Pugh MaureenMAUREEN PUGH (National): Thank you Mr Speaker. I'm sorry I was distracted by other important matters. I stand today too in support of the Incorporated Societies Bill in its third reading. As we've heard from many speakers today there is general consensus around the support for this bill. Anything that is 114 years old deserves a bit of an overhaul and this bill certainly does. There are some main issues that we do have concerns with which I will touch on a little later but I thought I would lay the foundation in my contribution about the bill itself and what the main provisions of the bill are.Bringing incorporated societies into the modern world and with other good practice in terms of law: some of the provisions in this bill mean that incorporated societies will need to now provide a process for dealing with disputes and conflicts of interests and also small societies have been singled out in this bill so that they don't have the same stringent reporting requirements as larger entities. I do note that the Economic Development Science and Innovation Committee dealt with this but when the bill was first drafted it recommended that that benchmark be $30000. And I note that the National members felt that this was probably too cumbersome and that it would capture too many very small organisations that perhaps didn't have the expertise or the capability or even the will to have to comply with a lot of those reporting requirements. So the select committee reached an amicable agreement to lift that requirement to $50000.So a small society falls into the following criteria: that one around having $50000 of payments for two consecutive reporting years and also the assets of that society for the two previous reporting years are also now set at $50000. A small society is also one that is not an entity with a donee status which means that anyone that contributes or makes a donation to that organisation cannot claim a tax credit for donations over $5.But this bill also because it has been so long—it's well over 100 years old—it has relied over time on case law to fill in some of the gaps in the original legislation of that original Act which is not a good way and it has become quite messy. So having a rewrite and introducing this bill into the House does make good sense. It makes it now modern law and it gives guidance to New Zealanders who do volunteer to run our not-for-profit organisations. As my colleague Melissa Lee said there's about 23000 or 24000 of those organisations in this country that it will impact on.One of the main issues that the National Party has concerns with is around the clauses 53 and 54 and the cut and paste job that was done out of the Companies Act where it's lifted sections 135 and 136 out of the Companies Act and dumped them into this bill. But unfortunately when it comes out of the Companies Act and goes into this Act it's not just targeting companies it's actually targeting very small organisations and volunteer groups. It's a classic example of creating blanket law which will eventually deliver unintended consequences. So clauses 53 and 54 now are designed for corporate structures but those corporate structures also have limited liability status. What we've got now is that the same types of rules are now dropped into the Incorporated Societies Bill. We've had a quote from Justice Goddard which I think summarised it very nicely but there is big concern about this. I sincerely hope that the Minister will commit to a review in one year and also make sure that incorporated societies are well informed about the changes that are in this bill. Thank you very much Mr Speaker.