Curran Clare: Construction Contracts Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeCurran Clare: Construction Contracts Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 12 March 2015. Volume:703;Page:2251. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South): Well I will do my best to be more obedient thanNick Smith the speaker before me in addressing my comments to Part 1 of this bill. There are several parts to this bill and clearly the changes being made to Part 2 have the most significance but Part 1 is important. I would also with your lenience Mr Chair like to go back a little bit in time in the history of this bill because it is of deep importance to the Committee given the extensive nature of Supplementary Order Paper 52 which was introduced 24 hours ago or less after as I understand it first going through Cabinet in August last year. This is something that I would like the Minister for Building and Housing when he again gets to his feet as I am sure he will during the process of this discussion to give us a little bit of information about—exactly what the consultation has involved with the industry around the impact of all of the measures contained in the Supplementary Order Paper including the measures that relate to Part 1 but in particular the measures that relate to retentions.With your lenience Mr Chair I will refer to my colleague Clayton Cosgrove’s Supplementary Order Paper 439. I will not talk about the substance of it because I know that we will certainly be having a wider discussion about that later on. The thing though is that this bill went through an extensive select committee process back in 2013 I think. There were 31 written submissions and we heard 22 submissions at that time. Almost without fail every submitter that came through the Commerce Committee raised the issue of retentions and the issue of the collapses that were happening in the construction industry and the impact that that was having on the construction industry. They spoke very lucidly about all of the other measures that were being proposed in the bill—the measures that are contained in Part 1 around the definition of “construction work” the process of complaints the definition of “construction site” and the operations that are critical to the completion of or preparatory to the scope of design engineering and quantity surveying work. That is one of the amendments in Part 1. Mr Chair I am just making sure that you know that I am addressing my comments to the part.These things were addressed but without fail for almost every one of them the real substance of their submissions to us was around what was a glaring gap in the bill. Just to back up my colleague Clayton Cosgrove despite being told that he is rewriting history this issue was ignored—it was ignored. It was ignored by members opposite right up until the very last minute when we were told oh no there could not be an inclusion in this bill of remedies for the retentions and the moneys that were being lost by subcontractors when there was a collapse—we could not include that information and that would have to be a separate item. As a result this bill has now sat and languished while another process was happening behind the scenes.As I have discovered there was as I understand it—and I would like the Minister to give us some clarification around this—a paper put to Cabinet in August by the Minister in the chair today Dr Nick Smith clarifying a set of proposals around this. My concern with any legislation that comes through this House when there is a substantial last-minute change that has not gone through the benefit of a select committee process and where there has not been any public consultation is that it is going to be bad law. We know that there have been other Supplementary Order Papers put forward during the course of this bill. We will be debating them in Part 2. But what has the process been for consultation?