White HelenHELEN WHITE (Labour—Mt Albert): Thank you Madam Chair I wanted to ask you about one of those things that you've raised—oh sorry Madam Chair; I wanted to ask the Minister for Small Business and Manufacturing about one of the things that he's raised as an alternative to this because there's been a lot made about e-invoicing. Now I've actually got no problem with e-invoicing—fill your boots. I'm thrilled to see e-invoicing promoted and I'm also thrilled to see Government invoices paid on time. Those are good measures. But what is the problem with doing both? I mean this is a situation where we could build on this bill some more teeth. I'd be thrilled to see that too. And we could have e-invoicing. Why is the Minister saying we have to pick one or the other? Because what I'm worried about is the signal that this sends. It goes to my friend the Hon Phil Twyford's point about gaslighting—right? He talked about that this is fundamentally behaviour that is anti-competitive it's mean-spirited it's undermining the productivity of our small businesses it's hurting real live people and yet it's being described as somehow helping them to take away this one tool. Why aren't we adding tools rather than taking them away? I'd like an answer to that before I go on. So I'm happy to sit down and have that exchange.But if the Minister's not ready to talk I'd like to also respond to the comments made about using the fair pay system or the fair-trade agreement. The Minister has suggested that he thought about prohibiting this behaviour and the report clearly recommends prohibiting the behaviour from Australia. He thought about that but he decided against it because it would be better as far as I'm hearing it to point these businesses towards the legislative ability to look at this. That's what they could do.Well they could also do it by contract. Often these payments aren't being paid even in a contractual time frame; they are often a breach of contracts which say invoice will be paid within seven days" or "invoice will be paid within a month" and they are being breached. They are breaches of contract. Those tools of actually suing on that are not working because they're expensive. So prohibiting and allowing a specific focus on it is quite different from that. It's the Government taking the lead in these situations saying "That's not OK. That's just not OK." versus a civil reaction. There's a lot of things that would breach our law that people can't do a lot about and it's that Government lead.I also wondered if he could talk about the nudge effect of the legislation. So when Government does something—like it prohibits smoking or it actually does something like this it says "It's not OK; you will report."—it's a process of public scrutiny and it's basically changing the norms and values of your society. It's saying that this is not OK. This nudge effect has clearly had a place here because I told a story earlier in one of my speeches about somebody at Fonterra and my understanding is Fonterra no longer don't pay people months in. So there is a nudge effect of this legislation. It says "It's not OK; you're going to have to report on it." and you get a change in behaviour. If you take away the Government's saying "It's not OK." and you say "It is OK."—because effectively that's what we're doing today: we're saying it's OK not to pay your people until we come up with perhaps some scheme where you may volunteer a different approach under your code or we will work in a different way. Until then we're saying it's OK now not to pay people.What has the Minister been advised with regard to the nudge effect of this behaviour whether in fact it'll now send a signal out saying "It's OK"? Because that is of great concern to me that this 3 percent of businesses or it's actually even less that are in charge—CHAIRPERSON (Maureen Pugh): The member's time has expired."