Leary IngridINGRID LEARY (Labour—Taieri): Thank you Mr Speaker. In the spirit of debate I'd just like to ask the Government what they are afraid of when it comes to transparency on business payment practices.I'm disappointed actually because Mr Bayly and I sat on the Economic Development Science and Innovation Committee when this went through and we worked quite closely together to make some changes to the original bill that I thought had satisfied the issues that he had raised. One of them was around the $33 million cap; I think originally it was around $10 million. There were a few other things that we worked on together. So it's really disappointing today to see that he wants to sweep this out. I take heart in the fact that there is apparently going to be a new bill. It sounds like there might be a plan. We haven't seen a lot of plans from this new Government. But if there is a plan and if it truly does put public payments—in particular Government payments—and shed some light on them then I really look forward to that because I think that leading from the front is a great example and a great thing to do.But Mr Bayly mentioned that the Australian equivalent the payment times reporting scheme had some deep flaws in it and a report was done and it showed that this didn't work and that was a reason to go ahead with the New Zealand repeal. But actually that report did not say to repeal the system; it suggested some fundamental improvements that could make it work. What it really said was Let's make sure that the legislation is pinned firmly on reputational risk." This is all about sending a signal to big business. I know having worked as a small-business owner who employed up to 25 contractors at some points in time the importance of cash flow. I also know having worked in a large multinational organisation—the British Council—that it makes sense for big business to extend payment terms as long as possible because the incremental amount of interest that they get on holding on to those payments when they are aggregated upwards can amount to millions of dollars of profit for them. Now I'm not saying that that is an evil or despicable thing to do; it is the signal that the market sends and it is allowed to do that within the rules. The Government might call that entitlement actually but it's not the right thing to do. What this intervention would do is simply tweak that to make sure that there were reasonable payment terms. I know when I worked for the British Council I worked really hard and it was quite difficult to get payment terms of seven days over the line for our contractors rather than the month or so that it took. I do know there were some times when it took four to five months for contractors to get paid. As a small-business owner I also understand the impact of that on cash flow. Cash flow is king; not just cash. So it's really really important to have things in place that send a signal to the big players that they have reputational risk if they do not conform to a scheme and if they have sloppy payment practices.The other thing the Australian report said was to make the register more accessible to users: so simplify the register make it more easily available. I'm sure that's something that the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment (MBIE) had noted and is probably work on right now. It also sought to improve or streamline the quality of the data. These are valuable lessons learnt from our Australian counterparts that could mean a really good bespoke system for New Zealand.Finally it wanted to improve the power of the regulator. I'm sure Mr Bayly won't have any issue with that. We sat together on select committee—on a couple of select committees actually including the Finance and Expenditure Committee and the Economic Development Science and Innovation Committee. There was a lot of work around the Commerce Commission. My sense—and I don't want to speak for the Minister—was that he would like to see regulators have considerable powers so that we can get rid of some of these market-dominant situations that we find ourselves in with supermarkets and so on. So I don't see why the Minister wouldn't want to look at these really valuable lessons learnt from Australia; see that we have already sunk some costs into what could be a really good workable scheme; that it will provide a signal to the market and be a tweak to the market that will make it a more level playing field; and not undo all the good work that not only MBIE has done around creating these regulations that would have come into force but also the work that we did together on the select committee. We had the mitigation of increasing the cap from $10 million in revenue to $33 million. We made sure that the data that would be available would not be commercially sensitive. We made sure that there would be no prescriptive time frames for business so we weren't telling them what the time frames had to be; merely saying that they had to follow the rules that they set out for themselves. We just really had something that I thought was good and it's such a shame that we're going to repeal that under urgency and come up with something that we haven't seen what the plan is."