Street Maryan: Plumbers Gasfitters and Drainlayers Amendment Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeStreet Maryan: Plumbers Gasfitters and Drainlayers Amendment Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 11 July 2013. Volume:692;Page:12011. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon MARYAN STREET (Labour):Thank you very much Mr Deputy Speaker for what is probably my last contribution to this piece of legislation the Plumbers Gasfitters and Drainlayers Amendment Bill. I regret that it is not going to be a happy contribution. My concern with this legislation has been for a long time that firstly it is retrospective and nobody likes retrospective legislation. Secondly it seems patently unfair to plumbers gasfitters and drainlayers who have been socked with an illegal levy. For them there will be no repayment or compensation for that by virtue of this bill passing its third reading. We are about to make legal an illegal levy imposed by thePlumbers Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board in order to providepūtea—a basket of money—that can help prosecute people who should not be practising in any of those trades. The purpose of that is entirely fine. The method of it was illegal.I have been constantly told by the Minister for Building and Construction and others that should we not pass this legislation the Plumbers Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board would be bankrupt. The extent of this moneys owing back to plumbers gasfitters and drainlayers from whom it was taken illegally is in the order of some $600000. Labour was always keen to find a different way through for this and we made that clear at the beginning. It was contained in Supplementary Order Paper 204—which my colleague Raymond Huo had put up—that there be an agreement a way of compensating in part those tradesmen who had been disadvantaged in this way. They would not get everything back that they were owed but they might get something and that was the import of an amendment that my colleague put forward. It would have been a reasonable thing to do.As it stands now and as this bill is due to pass in the next few weeks there is an injustice that is being done. People are being required to pay for something that was illegally taken from them. This disciplinary levy was collected illegally. As I say the purpose of it might have been entirely valid but it is not inconsistent with the history of the Plumbers Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board to not have done things entirely properly.There has been an inquiry into this board previously under the Labour administration and there was some change as a result. However we have now seen this piece of behaviour come in and be discovered only latterly and the remedy that the Government is jumping to is this one of retrospective legislation. I contend that there are other ways to have addressed it that there could have been ways of arriving at a settlement that left the tradespeople not so disgruntled and the board not so out of pocket. But quite frankly having had those suggestions that the board will be bankrupted if this bill does not pass I must say that I have not seen evidence to that effect. I do not understand why a board that receives annual fees for registration purposes and additional fees for licensing purposes can go bankrupt. If a member opposite is able to clarify that for me I would be grateful to hear from them.But it seems to me that threats of bankruptcy are exaggerated and areoverhyped and I am not persuaded that that is the case. The board has constant revenue streams derived from registration and licensing fees. What it is doing now is compelling tradespeople by dint of its own overreaching of its ability in law to flee the cost of licensing. So what we will have is registered plumbers gasfitters and drainlayers not being licensed on a regular basis—in other words not having to prove that they have upgraded their qualifications and their skills on an annual basis. They will now become the prey of the Plumbers Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board which will now seek to punish them—Chris Auchinvole: What?Hon MARYAN STREET: —by virtue of the very fee that it has extracted from them illegally. If that is difficult to understand Mr Auchinvole look at it this way: they have been required to pay a fee for disciplinary processes to get rid of the unlicensed cowboys in the industries right?Chris Auchinvole: Partly yes.Hon MARYAN STREET: So now what we are seeing amongst tradespeople is that in order to avoid exorbitant fees which have now accumulated to $600000 they will not relicense. They will carry their registration but out of protest at this fee they will not relicense however much we choose to make it legal. That defeats the purpose that this fee was collected for in my view. If we have unlicensed tradespeople who are now going to be hounded by the board because their lack of licence makes them unlawfulbecause they do not have the same qualifications and tickets that they ought to have to practise then the Plumbers Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board has only itself to blame.I consider that the passing of this legislation will compound the injustice to plumbers gasfitters and drainlayers. That is a travesty. There are other ways around this and the Minister should have set his mind to more imaginative solutions than simply this one of validation which the Labour Party cannot support. This has been a longstanding problem. This is not the way to solve it.Debate interrupted.