Webb DuncanHon Dr DUNCAN WEBB (Labour—Christchurch Central): Tēnā koe e te Mana Whakawā thank you. You know it was good to see Andrew Bayly Minister of Commerce and Consumer Affairs front up and talk about this bill and why the National Party's not supporting it. It was however disappointing. Now this is a bill that was put in the ballot when I was Minister of Commerce and Consumer Affairs and I was very happy to see it in there because it is a small adjustment but it's a timely one. I think it was a great idea to have an improvement to the Companies Act even though as Mr Bayly mentioned we were at the same time working on a more robust overhaul of aspects of the Companies Act.The interesting thing of course is that the aspects of the Companies Act that we were working on and I hope he remains working on are around transparency. And as the ACT member Laura Trask noted it's very easy to hide ownership interests through trusts and trustee companies through limited partnerships and all kinds of obscure shareholdings. In fact New Zealand is on a grey list for that reason because it's not possible to see who owns what and where funds are going because of the ability to hide shareholdings. As that member also pointed out and I must say it's a certain irony but the fact is that we do agree on some things and we do agree that we need to look after the little guy here that hairdressers and tradies are the kinds of people who have relatively straightforward company arrangements—just a shareholder and director very simple—but they're the ones who have to put their home address on the company's register.And I mean it beggared belief to me that Andrew Bayly would come into the House and talk about a bill that touches on privacy and start reading out people's home addresses. It shows how out of touch he is that the very thing that Deborah Russell has brought this bill to the House to protect he sits there and violates. It really just amazed me. So this bill is about privacy Mr Bayly and the idea that you'd sit in this House and read out people's home address whether it's on a public record or not frankly just astounds me. But then again what's surprising there? But I do challenge you Mr Bayly to get on with that company transparency legislation and improve the work that was being undertaken and bring into this House a bill which makes corporate transparency much more effective in New Zealand. Then Mr Bayly also gave an example—I think it was Mr Bayly or was it the New Zealand First member—of media sort of wanting to look up a company director who you know might have defaulted or something of media importance and that being the reason that they should be able to go on the Companies Register get the cameras knock on the front door and intrude on that person's privacy. That again shows a real misconception as to the reasoning underlying why being able to find a director one way or another is important. The reason you want to be able to find a director is because the director in many circumstances is liable for the operations of the company—legally liable. So you need to be able to go and track them down for legal purposes to serve a notice on the company or for shareholders to serve notices on the director for similar purposes. It's not a general ability to hunt someone down—we're not private investigators here. It's actually a really important legal reason. I do want to in my closing minute just mention Sarah Pallet who did come to me and talk about this and we agreed it was an important and actually quite urgent thing to do. Because every day that this isn't in place there are people—and as my colleagues have said mainly women but people of all kinds—who are at risk and we can change that. It's good to see that there seems to be some agreement in this House at least that that's a good thing. And where people are at risk the idea that they can approach the Companies Office give a statutory declaration to say that they feel at risk and thereby not have their personal details on the register is a good thing and I absolutely commend that to this House.