Clark David: Construction Contracts Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeClark David: Construction Contracts Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 12 March 2015. Volume:703;Page:2248. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr DAVID CLARK (Labour—Dunedin North): Labour will support the measures in this bill largely as a result of the road to Damascus experience that my colleague Clayton Cosgrove referred to earlier and what a very interesting and useful metaphor that is. I want to refer members—and I have some questions for the Minister—to section 6 in clause 6 where the meaning of “construction work” has been amended. It has been broadened and we see in subsection (1A)(b) that “quantity surveying work carried out in New Zealand” is captured within the amended definition. There is some debate about what that might mean and exactly how that might be applied. Design and engineering work carried out in New Zealand will be included as I understand it and I am just wondering whether this will really make a difference to the speeding up of the resolution of disputes and how that will flow down to subcontractorseventually.I want to mention a case that might be illuminating and give a concrete example of how this might be applied. So let us imagine a Government wanting to build a convention centre in a large city in New Zealand as an example of a process where we might want speedy construction and any disputes if there was a failure on behalf of the Government to be resolved speedily—brought to a head and resolved. In this hypothetical case that I am bringing to the discussion we know that Television New Zealand a local operator that is a neighbour of the site where a convention centre would be constructed had given over for the purposes of construction some land that carried a value to a deal that was done and we are told that the value of items brought to the party in this wider construction deal actually affect the final outcome and the solvency and the ability to deliver on the construction contract which is the fundamental case we have here.So we have got a dispute that is actually dare I say a very real dispute. It is not just hypothetical. It is playing out in New Zealand with a dispute over funding for the Auckland convention centre where the Government has said that there will be a cap of $402 million and concessions going to Skycity but Skycity is saying—The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): I am now going to ask the member to come to Part 1.Dr DAVID CLARK: I will come back certainly to Part 1 because what I want to ask is how it is determined in this example if Skycity said: “We can no longer build this convention centre for the money; we are going to have to fold. It is actually going to take our company under. We can buildonly a pup tent but we have got on to this and we are going to build it but we cannot actually finish the building.” If there was a dispute about this how much would go back to the value of the inputs—you know the work of the various quantity surveyors who worked out what that Television New Zealand land would be worth with different construction designs on it in the end picture and how much the deal was actually about the right amount of money if there was a legal dispute? How would those kinds of legal issues play out as they were resolved in working out whether the deal was properly funded in the first place and therefore what the implications for subcontractors would be?So I will be very interested if the Minister has a view. I know that there are a number of officials here ready to advise him but we are talking about a broader definition here and the legal implications of advice supplied along the way if I understand it correctly as well as the work committed by the subcontractors. Who is due what and where does the liability lie? That is the basic question I am asking and I think it is a fair question because what this bill is doing and what we actually support is hopefully leading to a speedier resolution process particularly where complex legal issues are applied.In this case we on this side of the Chamber have a particular view about that deal. We do not think it has been a good deal for the taxpayer. We think the Government has done a poor job and we think there could be implications further down the line for the taxpayer if the Government has not done its job right.