Hudson BrettBRETT HUDSON (National): Thank you Madam Chair. I rise to continue the National Party's support for this bill. I'd like to congratulate the Government on a couple of things. The first of those is that this week we have finally actually seen evidence of the Government actually being the most open and most transparent Government New Zealand's ever seen. It was somewhat inadvertent on their part but at least we got there. The second part I'd like to congratulate them on is continuing this work which we started some years ago in our term of Government. If we think about it most of what we do we're doing to make ordinary New Zealanders' lives easier—easier to manage and easier to comply—or somehow protect or enhance their experience. There was very much and has been for a long time a perception of the insolvency arena being something if not quite a wild west in New Zealand commerce certainly an area that needed some serious attention. Whether it's on the point of who the insolvency practitioner is actually working for in whose interests they are engaged or whether there are instances where there's a natural motivation of course for them to seek to recover their own fees first and how does that impact people a little further down the food chain. It's been some time in its germination but it's important that we amend the regime to give greater confidence to all participants. The participants are obviously not just the businesses that regrettably find themselves in need of such practitioners because they are being wound up but—not even equally so; in that situation even more importantly—those businesses that have found themselves as creditors to an insolvent business or a liquidated business who are at risk of not being able to recover the moneys that are due to them.So I think that the general principle—that we need to tighten this up so that every participant can have more confidence in the people that will act and the way they will act and the grounds under which they will act—helps to provide in commerce in general and business confidence in general some reason to have a little more confidence.The part I did want to spend some time talking about is Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 240 which we will support. There's no question about that. We're not going to argue the toss on this tonight. It was discussed albeit briefly at the Economic Development Science and Innovation Committee that it was the intention of officials to create a regulation-making power to see that a levy to pay for this practitioner regime would instead of being levied against the practitioners themselves be a much broader base and much lower levy across a larger group of companies—perhaps all entities that might at some stage be subject to liquidation under the Companies Act. We think that is the right thing in this case but it's not always the right thing to do.We are very mindful on this side of the House—and I'm also mindful that the Minister in the chair at the moment also happens to be the Minister for Small Business—of the ability for Government to even inadvertently place great pressure on small businesses through small elements of compliance that in isolation might look like they are negligible or not all that serious. In this case if we're talking about levying this across every potential company-type entity—every entity that could be liquidated under the Companies Act—we probably are talking a couple of dollars or not much more per annum. We have no issue with that in this case but the point I raise is that we should always be mindful that every few dollars we add here there or in other places ultimately adds up to something somewhat more than that to particularly the smaller businesses that end up carrying those burdens.But we do think that in this instance the case was made by officials and it is a very sensible case—that being that if the regime is going to cost between $750000 and $1 million to administer each year the alternatives are not many. Simply you charge the practitioners which some would argue is what we do with doctors or we do with lawyers or we do with other professions but if we look at the number of practitioners we have taking official advice that might mean that some of them would face levies of up to $10000 a year. Now that might force some of them out of business but equally a point to bear in mind is that ultimately they would have to recover that levy somewhere. That would be recovered when they did undertake an insolvency from the assets of that business and ultimately another creditor would then miss out. So we do support the SOP we certainly support the bill and we commend the Government on bringing it to fruition.CHAIRPERSON (Poto Williams): Oh that's it? OK.Melissa Lee: Madam Chair.CHAIRPERSON (Poto Williams): Melissa Lee—I call Melissa Lee. That was close.