Curran ClareCLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South): I have to say what a disappointing contribution. I was going to give that member over there Jonathan Young some credit for chairing the Commerce Committee around the Construction Contracts Amendment Bill—he did chair the select committee—but can I remind him that when that bill went back to the House from that committee it did not include the retention scheme in it. It was Clayton Cosgrove who put Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 439 on the Table at the Committee stage for a retention scheme. It was the Labour Party members who pushed the retention scheme and put a SOP on the Table. Then we had an election and then the Minister saw the light and actually put in his own SOP to the Committee of the whole House stage which included a retention scheme.A history lesson Mr Young—maybe you were not paying enough attention because the Labour members were paying attention. It was the Labour members who pushed for a retention scheme. It was Craig Foss who was the Minister of Commerce at the time. He said Oh no no no no. We need to do a lot more work on that." and "Oh yes we'll have a think about it." and he saw the light and felt the pressure from the construction industry. This is not to mention the fact that Jenny Shipley who was one of the directors of Mainzeal which was the construction company that collapsed in 2013 came under huge scrutiny as an industry that was so badly managed—when these lead contract firms could go bust with $153 million owing and none of the subcontractors were being paid out. It was an absolute disgrace. Jenny Shipley the former National Prime Minister was part of an inquiry into how that collapse happened and the Minister of Commerce at the time could not even bring himself to include a retention scheme despite the advice that was coming at him despite the pleas of the construction industry to protect all those subcontractors down the line.Anyway this is the closing—hopefully this is the closing—of that sorry chapter in our history. It has taken at least 4 years for the legislation to be enacted. And the reason we are passing this legislation today in the House—we could have waited another month at least—is clause 138 in the Regulatory Systems (Commercial Matters) Amendment Bill which is one of the three bills that are being put together in this third reading. Section 11A of the Construction Contracts Amendment Act amended by clause 138 requires this new retention scheme to be enacted from 31 March which is the end of next week and that new retention scheme was amended at this select committee the now Commerce Committee to include two instruments for the retention of those moneys. One is for the retention money to be held in cash or in liquid assets that can be easily converted into cash and the second mechanism is one such as bonds or insurance. It is quite historic. It is important. We absolutely support it. As you can see the impetus for this came from this side of the House. Clayton Cosgrove deserves credit for that for pushing the Minister into actually including retention schemes in the bill in the first place. So it is worthy of note and I congratulate him on that.These three bills before us today are changes to 20 pieces of legislation all administered by the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment. They are fixing regulatory gaps errors compliance issues and generally updating parts of the law including the Companies Act the Commerce Act the Construction Contracts Act—as I have mentioned—the Financial Markets Conduct Act the Employment Relations Act and the Unit Titles Act. There are others but those are the main ones.I just want to touch on a couple of other issues. One is also in the Regulatory Systems (Commercial Matters) Bill and relates to the financial reporting for small New Zealand branches. The change for small New Zealand branches of large overseas companies—we accept the logic of this change. We accept the arguments that were put to us by officials who took the trouble to go away and come back with a lot more information about why this was necessary and the anomalies that currently existed where you had got a large overseas company and they had got a small branch in New Zealand and yet they had an auditing requirement. You also then had subsidiaries of large overseas companies that did not have an auditing requirement. So there was a concern that it was potentially going to create a chilling effect for large overseas companies to not set up small branches in New Zealand. So I do not think we have got any issue around the fact that this change means that these small branches do not have to fulfil an auditing requirement. Questions though were asked were around what the definition of a large overseas company was. I still have a bit of a niggle around this. It is something that may need to be looked at a bit further down the track but it is that the definition of a large overseas company is one that has annual revenue of $10 million or more and total assets of $20 million or more which has been set at one-third of the amounts for defining a large New Zealand company which is $30 million annual revenue and $60 million in total assets. So what that means is there is a discrepancy in that definition and I am still not convinced that I understand the rationale for that and also around the transparency and accountability. If they are not being audited how is transparency being afforded? So there are still a few little niggling questions around that.I just have a comment with regards to the Regulatory Systems (Building and Housing) Amendment Bill which we have before us. In the Committee stage of the discussion a number of things came to light around the changes that were recommended by submitters that were considered to be out of scope by the officials. We were given an explanation in the House by the Minister in the chair at the time Michael Woodhouse who said that this was omnibus legislation it was a step above a statutes amendment bill and therefore did not deal with matters of substance and policy and that that was why matters were considered to be out of scope.We know that there is a wider review going on into the Unit Titles Act but it seemed inconsistent for Minister Woodhouse to be saying that when this legislation does consider matters of policy and it does consider matters of substance in other parts of the legislation. I have a concern around the timing—that some of these changes did seem to be inconsistent. They were accepted on the one hand but not on the other because they were considered to be out of scope. As to how those matters are going to be dealt with I would like—and clearly this is not Committee stage but I am putting it on the table that there are many outstanding matters from these bills that have not been dealt with yet that relate to wider issues of policy. I guess it is just a trademark of this Government that it does stuff around the edges and often does not deal with the really substantive issues that it should be dealing with—the ones that really matter to the people of New Zealand. We support these pieces of legislation. As you can see we have had quite a lot of impact and have driven a lot of the changes particularly around the amendment to the Construction Contracts Act. It is important that it does pass so that this retention scheme can come into effect on 31 March because this new retention scheme will apply to the contracts entered into or renewed after that date and that is important for our construction industry."