Goldsmith PaulHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Thank you Madam Chair. It's my pleasure to speak on this bill. Look I mean the National Party is not generally one for introducing new regulations and regulatory systems. We do it reluctantly. In this case I was the Minister when we reinvigorated this bill and we did it on the basis that the successful running of any economy relies on clear and well-enforced rules around the formations and breaking up of companies. It depends on the ability of people to be able to have confidence in the way that the money that they invest in companies or the money that they are owed by companies for work that they're doing has a reasonable prospect of getting paid and if something goes wrong—which it sometimes does—that there are effective systems in place so that people can be fairly treated.The reality of business is that things sometimes go wrong. Companies go bust in the middle of constructing buildings for example and there has to be a clear and robust system in place so that creditors have a reasonable chance of getting the money back or some portion of the money back without it (a) being eaten up entirely by fees of insolvency practitioners and (b) being too easy for the directors of the companies that have gone bust to get out of paying their fair share to creditors.The system that we've had in the past has been I believe too loose and not regulated sufficiently. Now the original plan as we know back in 2010 was to have a kind of negative licensing regime whereby you could do it unless you weren't allowed to and we didn't think that was sufficient. So when I was the Minister in the previous Government we reviewed all that and came up with a positive licensing system whereby insolvency practitioners would be regulated and there would be much more effective ways of dealing with practitioners who weren't performing in the interests of everybody. In practice that was very difficult to deal with under the current regime.So we support the broad thrust of this bill. I note that during the select committee process there was quite a lot of concern raised by practitioners about the wording of various elements of the bill and I was frustrated that there didn't seem to be a meeting of minds between the officials drawing up the legislation and the industry it was seeking to work alongside. So the select committee did recommend quite a few changes to the Supplementary Order Paper trying to make things more workable in practice particularly for solvent liquidation. There are two basic divisions between companies that go bust and owe more than they have in assets—insolvent. Those that actually have more assets than they owe are solvent and shouldn't have to jump through quite so many hoops in that circumstance.The other point that I would make is there was a fair and lengthy debate about how the regime should be funded. Normally the group that are being regulated pay for that themselves through some sort of levy but because they're such a very small group of practitioners it would be a very considerable sum for each of that small group. It was felt—and I agree quite strongly—that it's far better to have a small addition to the annual companies levy for all 500000 companies across New Zealand and I think that is absolutely a worthwhile levy to be paid in order to maintain the integrity of the insolvency system so that more New Zealanders can have confidence in the way that things will be dealt with in an untidy breakup.On that basis we broadly support what's been worked on here and would be very interested to continue to hear feedback from all parties concerned as it works its way through these final stages. Thank you Madam Chair.