White HelenHELEN WHITE (Labour): I am very proud stand in support of this bill the Construction Contracts (Retention Money) Amendment Bill. I just wanted to talk about what this bill is about and the kind of depth of the mischief that has been around for quite some time. This bill is about making sure that when a builder—or somebody in construction—makes a deal they will hold aside some of the money that they're rightly owed because of their work; until the main contractor is confident that they have done a good job and there aren't issues which need remedying that money is safe and secure. In 2013 as Julie Anne Genter pointed out we had the collapse of Mainzeal. Mainzeal was a very very big company and it had many irons in many fires and people didn't see that coming. They were utterly dependent on the integrity of the directors and the managers of that company and they got let down because they lost a lot of money. A whole lot of people who were tradies got lost in the system. They got cut out of money that was owed to them and a lot of people got hurt. And we knew that back then. Since that time we have had the collapse of quite a few organisations of significant size—and one of them was Ebert Construction. I was just looking at the kind of fallout from something like that and the fallout as described by one person Julian Oxborough meant that his crane was frozen on the building site and that was costing him $70k a month and he was owed $300000. He had 135 staff. And it wasn't just him who was going to suffer in that circumstance: it was his entire business and his entire workplace. His workforce were the ones that were going to pay the price. So it's very very important that this piece of the puzzle is actually put in place where we will secure that money that is hard-earned and it will be safe. So what's been done to create that kind of safety is that there is an insistence that such money is held in a separate account and it isn't co-mingled. I was alarmed to hear that there were reports of those businesses those head contractors actually—basically gambling with those funds so they would use the money for their other investments. That's a very dangerous thing to do because it wasn't really their money was it? It was money that someone else had earned. And what it does is it also means that if the business collapses it's very clear who that money belongs to. It doesn't just go to the loudest mouths or the ones with the biggest lawyers it actually goes to the people who earned it.So it is a real safety net and it's an important one and it does show the connection between this Government and these people that are representing the Labour Party here in Parliament and actually the working class because this is the working class. This is how you get ahead in this country and we've got 18000 young apprentices at the moment doing this work and they're coming into an industry. And we are going to get a lot more houses built if we actually make it an industry where they can actually thrive where they can go in knowing that things like this won't happen to them and devastate their families that this will be a safe place to operate and we'll all be better off for that. It will structure the way that people do business. So this bill will have something that's really strong in its penalties. It will make it a strict liability offence when the head contractor fails to hold the retention money separately. And it will also make the directors personally liable when the head contractor breaches that requirement of holding the money on trust because one piece of the puzzle that we did learn from Mainzeal is it's extremely important that directors think about the consequences of their actions and that they take care and that they make sure that they are looking after the people who work hard for them. We didn't see the collapse of some of these companies. These were strong companies. These were companies where the risk was not anticipated by the little fish that were in the swim and it's important as a Government we protect them. So while there is a lot of complaint about red tape that goes on look at how this particular piece of legislation works. This is Government doing its job. And actually there is good red tape. This is good red tape. Thank you Madam. I commend this bill to the House.