Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Amendment Bill

Thank you very much for the opportunity to conclude this speech that I began before the luncheon suspension. In that earlier contribution I reminded the Committee of the whole House that when this bill was introduced, the Hon Maurice Williamson, the Minister in charge of the bill, said on 14 March 2013 that it was critical for the continued solvency of the board that the bill was sent to a select committee, that submissions were called for and heard, that advice from the officials was asked for and received, that the bill was deliberated on—all in one week—that the report-back date was 22 March 2013, and that it all had to be done and dusted in this House by 1 April. Even according to our rather wonky calendar, it is now 2 July. I do not know why the Minister could not have taken the advice of just about everyone in the House, and certainly every member of the select committee, taken a deep breath and a step back, and looked at what the actual problems are and what a fair resolution of the problems would be.

There is not one person in this Chamber who does not respect the trades that we are discussing in this bill and the need for safety in those trades. And I am sure there is not a single tradesperson throughout the country who would disagree with that either. The people who are impacted by this retrospective legislation took their complaint to the Regulations Review Committee not once, not twice, but, I understand, now for a third time. They have taken this issue to the Ombudsman. They have taken the issue to the Auditor-General. Where else could they go? Every single body that they legitimately raised their complaint with said their complaint was justified. And instead of looking at the real problem, instead of looking at the real issues and asking as a Parliament how we address that—because we all agree on what we want the outcome to be—Maurice Williamson said: “I have seen the disallowance motion from the Regulations Review Committee. I know they’ve got further consideration here again. I will introduce and ram through the House in a 1-week session retrospective legislation to validate the actions of the board.”

We agree with a solution to this. We pledged to work across all parties to find a fair solution to this issue. I am pleased that the Hon Gerry Brownlee is in the chair at the moment, because he might redeem the situation. He knows what it is like to have a big issue and to work across all political parties to try to get solutions. This is not the answer.

I am very pleased to have this opportunity to take a call on the Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Amendment Bill. It would be fair to say that this bill has had a very long history and is a result of a number of serious issues over quite a long period of time. A few years ago, I had the opportunity to sit on the Regulations Review Committee when we were considering issues to do with the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board, and it would be fair to say that members of the community, the professionals who do this work, have legitimate concerns about the way the board is operating, legitimate concerns around the legislation that governs it, and legitimate concerns around the actions of a number of people involved in the industry.

What we are seeing here today is that the Government is simply going to override, by way of legislation, by narrow majority, what have been clear breaches of the Act by the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board, and that is wrong. One of the reasons it is wrong—well, there are many, many reasons it is wrong; it is manifestly unjust. One of the reasons that Parliament sets up an organisation like the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board is to provide leadership to the industry. And how can the board provide that leadership that the industry needs when so many in the industry have no confidence in it? They have no confidence in it, because it has breached its own Act on several occasions. Every time they have gone through some kind of process to have their grievances addressed and acknowledged, they have been proven to be correct. Yet this Government is simply turning a blind eye to that and is just saying to the board: “Just go on doing what you’ve always done.” That is not right. It is simply wrong. Actually, this board, to operate effectively, must have the confidence of the people who are required to pay the levies to it, and, at the moment, it does not. So how can it do the job if no one has confidence in it or if the majority of people practising in the profession do not have confidence in it?

So this legislation, far from fixing the problem, actually makes the problem worse, because it simply rides roughshod over the whole process and simply discounts all of the legitimate concerns that have been raised. It says that those concerns do not matter, and that that whole process—after the huge amount of time and energy that people have put into having their concerns addressed—is going to be simply overlooked.

I will turn specifically to what happens in Part 1. There are two parts to this legislation. Part 1, which we are dealing with now, is the part that effectively enacts the legislation as the board thought it should be. The board had been acting in a way that was inconsistent with the legislation as it was. Part 1 of this legislation simply says: “We’ll just change the law in order to allow you to continue doing what you have always done.” That is what this Government has said to the board.

Part 2, which we will talk about shortly, then retrospectively validates decisions that have been made. I am looking forward to that part of the debate, because there are a number of National Ministers who have been on record in this House when they were in Opposition lambasting the then Labour Government for anything that had even the slightest hint of retrospectivity to it. And now suddenly here they are retrospectively legislating to approve a whole lot of decisions that the board made that were against the law.

So turning to Part 1 of the legislation specifically, and looking at the clauses that are in the legislation, we see that clause 4 amends the Act to allow the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board to impose on registered plumbers, gasfitters, and drainlayers a disciplinary levy to fund the costs arising out of investigations into allegations or complaints against registered persons and proceedings covering dispute under Part 3 of the Act. It is that last part that is actually really important, because the Act previously allowed the disciplinary levy to be collected to cover complaints against only registered persons and not against other people who might be practising. This is where the board got itself into difficulty, because it was collecting a disciplinary levy that it could then use outside disciplinary matters concerning just registered practitioners under this Act.

