Bayly AndrewBUSINESS PAYMENT PRACTICES ACT REPEAL BILLThird ReadingHon ANDREW BAYLY (Minister for Small Business and Manufacturing): I move That the Business Payment Practices Act Repeal Bill be now read a third time.We're closing in on the final bit of this piece of legislation. The reason why we're putting through the repeal bill is that simply the proposals that were put forward by the previous Government will not work will not derive any tangible benefit. This was borne out by the Australian example where this similar arrangement was put in place in 2020 and the independent review of it late last year concluded that basically it wasn't working. Only 1 percent of small businesses were even aware of the scheme and in many cases they weren't making use of the information. The issue of this is that even if we were to put this process in place in New Zealand the information is only up to date if made up to date every six months and companies have four months to then work out what the response is. So at any point in time the information is 10 months old. The alternative of course was that many and virtually anyone can go to an independent credit agency get the same information and in fact a lot more financial information on payment arrangements and history and pay a mere fee of $35 per application. That is the principal issue.We've traversed this a lot this morning in the debates. I've got to reiterate that this Government is concerned about late payments. There is no issue or argument across the House—it is important that small businesses get access to payments on a timely basis because cash is the lifeblood of small businesses. But simply the proposal put forward by the previous Government would not work did not work in Australia and so I've put forward on behalf of the coalition Government a number of initiatives.First of all I'm working with the Minister of Finance to ensure that Government agencies meet their payment time of 10 working days and we will be proactively publishing the results on the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment website.Secondly we are expected to ask Crown entities to also enter a similar arrangement but it is appropriate that we go through a period of consultation. It's expected to take a couple of months but assuming that all works to plan those entities will also be captured. That should be Government entities numbering more than a hundred. And it should be worthwhile just bearing in mind that the Government accounts for about a third of the economy and spends about $50 billion to $55 billion a year on procurement of goods and services.The other aspect we're doing is that we really want to encourage e-invoicing. As I said before in question time e-invoicing offers one of the greatest productivity gains for small businesses. Xero are quoted every year saying that if small businesses were to adopt one new application such as e-invoicing then they estimate a benefit to the economy of $8.5 billion. It wouldn't quite pay off the interest rate that we're having to pay everywhere because of the huge amount of debt we've assumed over the last six years but it would go some way towards growing the economy. So we want to make sure that Crown agencies and organisations are e-invoicing capable which means they can receive and send such data. If they do so then they would be required to pay within a target of five working days.I think it's very important to understand what e-invoicing is—some people misinterpret it. That is not working out an invoice for a Government agency and then putting it on an e-mail and sending it to someone; e-invoicing is the direct transfer of data between both entities. It does not involve any invoicing function at all; that is already automatically calculated as part of the e-invoicing arrangement. To further incentivise small businesses that is why we're proposing a target of five working days because that means they get paid even more rapidly from Government agencies.The third element is that I'm working with Kirk Hope from BusinessNZ. We're going to work on an industry-led payment code to make sure that large players large companies in New Zealand do have good rules around paying small businesses in a timely basis and there are obviously rules and conditions that should go around that.The last thing is just making people aware—small-business owners in particular—of the issues of redress options under the Fair Trading Act 1986.So those are some of the specific things that we will be doing. We can do all of those virtually without any legislation—I'm not sure we're going to need any legislation in fact. But we will be putting those in place as soon as we can because it is very important that our small businesses do have access to the cash when they render goods and services. That is the intent of this bill because what we don't want people doing is spending a lot of money on a useless system that will not derive any substantive discernible benefit for small businesses. That's why I commend the bill to the House.