Hipkins Chris: Plumbers Gasfitters and Drainlayers Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHipkins Chris: Plumbers Gasfitters and Drainlayers Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 02 July 2013. Volume:691;Page:11733. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka):I am very pleased to have this opportunity to take a call on the Plumbers Gasfitters and Drainlayers Amendment Bill. It would be fair to say that this bill has had a very long history and is a result of a number of serious issues over quite a long period of time. A few years ago I had the opportunity to sit on the Regulations Review Committee when we were considering issues to do with the Plumbers Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board and it would be fair to say that members of the community the professionals who do this work have legitimate concerns about the way the board is operating legitimate concerns around the legislation that governs it and legitimate concerns around the actions of a number of people involved in the industry.What we are seeing here today is that the Government is simply going to override by way of legislation by narrow majority what have been clear breaches of the Act by the Plumbers Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board and that is wrong. One of the reasons it is wrong—well there are many many reasons it is wrong; it is manifestly unjust. One of the reasons that Parliament sets up an organisation like the Plumbers Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board is to provide leadership to the industry. And how can the board provide that leadership that the industry needs when so many in the industry have no confidence in it? They have no confidence in it because it has breached its own Act on several occasions. Every time they have gone through some kind of process to have their grievances addressed and acknowledged they have been proven to be correct. Yet this Government is simply turning a blind eye to that and is just saying to the board: “Just go on doing what you’ve always done.” That is not right. It is simply wrong. Actually this board to operate effectively must have the confidence of the people who are required to pay the levies to it and at the moment it does not. So how can it do the job if no one has confidence in it or if the majority of people practising in the profession do not have confidence in it?So this legislation far from fixing the problem actually makes the problem worse because it simply rides roughshod over the whole process and simply discounts all of the legitimate concerns that have been raised. It says that those concerns do not matterand that that whole process—after the huge amount of time and energy that people have put into having their concerns addressed—is going to be simply overlooked.I will turn specifically to what happens in Part 1. There are two parts to this legislation. Part 1 which we are dealing with now is the part that effectively enacts the legislation as the board thought it should be. The board had been acting in a way that was inconsistent with the legislation as it was. Part 1 of this legislation simply says: “We’ll just change the law in order to allow you to continue doing what you have always done.” That is what this Government has said to the board.Part 2 which we will talk about shortly then retrospectively validates decisions that have been made. I am looking forward to that part of the debate because there are a number of National Ministers who have been on record in this House when they were in Opposition lambasting the then Labour Government for anything that had even the slightest hint of retrospectivity to it. And now suddenly here they are retrospectively legislating to approve a whole lot of decisions that the board made that were against the law.So turning to Part 1 of the legislation specifically and looking at the clauses that are in the legislation we see that clause 4 amends the Act to allow the Plumbers Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board to impose on registered plumbers gasfitters and drainlayers a disciplinary levy to fund the costs arising out of investigations into allegations or complaints against registered persons and proceedings covering dispute under Part 3 of the Act. It is that last part that is actually really important because the Act previously allowed the disciplinary levy to be collected to cover complaints against only registered persons and not against other people who might be practising. This is where the board got itself into difficulty because it was collecting a disciplinary levy that it could then use outside disciplinary matters concerning just registered practitioners under this Act.So what it effectively does is say that those who are registered those who go to the trouble of being registered are now being asked to fund potential investigations and disciplinary action against the people who do not make that step of becoming registered. There may well be good arguments for that but simply imposing this by way of a legislative override effectively of a whole lot of organisations—the Regulations Review Committee the Ombudsman and various others that have all said that the practitioners who have raised the concerns have legitimate concerns—and to ride roughshod over those organisations through a legislative process is not the right way to do it. It is manifestly unjust. It is simply not right. Retrospective legislation is not right.We know that there have been major problems with this board as I mentioned. There have been some very good people involved with the Plumbers Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board and there are still some good people involved in the board. It is not in any way a reflection on them and I do not want to cast aspersions on their characters or anything like that but the board itself has had major systemic problems. In order to deal with those issues one of the things that must be done as a matter of priority is to restore confidence in the board. This legislation sadly is not going to allow that to happen because if anything it is going to add to the sense of grievance that people who have concerns with the board already have expressed. The bill raises natural justice issues; retrospective legislation often does. We are certainly not convinced it is justified in this case. Sometimes there are rare occasions where retrospective legislation can be justified and in this case I am certainly not convinced that there is quality justification for that.A number of complainants concerned about the illegal collection of the disciplinary levy and offences fee have had their claims vindicated through a number of the mechanisms including as I mentioned the Auditor-General the Ombudsman and the Regulations Review Committee. All of that vindication of their concerns is now beingoverturned. We in the Labour Party acknowledge the major problems that have existed within this industry and the way this board has operated. We are committed to finding a solution to those problems but that must start from the point that we have got to have a board an organisation that the whole industry can have confidence in. Unfortunately this legislation that Maurice Williamson is bringing before the Committee today does the opposite. It simply reinforces a legitimate sense of grievance that many people feel. That is the reason why we cannot support this.