Watts Simon; Rurawhe AdrianSIMON WATTS (National—North Shore): Thank you very much Mr Speaker and I rise on behalf of National and as the member of Parliament for North Shore. I must say just listening to the comments by the last speaker when I was in the Hawke's Bay earlier this year talking to apple growers about the significant workforce gaps that they had at that point in time and came back and asked them What is this Government doing about resolving those problems?" the answer was "Nothing." So have a look in your own backyard and have a talk to your own businesses. National oppose this bill and I'm going to articulate a few reasons why that is the case. As one of the few people who actually has a financial background as a chartered accountant and over 25 years in this sector I am someone that understands this challenge.The reality of what we're being told in regards to this bill which is a bill which seeks to extend the deadline by two months is this is because it is of a workforce gap. Well how can this workforce gap have just appeared? If anyone knows how to plan an audit the planning for resourcing of an audit is undertaken months and months before the work even started. There is no way that this is a surprise. This Government on that side of the House have known about this problem for a long long time and they have decided under the auspices of urgency to throw it on us and say "Oh well you know what? The changes need to happen." and push it through under urgency. Well I'm sorry. You can't just change the rules of the game to suit yourself when other people and other businesses in this country are significantly struggling because of a workforce crisis. So this bill in terms of that extension of the deadline is basically symptomatic of a Government that is unable to manage the problems that we have around workforce in this country and that is why National are opposing this quite strongly.Within my home electorate of the North Shore Peter and Susan Reeves who own Manuka Cafe in Devonport had to close their doors for a period because of a lack of workforce. Sid and Chand Sahrawat who own Cassia and major restaurant chains in Auckland were in the Herald yesterday saying that they have to close for two weeks at losses of over $300000 because they do not have the workforce to operate their business. But is the Government going to legislate to try and help those businesses? No. What are they going to do? Nothing. Are they going to do the right thing and put releases around immigration to let some of that workforce come in to fill those significant labour gaps? No. But what are they going to do in their own backyard when the auditor teams can't complete the work that is required for them because of Government? Well how about we just change the legislation? Well I'm sorry. That is a lazy approach and this is something that is not a surprise and should have been well planned out.What this indicates is we've got a Minister who is out of touch. He is not over the detail in regards to this and while the Auditor-General's office do an absolutely wonderful job and I do appreciate the advisory they provide to us across the board basically this problem has been caused by the Government and the Auditor-General's office are basically symptomatic of the issues underlying that and that is simply not good enough. Basically what we're trying to get through here is around whether this two-month issue is going to actually provide the changes required. But what we know in this articulation is actually the Auditor-General has articulated that there are a number of entities which they will be able to complete the audits for. However the legislation on the Table here is a catch-all driftnet of every single entity with a whole lot of basically no limitations on the Minister around that and I don't think that is good enough either.We should be looking if they want to be putting in place exemptions to at least advise what are the entities that can't be audited within this time line. But no none of that detail is here. It's basically just a big catch-all and that is not good enough. The other aspect I'm looking forward to in speaking a little bit later on—because I'm running out of time so I won't be able to cover it this evening in this speech—is the other aspect around what's actually driving these vacancies but we'll hear a little bit more of that later.DEPUTY SPEAKER: Dr Tracey McLellan—five minutes."