So what it effectively does is say that those who are registered, those who go to the trouble of being registered, are now being asked to fund potential investigations and disciplinary action against the people who do not make that step of becoming registered. There may well be good arguments for that, but simply imposing this by way of a legislative override, effectively, of a whole lot of organisations—the Regulations Review Committee, the Ombudsman, and various others that have all said that the practitioners who have raised the concerns have legitimate concerns—and to ride roughshod over those organisations through a legislative process is not the right way to do it. It is manifestly unjust. It is simply not right. Retrospective legislation is not right.

We know that there have been major problems with this board, as I mentioned. There have been some very good people involved with the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board, and there are still some good people involved in the board. It is not in any way a reflection on them, and I do not want to cast aspersions on their characters or anything like that, but the board itself has had major systemic problems. In order to deal with those issues, one of the things that must be done as a matter of priority is to restore confidence in the board. This legislation, sadly, is not going to allow that to happen, because, if anything, it is going to add to the sense of grievance that people who have concerns with the board already have expressed. The bill raises natural justice issues; retrospective legislation often does. We are certainly not convinced it is justified in this case. Sometimes there are rare occasions where retrospective legislation can be justified, and in this case I am certainly not convinced that there is quality justification for that.

A number of complainants concerned about the illegal collection of the disciplinary levy and offences fee have had their claims vindicated through a number of the mechanisms, including, as I mentioned, the Auditor-General, the Ombudsman, and the Regulations Review Committee. All of that vindication of their concerns is now being overturned. We in the Labour Party acknowledge the major problems that have existed within this industry and the way this board has operated. We are committed to finding a solution to those problems, but that must start from the point that we have got to have a board, an organisation, that the whole industry can have confidence in. Unfortunately, this legislation that Maurice Williamson is bringing before the Committee today does the opposite. It simply reinforces a legitimate sense of grievance that many people feel. That is the reason why we cannot support this.

Before I start, I would like to thank the Chair for the opportunity to speak. As one of now two independent MPs in Parliament, I get the opportunity to truly partake in the democratic process only during the Committee stage of each bill, along with seven other MPs who have to beg, steal, or borrow speaking slots from the major parties. For me, this rarely occurs, so I really do appreciate being able to take this call. I also look forward to taking calls later this evening, and certainly after dinner, whereby I can partake in the democratic process, because, as we know, sometimes deals are made between major parties but they do not consider those other MPs who are in the House.

This Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Amendment Bill is somewhat akin to the Government Communications Security Bureau debacle and Kim Dotcom. The Government has this Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board, which was investigated by the Ombudsman, who found dubious, illegal, and unlawful activity. Rather than pay back the $600,000—Ministers pay themselves a Wellington accommodation allowance of over $600,000 annually, so it would have been quite easy for the board to repay that money—to the plumbers, gasfitters, and drainlayers whom the board illegally took that money from, the board went to the Minister, and here we have now a retrospective change in legislation. It is not fair. It is not the Kiwi way. I wonder what is happening to our country and the message that we are sending out to the children of New Zealand when something so wrong can just be turned round and we change legislation.

When we look at legislation, I think it is very, very important that we ask whether this is good legislation. As we have heard from everybody on this side of the Chamber, this is clearly not good legislation. This is a board that has adopted a heavy-handed approach. It is turning this great industry itself—the 17,100 tradesmen in the industry—against the Government. We need to look only to some of the other price increases that this board has wrought upon the plumbers, gasfitters, and drainlayers. If we look at the cost to plumbers, for instance, to get an apprentice through the system, what used to be $6,000, thanks to levies imposed by the board, is now $12,000 or $14,000 an apprentice. I spoke to a plumber earlier this week who normally has three apprentices, but because of the costs imposed by this board, he now has only one apprentice. He told me himself that once that apprentice is finished he is not going to get another one. So we have a board that is really turning the industry against itself.

I cannot support this bill. Thank you very much.

I want to continue on from where Chris Hipkins was in his contribution to this Plumbers, Gasfitter, and Drainlayers Amendment Bill.

💬 Hon Members: Oh!

