Goldsmith PaulHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak on this bill which the National Party is supporting at the first reading in order to spend some time at the select committee delving into the details. Obviously nobody's very keen on having their wheels clamped and so there'd be widespread enthusiasm for doing something further about it following the voluntary code that the previous Government instilled. The question is what is the best solution. I suppose our concern is that the Government's come riding in and obviously a message went out from the ninth floor that We need more legislation in the House quickly—pronto." Mr Faafoi leapt up and said "Well here's one and we'll stick this out." and what we've seen with the regulatory impact statement is that officials have signalled that the procedures and the development of this legislation is somewhat shambolic. There has been no formal consultation. Generally how legislation is put together is that somebody says "There's a problem here." and the officials go away and say "Well let's talk to the people who are engaged in the industry."—in this case it would be the people who own car-parks and who have the very real problem of having people parking in them when they shouldn't or not paying and so not having access to the car-parks because there are people who are in there that aren't actually paying or that shouldn't be in there. You'd also talk to consumers who have been affected by this you'd talk to all the players involved in the particular industry and then you'd get a realistic idea of what the options are. But none of that happened. They've just plunged in and almost in a kind of Keystone Kops sort of fashion the Minister has romped in saying "Well I think we should put a cap of $50 in." And then around the Cabinet table they've almost had a bidding process and somebody's said "No actually I think $100 is better." Someone else probably piped up "No $150 is better." And then somebody—probably Winston Peters—said "OK. Well we'll split the difference between $150 and $50." and $100 is where we've wound up. So that's a very kind of amateur way to go about legislating. What we know is that we don't have any idea of what the consequences would be. It might well be that $100 isn't sufficient to cover the cost of the wheel clamping effectively and so the net result will be that people who own car-parks and who find that people are illegally parking in them might have the option of putting a ticket on the window wipers and nobody might pay that ticket; so that's not a realistic option. The only other option they've got is getting in a tow truck and that creates even more costs potentially down the line. That's the basic thing we've got to juggle. So we are prepared obviously to have that conversation teased out at the select committee process. The only point we would make is that generally you would expect a good Government to have made a realistic effort before they introduced the bill to the House to try and understand the real trade-offs in this situation and come up with some clear analysis and detailed studies into the scope of the problem and what the potential conflicts would be before they introduced the legislation in the House. But we'll have to do that process through the select committee process and I hope that we'll get some good realistic assessment of the issues as it's carried through. I hope that the Government is prepared to listen so that you can come up with something that is actually practical and helps New Zealanders and that helps avoid the extreme examples that do get thrown up in this situation so that people can have a little bit more confidence that they're not going to be treated in an arbitrary and unfair manner in a car-parking situation. So on that basis we'll be interested to see how it works in the select committee. Thank you."