Source: New Zealand Parliament – Hansard
HELEN WHITE (Labour—Mt Albert): Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise in opposition to this repeal Act, and I want to talk about why. I have a great deal of time for Mr Bayly as a person—as he knows, we’ve sat on committees together, and I know him well—and I don’t intend to do anything but absolutely speak genuinely to the Government and to the Speaker about what I think about what is going on today.
I was an employment lawyer for 25 years, and I came across this problem quite frequently. And I came across it from people I never really expected to. Often they were quite powerful in their own right—they might be the HR manager at a company—but they were contractors, and they were in situations where they worked for our biggest businesses. And our biggest businesses had a practice which they thought they couldn’t walk away from, because it made sense to them financially, and that was to delay payment. So a business like Fonterra delayed payment to its staff for three months. They were sole traders—three months regularly.
Carl Bates: Staff or suppliers?
HELEN WHITE: Absolutely. Sole traders. Sole traders. So I am talking about people who were contracted into the business, and I am hearing the opposition and the Government say differently, but that’s not right. Those people I know. I can stand on the experience I had. Those sole traders were in no position to argue with our biggest companies; they were dependent on them. So, basically, our biggest companies, our companies with over $100 million of capital, were the companies that were withholding from these small players, these people who were sometimes their suppliers too, who were often small businesses which were dependent on the only capital they had, which in New Zealand actually turns out to be their house. Usually it’s the equity in their house. They were the people waiting. From our biggest companies, they were waiting for payment, because the big companies were using their money, their hard-earned money, their money that they’d earned three months earlier, just to get the interest on it. They were cynically using that money.
And this emerged as an issue, and it got picked up, and it got picked up by the The Spinoff in 2017 by one of the journalists Cormack, who talked about it. And it got picked up by practitioners like me who saw what was going on and thought it was really unfair. So we got to pick it up, but nothing was being done about it. This obviously had happened in Australia too, and they went after it with a law where they did something quite similar, but they had a threshold of $100 million. We went after it in perhaps what I would say is a softer way than I would have liked. I would have liked to see a prohibition on this kind of clause. The reason was, for doing it in this way, was to collaborate with people to really target those big, big businesses against our small ones.
Our small ones are 97 percent of New Zealand businesses, and those people need a champion in this Government, and they haven’t got one. What they’ve got is a Minister who comes from the experience of being a fund manager, and that is all about financial markets. That’s big business. That’s very, very different from the small businesses I’m talking about. I’m talking about the tradies. I’m talking about the people out there who are our contractors who are basically, often, just trying not to work for the man, right? They’re trying to run these businesses, and those are the people that you will hear me, in these speeches, stick up for, because this was nudge legislation which had already started to change the habits of our big companies because it shamed them. It said it shamed them.
So I’m going to put out some amendments today, and I hope that the Minister will listen to them. They are amendments that are all about doing stuff that gives this more teeth, doing stuff that takes us seriously, because I want to see our small businesses thrive in this country, and we should be targeting those big businesses and holding them to account. Instead, what this legislation does is repeal itself and then repeal that repeal so we don’t even know it ever existed. We’ve never even put our toe in the water to standing up to big businesses who act in a way that I consider immoral. I consider it a form of theft from our hard-working New Zealand businesses. Thank you.
ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Greg O’Connor): [Pause] Scott Willis. I just encourage members to keep an eye on the speaking list.
