. I just want to draw the Minister’s attention to the reason for this and the problem that was being solved was that—and this goes to enforcement—under the existing provisions in the Act enforcement of a determination about payment is time-consuming and costly. So determinations about rights and obligations disputes have ended up not being able to be enforced and have ended up being reheard in court.The whole purpose of this part of the bill—and in fact when you think about it a lot of the reasoning behind making these changes to the Act in general—has been about trying to tighten up the enforcement part and the adjudication and how that process works in practice. So what I am concerned about is knowing and being reassured as a member of that select committee who took this seriously whether there are any changes in this part. Are they very minor and technical or are there any substantive changes and if so can the Minister tell us what they are? So I am hoping that after I have made my contribution that he at least will be able to give me possibly a yes or no answer.So just quickly to give the Committee an indication of the importance of this—and I think the Minister who was in the chair previously did actually address this the last time we had the discussion at the Committee stage on this which I think was last night or the night before; it all seems a bit of a blur—we talked about ambush claims. One of the other problems we were trying to ensure we did not create so that there were not unintended consequences was that there would be opportunities for ambush claims by people trying to abuse the process. We talked about the way that adjudication works now. Currently the claimants can set adjudication in motion within 1 working day and the respondent is required to reply within 5 working days. Residential owners and smaller contractors are particularly vulnerable to ambush as they are not likely to be familiar with the provisions of the Act. Our recommendations were to add new clauses that changed the time frame for selecting an adjudicator from 2 working days to 5 working days after the notice of adjudication had been served where both the parties cannot agree on the appointment. That was described as being a pause in the process. Even though it is several years ago I do remember there being quite a lot of discussion around how that would work and whether that would work.Then it went through a quite detailed process—and I acknowledge the work the officials did on this because it was quite a detailed process—as to how that would actually play out and how the adjudicator would be appointed and once they had been appointed what process would happen then. Then the eligibility criteria were gone through in terms of who was eligible and who was not eligible what were the rules around that and then the time frames for adjudication. And then the fairness—it is basically all the fairness provisions in this process so that there could be extensions of time and then around cost and the knowledge of the cost so that there were not going to be surprises in this process. We talked quite a lot about pre-adjudication and whether there should be a pre-adjudication conference. I remember there was again a big discussion about that.I do not want to take up the time of the Committee tonight by going into great depth around this but we felt comfortable with this part of the bill. We were not happy about the fact that retentions were not in the bill. But what I do want to be reassured about is whether any changes that have been made by the Minister’s Supplementary Order Paper to this part of the bill are minor and technical without any of the amendments changing the intent of the select committee or is there any greater impact that we should know about? So that is what I am asking the Minister for tonight—his advice to the Committee. Thank you.