Bayly AndrewANDREW BAYLY (National—Port Waikato): Thank you Madam Speaker. It's a pleasure to be talking on the Business Payment Practices Bill in its second reading. This is an interesting bill.First of all I've just got to congratulate the Minister because this is her first piece of legislation that she's had to talk about in respect of small businesses. Newly minted and here she is up today little bloop at the start that mucked it up a little bit but none the less trying to put forward a bill for supporting small businesses. And of course it wasn't her idea; this came from her predecessor the Hon Stuart Nash.Hon Member: Oh!ANDREW BAYLY: Oh Mr Nash that's right. So anyway the Minister's got the wonderful opportunity of actually trying to put through a bill that might support small businesses. And of course this is a Government that has just set about killing small businesses. How many things have they done to add compliance costs to make it harder? Last night we did the WorkSafe rule: now anyone even if you've got a business with one person can request a business to set up a health and safety committee and have a representative—one person. So rather than talk to a boss or something we've now got this situation. And this is just the cascade. We've just done the ACC one. There is a cascade of legislation that this Government has set about for the last six years to make it so much harder for small business. And that is the issue. If the Minister actually got out and talked to people rather than saying she's been in contact or whatever that is the single-biggest issue for small-business owners. They just feel like they're getting socked all the time. The issue is that they believe that the Government thinks they are just a pile of cash for the Government to go and raid to take a whole lot of money off them and spend it on a whole load of rubbishy projects and that's what's happened over the last six years.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): On that note can the member come back to the bill. Thank you.ANDREW BAYLY: Yes I'm very happy to Madam Speaker. This bill is all about intent it's all about being seen to do something for small businesses at the end of a six-year-long period and it is about trying to work out and assist businesses around business payment systems. The issue is that the bill doesn't actually deal with the problem. We are opposed to this bill because on a number of counts—and it really is a bad piece of legislation to try and deal with the issue of poor payments. We recognise that businesses need to have prompt payments but this is not the solution to it. We've done our best in the select committee to improve it because we know that this bill will go through the House because Labour dominate Parliament. That's why we've worked very proactively in the committee and a number of the amendments that the Minister spoke of were generated by National Party members. That's because if this thing is to go through we want to make sure it at least has some reasonable conditions to it to make it try and actually get to some point of being useful. But it will not solve the big issue.The biggest issue is its focus on large companies. Perhaps the worst-paying group in New Zealand is actually Government departments. We spend $42 billion as a Government and if you talk to anyone who has dealings with the Government actually Government departments in the main are often slow payers. All it would take is for the affected Ministers to tell their departments to make payments on time and you wouldn't need a piece of legislation to do that. That's the first bit.The other thing is that it's focused on large businesses. For instance there are certain agencies that are slow payers and one of those particularly is the building and construction sector. That is why the National Government changed the rules and implemented some new rules to make sure that contractors particularly were protected when it came to liquidations and those types of events because that's really dealing with the nub of the issue.What this bill requires is large companies—and often they are good-paying companies; it's actually the smaller companies that have got cash-flow problems that are the ones that are slow-paying. It is focused on the large ones and it requires them every six months to send some information in to the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment (MBIE) and MBIE are then going to set up a register. Of course I start to get a little bit worried at this point because the reality is first of all that such a system has been in place in England and Australia. The Australians put it in place about three years ago and are currently reviewing it because it is not working. In fact the evidence from Australia that having put this regime in place which is what this is modelled on has actually led on some occasions to even slower payments occurring to smaller businesses—slower payments; it actually resulted in a worse outcome. One of the reasons for that—and I think we'll find out in time from the Australian review of it—is that there's an assumption because many MPs from Labour don't actually come from a business background that every business person sits around in their office in Howick in Eketāhuna and in Mataura in the South Island thinking You know I'm very worried about my business; I'm very worried about how I'm going to get paid. Oh guess what I'm going to do! I'm going to go on to an MBIE website and have a check as to whether someone is going to pay me on time." I say to you that the register will be out of date immediately as soon as it's published. So that's the first thing: the reliance on data that will be out of date.The second thing is that business owners don't sit there waiting to go on an MBIE website to see whether in fact that's the source of truth in New Zealand because normally business people are a lot more busy than that. If you do want to get a credit assessment guess what you ring up one of the four credit assessment firms in New Zealand that have been operating for years and that have history of doing it. Centrix put out a survey this morning and guess what! To get an up-to-date comprehensive assessment on a business as of today is 33 bucks—$33. That's all it costs right? But hey presto MBIE now—and this is what really scared us in the select committee—rather than going and saying to one of those four providers "Guess what! You've got a good service you've been doing it for years and actually you know what you do because you're in the business of providing independent credit assessments. Why don't we contract with you and we might even post some of the data on our website?"—even if they want to run their own website; I'm talking about MBIE—what they want to do is set up their own system.So we asked some of the own-credit places "What would it cost to set up a system to do this?" The estimate was $3 million to $5 million. And guess what! IT projects—hmm yeah they have a bit of risk and Governments are not particularly good at it so you could probably assume at least at the top of that spectrum. And then the ongoing costs are about $1.5 million to $2 million. On top of that MBIE are going to go out and hire a whole lot of people—a big swag of them—because of course they've got to report every six months; put it on the website. So we're going to create a new department at MBIE. Why wouldn't you just go and get the 33 bucks? I think the biggest thing MBIE could do is to tell people where they could go and get an up-to-date assessment. So that's the prime stuff. It didn't work in Australia particularly and it's a system that's going to be Government-run and of course no one follows what Government does when you're in business because if you want to go and get something you go and get the source of truth from the right people.I think the issue with this whole thing is that we are trying to solve something. What we should have been doing is focusing on is those companies those industries that have specific issues and dealing with it. I would suggest to you that the Government agencies are the number one that Ministers should have dealt with. But we should also deal with specific sectors. This is a poor outcome. I've spoken to a number of the business agencies and when they start to hear this is going to cost a couple of thousand dollars for small businesses to operate and to do this—this is a poor outcome. That is the reason why we're opposing this bill."