Russell DeborahDr DEBORAH RUSSELL (Labour—New Lynn): Let me restore some equanimity to the debating chamber. This is an excellent bill and it's an issue that I have been concerned with for quite some time. Way back in 2018 as a new backbencher I read a really interesting article on The Spinoff by David Cormack who runs a small business and he talked about the difficulties that small businesses face in getting paid. He talked about exactly some of the stuff that the Minister for Small Business and the previous speaker have spoken about that we all back small businesses and that small businesses are regarded as the backbone of the economy but he pointed out that we do not treat small businesses well; that we could do better. In particular he was concerned with payment practices. Around about that time was when Fonterra had decided it was going to pay its suppliers on a 60-day cycle. In fact it was going to push up payment of some of its suppliers to a very long period of time. And at around about the same time Xero had mined its data and had found that only about one in nine invoices were paid on time. So you know if you have to wait for 60 days to get paid but then that gets paid late it can be worse; even up to 90 or 120 days. What it means is that small businesses have ended up providing the working capital for large businesses because those large businesses do not pay their bills on time. That is incredibly rough on a small business. Cash is king. Getting those bills paid and getting the money in is critically important to a small business. But it is so hard for a small business to get paid when even major consulting firms like McKinsey are urged to provide as one sort of gem of consulting advice that one way to keep a business going is to push out payment of your small suppliers. So there is a real problem here. David Cormack in his article gave an analogy. He was surprised he said by the number of people who just don't pay on time and he'd never expected that he'd spend a large part of his time as a small business operator acting as a debt collector. I'm just going to quote him. He says: Having to make awkward phone-calls to people coughing between words as I asked for our money to be paid because we have mortgage payments about to go out or my cat needs its teeth pulled at the vet." Then this is the analogy; he says: "I don't walk into a supermarket fill up my trolley and just walk out the door yelling vague promises of paying at a later date. Being a supplier shouldn't be any different. And yet it is."I contacted David Cormack after I read that article and said "Hey let's talk about this." So between us David and I talked through the issues. And at that stage I put together a member's bill and even put it into the ballot on setting a disclosure regime for companies around payment times. But around about the same time I was given word—I talked to the Minister at the time and I found out there was work starting to get under way on this issue already. On the grounds that a piece of work that goes through a ministry is likely much more developed than a member's bill I pulled my bill and worked on a different issue.So it's taken a while because now we do have a bill around disclosure terms. And of course the reason that it has taken a while is not just the intervening global pandemic but because the Minister in charge of the bill now has undertaken serious consultation in order to get this bill right has gone through several issues several rounds of consultation within the business community to make sure that this strikes the right balance between say requiring compulsory payment times versus not doing anything at all. What we have here is a disclosure regime. It's a disclosure regime that asks businesses to report how well they are paying their suppliers. Now the previous speaker Andrew Bayly said that he was deeply worried about the compliance costs that this would impose on firms. That is an odd thing to say. It's a very odd thing. This is data that firms are collecting anyway. It's information that any firm has at its fingertips anyway. I spent a summer job one year doing creditors' reconciliations for a firm in New Plymouth. Just fascinating work but at least I got paid for it! But that was part of that firm ensuring that it was paying its creditors on time. And so it actually knew how long it was taking to pay each creditor. So in terms of the information that is required to fulfil what this bill sets up firms already have that information. It is just a matter of reporting it. And it is important information for small businesses. The previous speaker also had a little bit of a query as to why $33 million was the particular threshold. There's a simple answer. It's sitting in the documentation. It aligns with section 45 of the Financial Reporting Act. So it's just a threshold we commonly use anyway in financial reporting in New Zealand. So carrying on from there I want to talk about just one further advantage of this particular bill. Now there is obviously the advantages that our Minister has already talked about in terms of how it will help small business to understand who they are dealing with and when they are likely to get paid. But this is also important information for investors in large businesses for the banks for the shareholders for the debenture holders and for the other entities who trade with them. A common way to understand whether a firm is doing well is whether it is paying its bills on time. If a creditor's ledger is stretching out and out and out and increasing that can indicate that a large firm has cash-flow problems or has financing problems. If that large firm cannot pay its invoices on time it quite rightly raises questions in the minds of shareholders of lenders of anyone who has a stake in that firm. So it's really quite almost a by-product of this excellent bill we are also going to have better information available to our stock exchange better information available about the funding of New Zealand firms and businesses better information available in general to business. And the great thing is that this is information that is already there. It is just not yet publicly available. So as the previous speaker said a small bill. Perhaps a small bill but really all it is doing is requiring firms to provide some extra information so that the entities that deal with them have a better understanding of what's going on. But a small bill with large and excellent implications for our small businesses. I commend this bill to the House."