Clendon DavidDAVID CLENDON (Green): I am pleased to take a short call to speak in support of this excellent bill. Before I deal with some of the detail of the provisions of the bill I would just like to make two observations about the Government's objection to it. It seems to me the first point its members are insisting on is that this bill is unnecessary—that the provisions within the bill are already covered off by existing legislation. That presupposes the drafter of the bill Mr Parker is given to flights of fancy and has an overactive imagination. None of these characteristics are evident in my experience of Mr Parker. I think it cannot be denied by anyone who is actually observing the New Zealand workplace that so-called contractors are often at a distinct disadvantage. The second concern we have heard from our friends in National on the Government benches is about the intense complexity of this bill. It runs to some 14 clauses—scarcely six pages of text. I recall when Simon Power was Minister of Commerce. He was putting through a lot of legislation to reregulate the finance industry. They were complex bills and I say this having sat on the Commerce Committee at the time. They were extraordinarily complex. It in a sense bothers me and concerns me that the combined intellectual horsepower of these fine folk we see this evening considers this to be a complex bill. It is quite extraordinary. The bill is extraordinarily straightforward in fact. I can say I speak with a level of experience. I have been an employer and an employee and indeed I have also worked as a contractor—on a very fair rate I might add. But the problem is that often people working as contractors are working at a distinct disadvantage. There is a significant power imbalance between those seeking to earn their way in the world and those who are in a position to employ them as contractors to contract to them. This very straightforward easily understood bill I think seeks to even out that field to even up the situation a little and to make it a fairer situation. New section 4B inserted by clause 7 of the bill is fairly straightforward I would have thought. Matters must be taken into account in establishing a rate: how long the job will take and how long is a reasonable amount of time for a person to take to provide the service. New section 8B inserted by clause 11 requires that information about remuneration must be kept. It requires a person paying someone for services to keep good records and it goes on to say that those records must be available to a labour inspector. So far I am not intellectually challenged by any of this I must say.Hon Members: Ha ha!DAVID CLENDON: I make no immodest claims to superior intellect but I am finding this quite straightforward to comprehend. It goes on to say that in the event that it is found by an inspector or someone else that a person has not been rewarded sufficiently and reasonably and fairly the person paying the amount may be taken to task and obliged to pay compensation in effect—to top up the payment that person has received to meet a reasonable minimum standard. None of that challenges me. None of it do I find unreasonable unfair or difficult to incorporate into existing law. It may well be and Mr Parker has very modestly conceded that this bill may be far from perfect. This is the purpose of select committees: to make bills better and bring them back into the House in a form that we can then integrate into the existing statutes. Nothing in this do I find difficult; nothing in this I find would disrupt the existing employment situation in New Zealand in any negative way. I must refer to some of the majority view of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee which identified the printing and distribution sector as potentially almost a victim of this bill. It highlights the fact that the digital age has made things slightly difficult for the print industry. That is a given. Disruptive technologies come along and do create challenges for older forms of technology and this form the digital form has made print a difficult thing. It goes on to say that—I am running out of time so very briefly it implies that if we pay these people too much the entire print industry could collapse. If we give a few more dollars to people stuffing letterboxes with leaflets with local papers and the like the entire print industry could be brought to its knees. Somehow I doubt that. I do not see that as being a credible proposition.