Walker Holly: Plumbers Gasfitters and Drainlayers Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWalker Holly: Plumbers Gasfitters and Drainlayers Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 02 July 2013. Volume:691;Page:11713. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]HOLLY WALKER (Green):Well Mr Chair this is your favourite bill no doubt and mine and it is one of the most interesting and unusual bills I have had to deal with in my short time in this House. The Green Party opposes the Plumbers Gasfitters and Drainlayers Amendment Bill and we will continue to do so in this Committee stage for a number of reasons. Probably actually chief amongst those is the incredibly poor process that has been followed with regard to this bill.I thought I would begin my contribution by outlining briefly just what that process has been. The bill was introduced in March as we know with an incredibly short select committee consideration period of initially just 1 week. It was later extended to 2 weeks but it was still an incredibly short period of time. That was due to the apparently urgent need to pass this legislation—Hon Ruth Dyson: Sorry when was that?HOLLY WALKER: Before 1 April apparently. Very urgent—before 1 April we needed to pass this legislation. I know that the dates on the walls here are slightly behind today but they still say 2 July and 1 April was quite a long time ago. Here we are in the House with the bill at only its Committee stage yet the Government Administration Committee has done quite heroic efforts I think to consider this bill in an incredibly short period of time due to its apparent urgency.Due to that constrained period of time many submitters were unable to be heard. Many had to have their submissions recorded as correspondence rather than as submissions because they were received after the closing date. They had very little notification of the time available in which to make those submissions. Given that we know that what in part has given rise to the need for this bill is a large amount of dissatisfaction in the plumbing gasfitting and drainlaying sector the incredibly short time that was applied to the select committee process and the fact that many individual stakeholders who felt that they had a very strong interest in this were not able to make submissions and had very little notice of the bill coming up in the House will have only added to that high level of dissatisfaction in the sector.As we have said to add insult to that injury despite the rush and the select committee reporting back in time that deadline of 1 April came and went with no change and the bill has been languishing for months since its second reading. It is now July and we are finally having the Committee stage. Despite the fact that we are sitting under urgency clearly no urgency has actually been accorded to this bill in terms of the priority given to it by the Government after that initial panic of its introduction and short process. Clearly it could have had months longer at the select committee it could have had a proper period of scrutiny it could have had a proper period of submissions and we could be back here right now in a much different position.I want to acknowledge at this point the pressure that such shortened select committee periods place not only on submitters and members of the public but on the select committee staff on the Parliamentary Counsel Office drafters and on the officials who advise the committee. It is not actually really the members of the committee who suffer the most—although we often go to considerable efforts to make sure we have read all of the submissions in a short period of time—but the staff and the advisers who quietly get on with it and bust a gut behind the scenes to meet these urgent deadlines. In this case it appears that it was all completely unnecessary because here we are monthslater with absolutely no priority having been given to the bill since then. So those are the procedural reasons for our opposition to this bill.In terms of the substantive reasons for our opposition they are very clear. It comes down really to the point that retrospective legislation should be extremely rare in this House and that when it occurs it should be subject to a very high bar. It is not clear at all in this case that that bar has been met.As we know this bill retrospectively validates fees and levies that have been collected in what turns out to have been an unlawful manner since 2006 by the Plumbers Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board. This unlawful practice has been the subject of complaints to every available adjudicator. The matter has been to the Regulations Review Committee it has been to the Ombudsman it has been to the Auditor-General and it has been back to the Regulations Review Committee and in every case those complaints were upheld. They were rightful complaints they had a right to take them and the adjudicators in every case upheld those complaints. So there is a real issue of natural justice when after someone’s complaint has been upheld by every channel available Parliament simply legislates to make it go away. It said: “Ah there is a problem there. Congratulations on taking this complaint. Thank you for bringing it to our attention. We are now going to retrospectively validate this unlawful conduct so that your complaint will go away.” That is not acceptable. It is unfair and it should not be happening in this case.Even if the Plumbers Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board believed—and I believe the board to be frank and honest when it says it believed it was acting lawfully. But believing one is acting lawfully is not the same as acting lawfully. Much in the same way as we are seeing at the moment with the Government Communications Security Bureau believing one is acting lawfully does not make it so. It is offensive to the rule of law for Parliament to come in and say effectively: “Well we have to make the law catch up with the practice.” It should not be done lightly and we think it is being done lightly in this case.We do agree—and this is where we do agree with parts of the bill—that there is a need for legislation to validate the collection of the offences fee by the Plumbers Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board in the future because we agree that the board should be able to prosecute non-licensed practitioners when complaints about them are received. Indeed we think it is in the interests of the whole industry to ensure that that can happen—to ensure that the so-called cowboys are regulated. It has negative consequences for all plumbers and gasfitters when those unregistered unlicensed practitioners bring their industry into disrepute and it is a logical natural thing that the board should be able to prosecute those complaints. So we could absolutely support legislation of this nature if it applied only to how the board collects levies and how it prosecutes complaints in the future. But we cannot support its retrospective application.The reason we have been given as to why it is so important to apply this law retrospectively is that if the board was required to pay back the unlawfully collected levies and fees it might be left bankrupt. We can agree that it is not a desirable outcome obviously for that to happen. But our question is why should the Government not provide the board with some financial support to ensure that this does not happen? After all it was poorly drafted legislation in 2006 that led to this problem in the first place. It created the situation where the board thought it was acting lawfully but it turned out that it was not. Surely there is some responsibility on the part of the Government of the Crown to help put that right including making a financial contribution to ensure that if the board was required to pay back those fees and levies there would be some financial support from the Government to enable it to do that without falling over financially.The best estimate we were able to obtain at the select committee was that in order to do that we might be talking in the vicinity of $1 million. I know that $1 million is a lot of money but in the scheme of the Government coffers it is hardly going to break the bank. It seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do in this situation given it was a Government error in the first place that the Crown should help with some of the financial liability if indeed those fees and levies need to be paid back.Those are the substantive reasons why the Green Party continues to oppose this bill. We have both procedural and substantive reasons for doing so.The Committee is in quite an interesting position because it has a select committee report where the select committee said that it was “unable to agree” on whether the bill should pass. That I think is indicative of what a mess this whole process around this bill has been.There was one substantive amendment that the committee could agree on. That was an amendment to clause 5 to insert new subsection 171B(2) to make it clear that although the board could continue to collect the offences fee in future it could not change the fee and that in order to change the fee it would need to replace the fee with an appropriate disciplinary and prosecution levy imposed under section 143. This change I think speaks to the need to get the process right for the future collection of fees and levies and that is why the Green Party can support that one technical amendment to the bill.But we cannot support the bill as a whole because of its retrospective nature. We will continue to oppose it in this Committee stage and in the third reading because of both the process and the substance of this rather interesting bill.Tēnā koe.