Russell DeborahDr DEBORAH RUSSELL (Labour—New Lynn): Tēnā koe e Te Māngai o Te Whare. I just want to talk a little bit and follow on from what my esteemed colleague Mr Chris Penk has said. This is a very short bill. I note that the only thing Mr Muller hasn't done is put it into a larger font size—he could've made it a little bit bigger. It does deal with an issue that needs to be dealt with—an issue of clarification. It is so short you might almost think that perhaps it was a trivial bill except that one would never attribute a trivial bill to a man of Mr Muller's stature. It is actually an important bill.Hon Iain Lees-Galloway: Careful. There could be a leadership bid.Dr DEBORAH RUSSELL: Ha ha! It's important because it actually affects a large number of entities in our country. My understanding is that there are well over 100 cooperatives in our country more than that and they're actually a very important form of business organisation in this country—dear I say a socialist form of business organisation where people get together and they decide to operate together to share the profits together because by doing so they will in fact do better for themselves and better for their communities. So I think it's important for us to try to clarify this particular law around cooperatives to make it easier for people to operate them and to ensure that we don't end up in a lawyer's fashion exemplified tonight by Mr Chris Penk and Dr Duncan Webb as to the way the lawyers can sort of dig into and into and into an issue and find something to dispute.Now in this particular case this Companies (Clarification of Dividend Rules in Companies) Amendment Bill—what it does is it clarifies an issue that we're not even sure is going to be an issue. Within cooperatives there are two sorts of shares as some of my colleagues have referred to. There are wet shares and there are dry shares. For those of us who are not lawyers I much prefer those terms wet" and "dry"—they actually mean something. So a wet share is a share that actually carries a right to a dividend; a dry share does not. Now that dividend is a share of the profits of the co-op.The interesting thing—and this is what Mr Muller has picked up in the Companies Act—is that that particular distinction is not especially clear in the Companies Act. It is there—we think it's there. We think the law is right. But there is just sufficient uncertainty that it is an issue which could be disputed could be taken to the courts could go all the way through our legal system and that does seem to be a waste of time a waste of intellectual effort a waste of the courts' energy and more to the point the co-ops themselves are clear about what they want. They understand that they want some wet and some dry shares. No one is disputing what the members of these companies want. All that we need to clarify is the law and that is exactly what this bill does.So what it does is it makes it very clear that members of a company a co-op can set up the rules to suit themselves and set up the rules—within of course the limitations of our legislation—and makes it clear who gets a dividend and in which circumstances and it clarifies the law that way. We have a lot of bills in this House that clarify the law that just sets matters right that just make things a little bit better and sometimes you think "Well why on Earth is the House spending its time doing this? Why don't we just sort of let it disappear? Why don't we just wait for perhaps a matter to appear before the courts and then we might deal with it?" But the answer is straightforward. For the rule of law to operate effectively we need the law to be precise we need it to be clear and we need it to be defined in advance so that people understand their positions. That is exactly what Mr Muller's member's bill does in this case.So short as it is; in 12-point font as it is; amending just a very small number of clauses in the Companies Act as it does; even though it might seem to be the smallest matter I assure you Madam Deputy Speaker it is not the smallest matter. It is worth the House's time and attention and for that reason I commend this bill to the House."