Pugh Maureen; Leary Ingrid; Bayly AndrewIn CommitteePart 1 Repeal of Business Payment Practices Act 2023 and related mattersCHAIRPERSON (Maureen Pugh): Members the House is in committee on the Business Payment Practices Act Repeal Bill. We come first to Part 1. This is the debate on clauses 3 to 6—Repeal of Business Payment Practices Act 2023 and related matters". The question is that Part 1 stand part. INGRID LEARY (Labour—Taieri): Thank you Madam Chair. It's great to see that the Minister for Small Business and Manufacturing has engaged with the debate and I know how passionately he feels about competition law having sat on a couple of select committees with him. I do have some questions around the general policy statement at the beginning of the bill in Part 1 which talks about what the purpose of this repeal is because there's a really interesting statement where it has been asserted that small businesses will not have time to search for payment data on the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment website and that even if they do find it and interpret it correctly it's unlikely to impact their decisions about who to do business with. Now I find that quite an astounding explanation of what the purpose of this repeal is. There's an assertion that small businesses don't have time to do their due diligence. In fact small businesses in my experience are more likely to do due diligence on anything to do with their business because it is such a vulnerable place for them to be in a market awash with big players. So it behoves small business to make sure that they are dealing with reliable trusted business associates in their supply chain and certainly in my time when I had a TV production company I made sure I did my due diligence to find out as much data as I could about those that I was transacting with. There's also an assertion that even if they can find it and interpret it correctly—now this seems very patronising language to be putting into the explanation of why you would be repealing an Act. It is suggesting as one of my colleagues quite rightly said in the debate that small-business owners somehow do not have the capacity to interpret data in a way that maybe big business does. I'm not sure what the comparator is here. Perhaps it's that they may not be able to interpret it sufficiently compared with the public sector or compared with those people who are employed in high-paying jobs. I'd really like to know the assumption that the Minister made that led to these assertions that small-business owners do not know how to interpret data in a way that others perhaps may be able to. Then it goes on even more to say that it's unlikely to impact their decisions about who to do business with. Now that seems to me to be a real admission that there is a David and Goliath situation in the market and certainly the report that the Minister alluded to that came from Australia and the review of their legislation also acknowledged that there are market-dominant players and that it's difficult for small business sometimes to have as many choices. So this here seems to be an admission by the Minister in this repeal bill that there isn't a fair and competitive landscape that small business can compete in. Now that seems to me to go against the purposes of the bill and to show that actually what the Act does is it does have that mechanism to try and level the playing field. So I'd really like the Minister to provide some answers about that. It's simply not good enough in my assertion to say "Oh well businesses won't be able to do much about that anyway so too bad." when we have an Act in place—and we have an Act in place until later today I suspect—that does the very thing that the Minister I would have thought wanted to do as I said at the start of my contribution which is to make the landscape more competitive fairer and better for all business. The other thing is that the Minister in his contribution has alluded to a plan. I just want to put on the record that this is a smart Minister who knows that in 100 days we haven't seen many plans from this Government if any. So he's saying he has a plan but as I raised in the second reading there is proportionality available through the regulation mechanisms. The Minister knows that very well. He and I have worked together on proportionality in terms of other frameworks to do with the Reserve Bank and that seemed to satisfy him. So I'd like to understand why in this particular case the Minister isn't able to apply that proportionality principle. Is this just politicking as has been asserted by the Hon Phil Twyford or has he got some real reservations about that?Hon ANDREW BAYLY (Minister for Small Business and Manufacturing): Thank you Madam Chair. I just want to address a couple of those issues and thank you for the contribution. I have already acknowledged and said that there is an issue with businesses particularly smaller businesses paying late so there is no disagreement across the House. The issue as I've continuously said is that it is an issue of how do you address this. And the proposed approach that the Government put forward in the previous bill which we're going to repeal was not a viable solution—that is the essence of it. And what I've put up is a number of initiatives—seven of them—to try and deal with the issue of late payment. Now I don't need to go through a process of requiring a new bill to do those; most of those can be done without requiring new legislation. That's the first point.The second point that she raises around the explanatory note is this issue about small-business owners knowing where to get this data. And the first issue is whether they know that this data is available. Now I think there's an issue of understanding where we sit. We sit in this grand House here and we're very aware of Government agencies but actually when you get out and you talk to small businesses—and I quoted the three locations in my earlier speech: Porirua West Auckland or Tauranga—many of them do not know and wouldn't be able to quote you the full name of what we would colloquially refer to as MBIE—Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment—and wouldn't even know where to find this type of information. Even if you ran a very expensive process to try and make them aware of the data many would not know it because simply they do not understand Government entities unlike members of the House. And I back up that statement by saying that in the review in Australia where they've had this arrangement in place since 2020 the Minister in his summary of the scheme noted only 1 percent of Australian entities knew where to find this information. That's a crucial part of it.But the third element that she raises even if you can find the data and you're smart enough to find it is as I said in my opening speech that data could be 10 months out of date. So then the business owner's got to sit there and work out—interpret calculate whatever you want to call it—whether that data is still appropriate. And I'd put it to you that 10-month-old data about payment systems about when they paid the money is actually quite unreasonable and actually not that effective and useful for a small-business owner. As I've said on countless occasions and as I kept saying during the select committee process why doesn't the Government recognise that they can go to four credit agencies—and I gave the cost—for a mere sum of $35 get up-to-date information on payment systems and times and actually get a lot more information that's absolutely relevant to due diligence considerations rather than spend at least many millions for the Government but multiple millions across industry coming up with an out-of-date system?"