Collins Judith: Construction Contracts Amendment Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeCollins Judith: Construction Contracts Amendment Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 20 October 2015. Volume:709;Page:7358. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon JUDITH COLLINS (National—Papakura): Well not all good things take time because I will not take much on this one.Listening to some of the contributions today you would think that this problem arose only in the Mainzeal collapse. Actually it has been around for ever and even when I first started practising law in 1981—yes I know; I was probably about 6 at the time—this was an area that has been a constant problem whenever it comes to the building industry. It is always because money gets tight. Whenever there are any tough issues around funding—and developers and builders often have real problems getting funding through traditional sources like banks so they used to end up in solicitors’ nominee companies. Then they went to other contributory mortgage forms and mezzanine financing. A lot of those outfits actually went broke during the global financial crisis in 2008 to 2009 and so what happened was an awful lot of financing went.It also means that during those tough times people who have signed up to lease buildings or to buy buildings find ways of getting out of doing that or suddenly decide that they do not want to continue or they want a smaller area. So it is a tough time and the people who suffer the most are the subcontractors or—as has been referred to today colloquially—the subbies. These people are the people who have the least ability to be able to get back their money and no matter what you say and put in contracts—and I certainly have over the years put things in contracts—the trouble is that as soon as you have to go back to that contract as soon as you look at it it is all over Rover. Essentially you are there because something is not working properly.And it is all very well to moan and complain about the fact that companies go into liquidation but they pop up again and the people pop up again in them. We do now have mechanisms to stop people constantly becoming company directors after they have been in charge of companies that have gone into liquidation and left debts like this but I would say it is a tough job to make significant changes in this area and actually not put a lot of regulation around it. I think the Minister for Building and Housing has done a really good job with the Commerce Committee in trying to have quicker adjudication of issues and to deal with some of the most outstanding of the issues.It is always going to be difficult in building. There is never quite enough money for what people want. Far too much time is spent. It is very expensive. It is a difficult game and certainly any developer will say to you that if you really have been a developer you have probably been bankrupt at least once. That is what happens. It is the nature of it but we can do things to improve the situation particularly for the subcontractors the tradespeople who have no other mechanism of getting paid. This is a good bill which we should all be supporting.Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: I call Denise Roche—a 5-minute call.