Genter Julie AnneHon JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. The Green Party rises in support of this bill and it's of particular interest to me because in fact on 7 May 2014 I tabled a Supplementary Order Paper on a previous construction contracts amendment bill that did exactly this. It required that retentions be held in deemed trust. What happened at the time—and I know there's some history here—in early 2013 we had the liquidation of Mainzeal and a huge number of subcontractors were negatively affected by the collapse of Mainzeal. They were locked out building sites they couldn't access their tools and their money that was rightfully theirs was not able to be recovered. At that time in 2013 in the 50th Parliament the then National Party Government had a construction contracts amendment bill going through the House and I sat on the Commerce Committee and we heard through the submissions from at least a dozen subcontractors associations who were laying out this problem with retention money being used as working capital by main contractors and that it was a huge problem. So I went and I talked to them. I wrote a Supplementary Order Paper. I tabled it. I tried to get the Government of the day to support it. So it's very interesting to see National Party members like the Hon Scott Simpson who was of course in the Parliament at that time and would have voted against my Supplementary Order Paper but now is enthusiastically supporting this bill that does exactly the same thing seven years later. So I'm pleased that they've come around and they've realised.So of course what happened at the time is the Minister responsible for the bill Maurice Williamson had to step down for various reasons. The Hon Nick Smith took his place and right before the 2014 election when he was at like a subcontractors' conference where he was probably quite horrified to hear that they were all in support of this Green Party member's Supplementary Order Paper on the bill Nick Smith did promise that there would be action on this issue. And so it took a full three years from that point till the original legislation came in. That was 31 March 2017. So four years after the Mainzeal collapse we finally had an initial regime. Of course what we've seen—and all the documents we have here today show us—is that unfortunately in the process of drafting that legislation it was quite watered down and it wasn't airtight enough. So there was not in fact sufficiently strong indication that the retention money should be held in deemed trust that it should be held in a separate bank account. The whole point of this regime was to ensure that the money that rightfully belongs to subcontractors for work that they have completed would not be taken by the main contractor and used in other projects which would then mean that it was not recoverable by the subcontractors should the main contractor go into liquidation or collapse. Of course that's continued to happen.So I don't have much more to add on this other than—you know seven years is a long time and we'll be going through the select committee process again with this one. But I am really really pleased to see some meaningful progress on this issue and to see that there is agreement across the House. I am particularly pleased that something I worked on quite a long time ago in my first term of Parliament in the 50th Parliament is finally going to be brought into law.