Tirikatene RinoRINO TIRIKATENE (Labour—Te Tai Tonga): Thank you Mr Speaker. As you can see I'm not Mr Patterson but I want to speak and articulate our position for our opposition to this bill. But I want to acknowledge Mr Muller and his leadership in bringing this bill to the House and the wide consultation that he has undertaken up to this point. What we are dealing with is an issue which arguably can already be dealt with under existing law. It was unclear to officials and in fact officials thought it was unnecessary for us to go to this extent to actually put a change in the law to accommodate what arguably could be done anyway. Hon Nathan Guy: No they didn't say that. RINO TIRIKATENE: It is true—it is arguable—because what we are dealing with here is an instance where there is different treatment of a single class of shares. There are wet shares and dry shares in terms of those companies that want to operate under cooperative principles. Now for any company that is established and that wants to actually operate under those principles there is all the flexibility in the world for them to do that by way of the constitution by way of creating different classes of shares or by way of shareholders' agreements between shareholders so there is enough scope within the provisions of the Companies Act which has always been very flexible in terms of how companies and how shareholders want to make their arrangements. So there is already a sufficient degree of flexibility within the Act itself and that was brought home by the officials who were advising on this bill. Sure there were others that took a different view in terms of the fact that well we need to be absolutely explicit and create a separate law in itself for this very unique situation. Again as I say any company that establishes itself under cooperative principles today can create the desired scenario under an existing constitution. They don't need to actually rely on a change in the law—they can do that. They can create different classes of shares. They can create wet shares and dry shares and they can make the conditions amongst themselves. What we're dealing with here is the situation of a significant cooperative exporting and marketing company Zespri. There's a very large shareholder base. A lot of those shareholders were the pioneering shareholders that helped grow the business and helped produce and contribute their fruit to make the company what it is today and a lot of those pioneering shareholders no longer are contributing to the company because they've retired but they still sit on their shares. So what situation we have here is a company which is a multimillion-dollar company which now the directors face the difficult decision of How can we distribute our profits to our shareholders when a lot of those shareholders no longer actually contribute their kiwifruit to the business?"So that's the situation which has been created. Perhaps if the company had foresight and actually made it more explicit that when these pioneering shareholders if they do no longer supply fruit or grow fruit which they supply to the cooperative—when that happens they won't be entitled to dividends. If that was the case when the business was established and that was very explicit and very clear there would be no need for this piece of legislation. That's why I say there isn't a real need for this piece of legislation. It is arguable. I'm pretty sure that directors will be able to make decisions along those lines.In terms of Zespri well you know they have to look at their total shareholder base and they are probably in difficult situations. As a select committee we didn't actually hear from the potentially affected shareholders. So you know with only four submitters we weren't able to actually gauge what their thoughts were in terms of having their shareholder rights potentially being overridden by this piece of legislation. So those were the issues.I'm sure Mr Muller and the directors and the board of Zespri will find a way through this but it's really unnecessary for them to put an amendment right into the legislation itself for this very very narrow conundrum that they find themselves in. But I'm sure they'll find a way. I understand that they have the Greens' support. So I look forward to hearing further contributions.Hon Members: Come on Mark."