Woodhouse Michael; Andersen GinnyHon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National): Thank you Mr Chair and my apologies as I was somewhat thrown. I was thinking we hadn't actually got to Part 3 but we are and before I go into some of my questions on Part 3 I just have to reflect on the fact that the interlude of collegiality in an otherwise acrimonious urgency motion has now ended. There was pretty much strong support for the previous bill—and why wouldn't there be when it was sensible and the right thing to do? This is not. This bill is poorly planned and badly designed and it will fail to deliver what it's intended to do. In fact it's unnecessary to deliver what it's intended to do and for that reason the National caucus will continue to oppose it. Part 3 of this bill is I think emblematic of that inasmuch as it is punitive in its compliance enforcement and offences regime. So let's just cover off what we are doing here: we are putting in place a requirement for a significant number of medium and large organisations to report on their payment practices and their failure to do so or to do so in the manner and at the time set out in the bill could lead them to incur the wrath of the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment and to have some quite serious infringements ruled against them. Now we are opposed to this because there are other ways to do this. In fact that was the advice that was given to the select committee which was indeed that firstly the case for the problem hadn't really been made and secondly this is not the solution. So to have an infringement regime for the failure to do something that most organisations simply do not need to do or could do in another way or may inadvertently not realise it has to do because the cycle of this actually means that organisations could—depending on their size and the nature of their debtor's ledger it could actually lead them to inadvertently not report at a time when they do. Now I note that there is a compliance notice regime so the registrar in its monitoring of compliance with the Act has a choice to issue a compliance notice rather than go through an infringement regime and I think that's appropriate. But what's not appropriate is that this be in place at all. So it would be helpful if the Minister could remind the committee as we commence the balance of this review of the bill why it's felt that the information is needed to be collected in this way and by this law when a simple $33 search of a credit agency register could deliver exactly the same result. Hon GINNY ANDERSEN (Minister for Small Business): Mr Chair thank you. Look I feel like we are going over ground that we covered quite extensively the last time this bill was traversed and the answer I provided to that same question we've received now is that a credit check in terms of a company's financial viability is quite different to how quickly they pay their bills. Those are two separate things. So while someone might be well solvent and have a great credit check and you can find that out well and good for $33 what you cannot find out is how quickly that large company pays their bills. We know from good research provided by Xero that Xero has taken an index analysis and used really good data from the clients they have to demonstrate that big business more often than not uses smaller businesses as a credit facility and what this bill does is hold that up to the light. It makes it transparent and it enables small-business owners to know who pays their bills on time. I have heard firsthand from a number of small-business owners that they often are very close to missing a wage round or to missing paying a lease when they are required to do so because larger companies hold out to the very last minute in order to pay what is quite rightly due to those small-business owners. So I feel that this bill only goes part of the way in terms of balancing up that ledger to enable the small fish who swim within our economy to at least understand which of those big fish they should choose to do business with.