Leary IngridINGRID LEARY (Labour—Taieri): Thank you. I'd like to start my contribution by just acknowledging the small businesses that are out there the 97 percent of businesses in New Zealand operated mainly by families by small groups of people who are doing the hard yards for our economy—and many of them come from migrant families—I really want to acknowledge them. I also want to acknowledge those in my electorate people like the hot yoga studio run by the fabulous Donna. People like Abdal's Gourmet Foods an amazing small business that is growing and was started by a former Syrian refugee who is really making a difference in our community both in terms of the business he provides but also just the rich and interesting new palate that he is bringing to the electorate. And many of those small businesses of course took the wage subsidy which helped keep them afloat because as I've maintained through this debate cash and cash flow is king for small business. I know that as a small-business owner; I know what it was like to have sleepless nights thinking how am I going to pay people when some of my suppliers were late in their payments and that's what this is all about.But having listened to the debate I cannot help but think that the Act the current system is being repealed as a vanity project by the new Minister. The reason for that is there is no need for the repeal and there has been no use of process and by the looks of it not much process going forward. So although the Minister was generous in the committee of the whole House stage with his contributions my sense is that he is a Minister who's very hands on he thinks he knows better than the officials he thinks he knows better than the public consultation. He's got some good ideas it's great that he realises that e-invoicing is around—something that has been around for 20 years. But there's been very little process and unsatisfactory answers to the questions that we put to him in the committee stage about that.The Minister could have just left the current system intact. He has tried to say that there's no point in doing that because the Australians don't like their system. But the very report that he quoted from he cherry-picked out the things that he wanted to say and left out the most important point which is that the report recommended that Australia maintain its payment practice system and hinge it more firmly around reputational risk. And it had a number of ways that it said that could be done. That was through making the register more accessible for small-business owners streamlining the data and improving the power of the regulator which I would be surprised if the Minister knowing how he loves competition law would have had an issue with.Instead though what we have is this repeal bill that has a really patronising general policy statement that assumes that small-business owners do not know how to access data that they do not know how to interpret the data and that even if they did Oh well they're not going to have much choice anyway because they're only small-business owners. They don't really have a way to strategise to choose their own suppliers in the market." Now I do not know where that general policy statement came from. We asked questions in the committee stage about the underlying assumptions and the advice from officials. There was no regard to that and certainly it hasn't come from any select committee process because I would remind this House that once again we are doing this under urgency.So that takes me to my second point: just the lack of process around this; the use of urgency the lack of a select committee process and then what appears to be quite a lack of process going forward if I'm hearing the Minister correctly because he's talking about a voluntary code that has suddenly come out of the middle of nowhere suddenly big business wants to introduce this even though bad payment practices have been going on for decades. He wants us to believe that this code is going to work for small business. Well where is the process? I asked these questions in the committee stage. I asked where the consultation would be. I asked what the sanctions would be and how this would be linked to reputational risk because as was pointed out by one of the previous speakers if there's no link to reputational risk then the system simply won't work. He did not answer any of those questions. Instead he insisted on talking about his e-invoicing and the fact that the Fair Trading Act could be used. Now he also said that it would be difficult for small business to access information under the current system that the Labour Government introduced. Well he can't have it both ways; either we know how to use data or we don't. This is a terrible repeal bill and I do not commend it."