Genter Julie AnneHon JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green—Rongotai): Thank you Mr Speaker. I have to say this is just absolutely classic from a National - ACT - New Zealand First right-wing Government. This is a classic playbook. They go out and position themselves as the champions of small business but when they get into power we see whose interests they really represent. What is happening under urgency right now is that the Government is repealing a bit of legislation that was correcting the power imbalance between large corporates and small business. It wasn't even really penalising those large corporates; it was just asking them to be transparent and allowing them to be accountable for late payments which is seriously affecting many small-business owners. Of course in the case of those small businesses late payments have a much more consequential impact on their functioning because they're running on the smell of an oily rag usually right? They are working as hard as they can to deliver goods and services to the people of New Zealand. The fact that this is being repealed under urgency shows that the Government is more interested in protecting the power of big corporates.Now I understand there's a huge conflation on that side of the House between what is genuine economic productivity what genuinely is good for people and planet and what makes a lot of money for a small group of people. Those two things are different. Generating genuinely productive goods and services circulating money through the economy—like you know you can see that is different than extracting profit and becoming rich. So like those are two different things actually generating the value and then skimming off the surplus.That's why like in the 20th century there was always a real big focus on maintaining a check on the growth of corporate power the growth of monopolies duopolies and oligopolies because those are actually not good for the economy. It's not good for the people of our country. What it is good for is the small group of people who are invested in those big corporates or the people who are on the really exorbitant salaries of those large corporates. So when organisations get really really large and profitable they have more power than other people in the economy and they tend to grow more and more and more and that is actually not good for the economy. If you actually study the economics people on the other side of the House and not just like Econ 101 in the 1990s or you know as part of their commerce degree or their MBA they might understand what actually makes an economy work and it's not letting huge amounts of money get hoarded by small groups of people or organisations.So that is the interest represented by this Government and under urgency they're getting rid of a perfectly reasonable tool that actually would've helped. I have to say this is really important because in the Cabinet paper they say Oh small businesses don't really need this because they can obtain information on which companies have payments in arrears through a credit agency." Oh a private for-profit credit agency such as Centrix which charges $35 to provide this information—$35. Well it so happens that one of my colleagues has been—in fact several of them have been small-business owners and they're able to let us know that if you go get a Centrix report it doesn't actually cost $35; it costs $49 plus GST per company. So the Government and the people providing the advice are out of touch and while they say they're reducing cost and red tape what they're really doing is shifting the burden of it on to small businesses who don't have the power to go chase up their late payments from the big corporates.So very very transparent through their actions who National ACT New Zealand First represent: it is the 1 percent who keep getting richer through making the economy fundamentally imbalanced and not functioning. Like the purpose of an economy is simply to facilitate people to trade goods and services and get what they need to have a good life and live a good life. What is happening right now is the extremely rich people and large corporates are extracting profit out of the economy while ordinary people hard-working people are seeing their cost of living rise and at the same time we're seeing the planet face an existential crisis. This bill will not be supported by the Green Party."