Bayly AndrewANDREW BAYLY (National—Port Waikato): Well I thought I might talk on that excellent Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 365 which happens to be in my name! I can't claim to be perfect because I've got to acknowledge the help of the House in preparing this. But in the spirit of trying to improve this bill—the Opposition is committed to this bill albeit that we don't agree with the bill—what my SOP does seek to do is to make sure that if this bill is pushed through and no doubt it will be by Labour as it commands a majority in the House—Hon Scott Simpson: At the moment.ANDREW BAYLY: At the moment" as my good colleague says.CHAIRPERSON (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! The member is speaking to Part 4 of the bill. ANDREW BAYLY: Yeah I thought we're on new clause 48A.CHAIRPERSON (Hon Jacqui Dean): Can I ask the member to come back to Part 3?ANDREW BAYLY: Oh that's right. I see we're one over. OK. Hon Scott Simpson: He's getting ahead of us.ANDREW BAYLY: Slightly ahead. I thought I was very careful about that but I wasn't. So what I'd like to talk about now is the pecuniary penalty for contraventions of compliance notice or involvement in a contravention. In clause 39 there's a whole stack of contraventions and why a person might be deemed to be subject to pecuniary penalty. For instance if they have "(2)(a) aided abetted counselled or procured any other person to contravene the requirement; or (b) induced any other person whether by threats or promises or otherwise … or (c) been in any way directly or indirectly knowingly concerned in or party to the contravention"—gee this is a long list—"(d) conspired with any other person to contravene"—Barbara Kuriger: Don't run out of breath!ANDREW BAYLY: Yes. Then Holy Toledo! What happens is we make our six-monthly report and we realise that we've made a mistake. Under subclause (3)(a) in the case of an individual we're subject to a $50000 fine or in any other case $500000 for each act or omission.So one of the things about this is first of all there was some debate about the level of these penalties because it does introduce the issue of proportionality. If an entity ends up saying that they think that they meet their payments at 49 days as opposed to the reality being 50 then they're potentially up for $500000. So why does the Minister believe that these fines are proportionate? Because inevitably we find in legislation going through we see the same sort of figures being driven through; albeit for differing types of severity. It's fine that the Minister might say "Well $500000 is the maximum." Well actually it is the maximum but it's a high bar to start to work back towards what the ultimate fine might be for an entity or even $50000 for an individual.I suppose it gives rise to the issue around given the level of the severity of these payments and whether in fact it actually has caused any loss to a particular entity because if it hasn't actually resulted in loss i.e. a firm has entered into an agreement with a company because it thought it would pay within a certain prescribed period of time and it hasn't made that payment within one day of it or one day extra has a loss actually occurred? I would have thought that was a pretty important issue in determining what a proportionate fine is for any person who contravenes this requirement to publish or provide the data. So maybe we'll just start off with that point and then we can come back to a wider issue as well."