Williams Andrew: Plumbers Gasfitters and Drainlayers Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWilliams Andrew: Plumbers Gasfitters and Drainlayers Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 02 July 2013. Volume:691;Page:11739. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]ANDREW WILLIAMS (NZ First):I take a call on behalf of New Zealand First on the Plumbers Gasfitters and Drainlayers Amendment Bill. New Zealand First will notbe supporting this bill as we have said in this Chamber before. We do not favour bringing in retrospective legislation to sort out what was basically something of the past. It should have been picked up a long time ago. The Government should have sorted out the Plumbers Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board back in 2006 2007 and 2008 at the beginning of the National Government and it should not have taken 5 years for the Government and for Minister Maurice Williamson to bring it to this House. It is wrong we believe to impose effectively a retrospective tax in a sense. It is a tax on small business—this levy these charges these fees. It is wrong to go back and attack these small businesses and try to penalise them and charge them for errors of the past.We have received a lot of correspondence from a lot of concerned plumbers gasfitters and drainlayers around the country who simply say that in this current environment and in the way they have been conducting business in recent years they cannot afford to start paying these retrospective moneys for a number of years going back. These small businesses are not able to suddenly start coughing up retrospective fees so it is not fair for them to be attacked in this manner—for the board to go after some of these organisations in this manner.It is also driving a wedge right into the middle of this industry. You are now seeing one side versus the other. It is not healthy in a small economy like ours to have such an important area as the provision of plumbing gasfitting and drainlaying ending up with the two sides at loggerheads. In this instance the Minister has very much been on the side of the board which has ended up alienating such a large percentage of people in this particular industry. As a result we are seeing more and more disappearing off to Australia and further afield and as we have heard already in this Chamber today there have been 761 fewer certified drainlayers since 2012. That is an alarming sort of figure.At a time when our country needs to be developing our capacity and increasing our capacity it is most alarming to be seeing so many trained people disappearing out of the system. They are not just disappearing overseas; we are hearing that they are just disappearing—giving up and getting out of the business because they have had it up to their back neck with it.So in this respect we feel this is wrong. We feel that the Minister should have worked through a far more conciliatory process to find a way to get buy-in from the whole industry instead of just taking one side of the argument. He has not worked through all the other alternatives that were available to him in order to find a better solution to this. He has tried to ram this through in very quick succession despite it being a 5 or 6-year-old problem instead of sitting down and working with the industry to come up with a solution that although it might not meet every single need would at least have some compromises in there to appease those who are aggrieved by this. Instead of doing that as is the usual Maurice Williamson way he has just rammed it through with a sledgehammer the same as in the days when he rammed through changes to legislation that ended up with us having the leaky building situation in this country.It is the same way that he has been ramming through changes to the building code through the building amendment legislation to reduce the requirements on building in this country. Again this legislation is being pushed through with little regard for the final effects in terms of the situation in our building industry. This is what we would call a litany of continuous errors on the part of the Minister Maurice Williamson who just seems to think that you can sort it all out in retrospective situations like this with legislation you can turn a blind eye to leaky buildings and you can turn a blind eye to errors within the building code. Quite frankly we do not think this is the right way to go so New Zealand First will not be supporting this. We really do feel that it is wrong.Once again when this Government keeps talking about supporting small business in this country supporting and developing the economy growing the jobs helping smallto medium enterprises get ahead reducing compliance costs and making this a more competitive economy it sends all the wrong signals to then go after just the plumbers gasfitters and drainlayers in this manner. Basically it is not warranted.