Sharma GauravDr GAURAV SHARMA (Labour—Hamilton West): Talofa lava kia ora namaste Madam Speaker. It's my pleasure today to rise in the House to take a call on the Fair Trading Amendment Bill which amends the 1986 Act to introduce new protections against unfair commercial practices. These unfair commercial practices exploit vulnerabilities of a consumer or a small business and this bill addresses this in three ways: first of all by prohibiting unconscionable conduct in trade; secondly by extending the Act's existing protections against unfair contract terms in standard form consumer contracts to also apply to small trade contracts; and thirdly by strengthening the ability of consumers to require uninvited direct sellers to leave or not enter their property.The Act currently provides protections against unfair contract terms in standard form consumer contracts. So what are these standard form contracts? These are the take it or leave it" contracts where the party accepting the contract has no real ability to negotiate its terms. The bill extends these protections against unfair contract terms to standard form small trade contracts. These are contracts between businesses with the actual expected value of less than $250000 in any 12-month period.I was recently looking at a report from the Royal New Zealand College of GPs' Workforce Survey and they said 42 percent of GPs are either small businesses or contractors. Last year during COVID a lot of these GPs were front-line healthcare workers and I heard from a lot of them because one day they were out there working in the global pandemic; next day they received a call from the small medical practice and they just said "Well sorry don't come back the day after. We don't need you any more." Now this conduct was against the conscience by reference to the norms of the society norms of acting honestly fairly and without deception or pressure.But that's not where it stopped. The GPs also had in their contracts that they couldn't work within a certain radius from the actual medical practice. So you couldn't work for 10 to 15 kilometres from the practice that had just terminated your contract with your business. Next day you had absolutely no job; you couldn't work anywhere in town. This was even worse if you actually worked for a big commercial entity that owned 30 40 50 practices. If you worked in Auckland if you worked in Hamilton for one of these practices you just couldn't work anywhere in town. It's about protecting the rights of small businesses and this is just one example in healthcare but this applies to businesses across the board not just in healthcare but other businesses as well which don't have these protections.We've heard today from the other side many of whom want this bill to go back to the select committee. As some of my colleagues have talked about it—you know people like Melissa Lee and other members on the other side—they keep forgetting that they were in charge of the select committee through which the bill came and for six months there was no report from their side. But in many ways the country is lucky that they were only in charge of the select committee and not the House because if they were well we know what would happen. Couldn't figure out who the leader of the party was couldn't figure out whether we should keep the borders open or not—they couldn't even figure out if they should write a report or not for a bill that we're discussing right now. Apparently we should now but not for six months when you had the bill.So aren't we glad that we just had them for the select committee for six months to not be able to write a report rather than in the House where they can't decide who the leader of the party is they can't decide whether we keep the borders open or not. The select committee had the bill for six months and now they want it back. We are lucky that we had departmental reports on this where they had provided enough information collating the information that was submitted to the select committee about how the bill should go ahead for the second reading. Now thank God that the Labour Party is doing the job that we were asked to do.But again I bring back the point of small businesses like the GP practices where the small businesses the GPs didn't have a bargaining power to take care of that contract. But also there was no good faith from practices which fired these GPs last-minute in the middle of a pandemic and that's what we're trying to prevent. The people who are out there making their living and in good faith working for another business with another business have that protection in place when their own business makes less than $250000 dollars in 12 months.So I would like to commend this bill to the next stage because I know the National Party hasn't done their work."