Twyford PhilHon PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū): One of the lasting images of this debate for me is the image of Minister Andrew Bayly sitting down to dinner with a bunch of small-business owners a couple of weeks ago. I would love to have been a fly on the wall and heard the dinner-table conversation which I think would have gone something like this: Here have some more dessert because I'm just about to completely shaft you by repealing the law that gives you a break and prevents and discourages big business from late paying and having interest-free loans at your expense." I'd really love to have heard that and I hope that Andrew Bayly paid for that dinner because he's really making small businesses pay with this legislation. The Minister claimed in his third reading speech—and actually throughout the bill's progress through the House—that we all agree: we all agree on the problem we all agree that something should be done about it; it's just that we have a different way of going about it. But he's asking for a very big leap of faith. He's repealing a mechanism that was put in place that requires transparency and public disclosure from large firms in order to make it clear and transparent to the public and to small businesses their record on payment times. He's true in that I think we all agree at least in principle on the problem definition but the trouble is that this Minister and this Government are pretending to be concerned about this. They are gaslighting the New Zealand public and the small-business sector: half a million small and medium sized enterprises around this country who employ vast numbers of New Zealanders and generate a very large share of this country's wealth. The Minister has itemised for us what he is intending to do about this problem in lieu of having this legislation on the books. He's going to be having Cabinet require that Government agencies must pay their bills within 10 working days—OK. He's going to be consulting with Crown entities about them doing the same thing. He's going to encourage e-invoicing something that—I don't know—a dozen times in this debate members of this House have pointed out is already happening. E-invoicing is not a new thing it's not an innovation and it actually doesn't address the problem that the legislation that's being repealed today was designed to fix. It's a red herring. It's a distraction. It's irrelevant to this debate which is about: how do we fix the problem of large companies taking advantage abusing their market position not paying on time and getting free money at the expense of small businesses? The Minister has offered up a voluntary code of conduct. Why would he think that large companies with a significant financial benefit from not paying their bills on time would voluntarily change their practice when there's no transparency? There's no public disclosure. Well why would they change? Because it feels good? Because the Government is asking them to through having a voluntary code of conduct? It's completely implausible. It lacks credibility. Then the fifth thing that the Minister offered up was making small-business owners aware of the redress that they have under the Fair Trading Act and other legislation. Well the case has been made very persuasively through this debate that that is not a real solution—that is the remedies are not clear they're not accessible it takes time and it takes money. It's simply not a realistic option for small businesses. So this agenda—so-called agenda—has been cobbled together by the Minister as a kind of fig leaf for what he is doing here which is repealing a mechanism that was put in place. It may not be perfect but at least it offered a genuine prospect of changing the behaviour of large companies who are the culprits here. We know that they are rorting the system and ripping off small businesses by not paying on time. The Minister is repealing that he's getting rid of it and he's not putting anything credible in its place. We've had to listen to hours of infantile rhetoric from the Government benches about red tape as if all regulation was somehow bad when the law that is being repealed here would have imposed an obligation for public disclosure on New Zealand's largest companies and no doubt there would have been some cost associated with that. But it offered the benefit for small businesses that they would be able to know who of their suppliers had a decent record of paying their bills on time. So as Julie Anne Genter rightly pointed out the Government is simply shifting the burden and shifting the cost from big business to small business. This is the party that styles itself as the party of small business and as the great champions of free enterprise. National's lack of interest in actually doing anything that would create a more competitive market gives the lie to their claim to be the party of small business. One of the things that actually distinguishes or characterises the New Zealand economy is its tendency towards the concentration of market power. We're a small economy and in almost every industry in every sector there is a tendency for the concentration of market power in two three or four different companies and you see it everywhere you look. One of the achievements of the last Labour Government was its giving teeth to the Commerce Commission to allow it to do market studies where it could basically require companies to open their books. It gave to the Commerce Commission the legal power to do in-depth studies to get the facts and then to set out what a pro-competition reform agenda would look like. We've seen that in the building supplies industry we've seen it in the fuel industry and we've seen it in relation to the supermarket duopoly and those reports indeed laid out a pro-competition reform agenda that our Government went some way towards implementing. But what we've seen today from the Government with the repeal of this legislation doesn't give me any optimism that the Government has the political will to actually make changes and make reforms to make our economy more competitive. There are two reasons why you would want to have the kind of legislation that's being repealed today. One of them is just basic fairness. Half a million New Zealand small businesses experience insecurity and precariousness because they are completely dependent on their customers paying their bills on time to ensure that they have decent cash flow. We know how hard small businesses work; the risks they take often investing the family the home to get businesses started; and the long days and long nights trying to get businesses off the ground. They work incredibly hard and they deserve a Government that will go in to bat for them. It's a basic question of fairness. The second reason is what's good for the whole economy and what's good for this country. We need good competition policy. We need competitive markets that make our firms more successful tougher more innovative and more fleet of foot but we also need competitive markets that allow small firms to grow into medium-sized firms and into large firms. The larger firms generally have higher levels of productivity. They're able to invest more in technology and they're able to specialise and if we don't make it easier for that upward mobility of small firms then we are dragging down the New Zealand economy and making it less productive and making us less wealthy as a country. This seems to have completely escaped this Government. This issue I would have thought was an opportunity for the current Government to demonstrate its commitment to small business and to competitive markets and productivity. Instead they have sided with big firms with vested interests against the interests of hard-working small-business owners. At the very least they would have had the courage to send this bill to select committee and invite small-business owners to come along and have a say and express their view on this issue. But instead we get a mixture of reckons and political ideology."