Uffindell SamSAM UFFINDELL (National—Tauranga): Thank you Madam Speaker. It's good to take my second split call of the day—Chris Penk: Go the Ooof"! SAM UFFINDELL: Uff-indell thank you Penky. Now we've heard a lot of talk around this today and I must say I heard Jamie Strange get up a little bit earlier today and comment about how "National is the party for the big end of town" and "Labour is the party for small businesses" and I internally and outwardly LOL'd because I wonder how many times Jamie or anyone else on that side of the House has gone around to talk to small businesses. Because if they did they may be in for a bit of a shock because I don't think small businesses think that Labour is their party. When I walk in there and I knock and they see me and they go "Oh a National Party MP" they tell me how hard I must work so that we win next year because they are facing considerable strains at the moment. And a few of these have been eloquently put forth by my colleague who is not in his seat at the moment—that's occupied by Mr Penk—but the Hon Todd McClay was here earlier and commented on all the cost that's been put on small businesses. And we could talk about the Credit Contacts and Consumer Finance Act failures we could talk about rising interest rates we could talk about the union bill. There's the job tax coming up there's the additional public holidays there's the additional sick leave there's the immigration bottlenecks. This has put more than $2.8 billion of additional costs on to small businesses. And we know that small businesses are a significant part of our economy—97 percent of businesses here—and they don't have the ability to soak up these additional costs such as a very large listed player or a Government may be able to. So I would encourage the opposition to get out there and talk to small businesses. And they may actually then get a bit of a feel—or a bit of a flavour—for how much they are suffering. We know that they obviously had to sit on the sidelines throughout COVID and a lot of them took that on the chin and they did it; they did what the Government asked them to. And I think in return it would probably be a good courtesy just to be able to empathise a little bit more with the pain that they are going through. Now this bill looks to update the reporting requirements around payments and what is owed and look the intentions of it are pretty good. We have noted that it probably could have come through a few years ago but you know we are where we are today—is it the right way to approach the problem that we're trying to solve? And I would argue that no it's probably not. I mean if you are looking to help businesses get paid faster requiring businesses with—they picked out $33 million arbitrarily to report this information is that necessarily going to facilitate faster payments? I'm not necessarily sure that it would and I think there are probably better ways that you could do that. One of my colleagues noted that you could legislate that payments had to be made within X amount of time and I think if something like that had been put forward then that would give small businesses the certainty that there is actually something that's going to come of it as opposed to this mechanism. And how much is actually going to be captured here? Are your small mum and dad businesses out there—are they dealing with other small businesses in the business-to-business space that have an annual revenue of over $33 million which is those businesses that are subject to and caught by this bill? So I'm not sure that it's necessarily the best means. And I think that there are better ways that we could look around speeding this up. And I thought some legislative—or something a little bit more thoughtful could have reached that goal. As a party we are supporting this bill. I've provided a fair bit of criticism around it but we will support it to the next stage. And I hope in the committee stage there is the opportunity to help the Government understand the amount of pain and suffering that small businesses have taken on board over the past three years and how tough they're doing it now. They are now facing rising interest costs their productivity isn't going up they have additional regulations being placed on them and a lot of them will be suffering a lot of stress with their business loans being linked to their mortgage. And I hope that through that stage—[Time expired]"