Bennett DavidHon DAVID BENNETT (National—Hamilton East): Thank you Madam Chair. I'd just like to follow from that speech and just echo those strong words that the Minister relayed to the committee and also Stuart Smith's intentions as well. Seeing the Minister in the chair Andrew Little—he definitely is wanting to understand and work through those issues as well so I don't think there's any problem in the committee with that. I think everyone's got the right intentions around this room. The question then becomes: are we willing to do the next step of actually making it work? And the Hon Nick Smith has raised a particular solution that would enable that to happen.I understand that the Minister in the chair is reverting back to the principle of retrospectivity in law and the difficulty of that. However this is not a case where the offence is easily identifiable in that people would be caught as typically would be the case in retrospectivity. This is a case where you're futureproofing New Zealanders and the law for any situation that could arise in the future from activities that have been taken in the past. One of the key things that overrides retrospectivity in our law is intention and that is a much more important part of our legal system—the intent of someone. This law does not actually enable the intent to be considered because of the strict time frame.Nobody is intending to build a building that would create the dilemma we are talking about but there are often cases of negligence in these situations. So I believe that the retrospectivity that we're talking about in the committee is actually trumped in this case by looking at the intention or the lack of intention and the ability to do a negligence in the case of a building around that. So I just express to the Minister to think more broadly around broader legal concepts rather than just the strict ones that I know he's standing behind. I fully understand his argument in regard to it and fully comprehend and welcome it but I think that there is a broader concept in the law that actually would overtake it.The other part of that is actually the actual pub test. You know you could say—Kieran McAnulty: Pub test?Hon DAVID BENNETT: —for individuals out there they would actually expect that whether it's yesterday or today or whatever time the law would apply. We have the ability in this House at this moment to actually do what the public would expect. They wouldn't expect a rule like that to apply.What I'm saying Mr McAnulty is that every genuine person out there would expect that there would not be a period of time where no offence had been identified but that if an event that came in the future identified that there had been a problem the law of this country would protect that person at that time. It's not something that we're passing knowing that we're going to capture anybody; it's something we're passing to protect people from situations that may arise that they would genuinely be expected to be protected from by this Parliament.The opportunity is here. Regardless of who's put it up it's come along. It's here now and we've got a crossroads whether we do the right thing for the New Zealand public and what they would expect or we hide behind—not meaning that the Minister is hiding behind it—or we use some legal concepts which are relevant and are practical but could be overturned by this House actually being more practical and reasonable for what people would expect and endeavour to see this Parliament do. Also I think there are more general legal principles that do override the retrospectivity and this is a unique case where you're not looking at something you know has happened in the past; we are dealing with something that will happen in the future and it's a matter of whether we present the law enabling New Zealanders to be protected in that case.