Yang JianDr JIAN YANG (National): Let me start my speech with an example to demonstrate the spirit the nature of a contract. I am currently doing up my garden. I have a contractor. He employs a few people and he gave me a quote and I accepted the quote. He did not specify how much time it would take. He said about 4 weeks but now 4 weeks have gone and the work is half done due to various reasons. There was bad weather a couple of his workers left and the plants that he had ordered did not arrive on time. So for all sorts of reasons the job did not finish within the time frame he had informally talked about. However I am not particularly worried because I know that I am not going to pay more and he is not particularly worried because he knows that he has a job to finish and I am not going to get somebody else to finish the job. So this is the beauty of contracts—flexibility. Flexibility is particularly important. I do have sympathy for the intention of this particular bill. However I would say that this bill is trying to resolve a problem that does not really exist because there is no empirical evidence to support this and also we do not know how widespread the issue is. Having a contract is a commercial activity—for that reason we need to listen to the voice of business right? For example the Employers and Manufacturers Association (EMA) has a membership of 4500. It is a large organisation. The chief executive Kim Campbell said that although the bill has good intentions it would create more problems than it tries to resolve and a contractor may well have more than one job at a certain time. So this person may not get much from one particular job but could get many more jobs and if you add up all the jobs this person—he or she—might be doing quite well. So this bill may well reduce types of contracts that we are currently using and therefore reduce flexibility. Also the bill may not necessarily help the contractors themselves because some people may not be able to finish within a time frame and therefore may not be able to enter a contract. Also as my colleague Dr Parmjeet Parmar said the bill itself might entrench contract workers because in the end the contract workers might have to set the pay which in the end may not work out in their favour because they have other things to factor in like sick leave holiday pay or ACC levies—these things. I also quote Mr Kim Campbell from the EMA and he said: I think probably common sense will prevail and I'm reasonably confident there are enough people who've got some common sense in Wellington who will see this is not going to work". So I do think that we should let common sense prevail and common sense should prevail as the risks outweigh the benefits and the bill would not achieve its goal. The bill is more of an attempt to address wage level concerns for a selected group of occupations rather than to address concerns over the nature and value of contracting for services generally. There are many other problems with the bill. Also as my colleagues have mentioned the administrative compliance cost is a factor we need to consider. Just imagine that contractors have to record what they have done today and when. So this can mean lots and lots of work to be done. There is also confusion regarding the provisions. What kinds of jobs should the bill apply to and what kinds of jobs should it not apply to? For example construction and building services are covered by the bill but technical maintenance is not. The bill therefore—"