Oh, I am so pleased members opposite are welcoming my contribution. It is going to be a serious one. In fact, I am going to quote from probably one of the member’s own constituents, whom I met with recently. Chris Hipkins said we know that problems exist in this area, and we are very keen to find solutions. I think where we ought to start is to take seriously complaints that have been made about what is going on in this industry. I am aware that there are three complaints currently before the Regulations Review Committee—three complaints that those who have made the complaints want heard before this bill passes. They have asked for them to be heard before this bill passes.

I have spoken to the chair of the Regulations Review Committee, Maryan Street. She is keen to put these complaints on the agenda and have them heard. I will predict, however, that the members of the National Party, who now have the majority on that committee—it is unheard of in this Parliament that you have the Regulations Review Committee without it being a committee that has even numbers on it—will not allow those complaints to be heard. I will predict that. If the members opposite can tell me that they will support the hearing of these complaints when the chair calls for them to be heard, say it today. What I suspect is that this bill is going to be rushed through and the complaints are going to be denied to be heard by that committee before the bill is passed. That is what I believe is going to happen, and so do those who have made the complaints.

You see, this is what has happened because of uncertainty this last year, in particular, around this bill and around what is going to happen. The bill was introduced in March and the House was told that the Government needed to pass it very quickly in a short time, and then it truncated the number of submissions that could be heard. In fact, not all the submissions were heard. It needed to be passed by 1 April, I think it was said at the time, and here we are really on 4 July, although it says 2 July on the Chamber calendar, and it is still only now being debated. In that year I have received, as other members have, from the Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Board the figures on the number of certified and licensed plumbers, gasfitters, and drainlayers for the year 2012-13. So what has happened while we have had this uncertainty—the lack of resolution around the problems in this area? We have seen in the last year an overall loss of certified plumbers of 558. We have seen the loss of certified gasfitters of 88. We have seen 761 certified drainlayers lost. In fact, the total loss of licensed and certified drainlayers over this last year is 2,173. Can we afford to have that sort of loss, particularly of licensed drainlayers? They are the ones who actually go out and do the job. Can we afford it at this time—

💬 Mike Sabin: The board’s there to make sure the unlicensed ones don’t get away with the rubbish they do.

—when we need to have such—what is the member over there crowing about?

💬 Mike Sabin: The unlicensed ones are the ones whom the board is there to protect the licensed ones from.

Well, the licensed ones are leaving the industry because of the lack of certainty—

💬 Mike Sabin: And I think you’ll find they’re being replaced.

I am not talking about unlicensed plumbers, gasfitters, and drainlayers, Mr Sabin. Get the figures. These are the licensed ones, so stop yelling and listen for a change. We have seen a loss of 2,173 gasfitters, drainlayers—[Interruption] Mr Chairman.

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Order! Interjections should be rare and reasonable, and barracking across the Chamber is unacceptable. I ask the member to calm it down, and I come back to the Hon Annette King.

Thank you, Mr Chairman. Maybe Mr Sabin would like to take a call rather than just scream from his seat. What I am saying to this Committee is that that is a huge loss of licensed plumbers and certified plumbers, drainlayers, and gasfitters over the last year.

There does need to be resolution around this bill. I have had something to do with it in the past. This Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Act used to be under the Minister of Health, so I did have some contact with this Act in the past. But now we have so much uncertainty, and we have those who will not pay a licence fee, because they believe—

I rise to take a call on this bill, the Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Amendment Bill, yet again. It is a shame that this situation has been allowed to get to the point of needing validating legislation. When it was first introduced to the House it was clear that nobody was particularly happy about it, but the Minister for Building and Construction had decided that this was the way to correct the inappropriate purpose for which the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board extracted a levy from its members.

This does go back a long way, and it is entirely true that the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board has been problematic for a long time. I would suggest that, in fact, instead of passing this legislation, it would be good for the Government to go back, as we did when we were in Government, and look at the whole membership and performance of that board again. We did that once because the board was behaving in ways that were particularly disreputable and it was denying perfectly competent young tradespeople the chance to get a ticket. In a sense it was gaming the labour market by making certified tradespeople rare. That was inappropriate, and, besides that, there was all kinds of behaviour from the board at that time, which I have never seen in an industry association before or since.

The Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board is not out of the woods yet. There is another alternative. I am talking about Part 1 of the bill, “Extension of purposes for which Board may impose levy”, because this is one possibility. It imposed a levy that it was not entitled to impose, for reasons that are defensible—it wanted to clean the industry out of cowboys. Unfortunately, it has now had the reverse effect. We have plumbers, drainlayers, and gasfitters who now have their licences and are able to practise, but who will not pay the registration, because this board has increased it substantially and has treated them with disdain.

In legalising the purpose for extracting this disciplinary levy, which the law did not give the board the right to do, funds have been amassed that, in my view, ought to be repaid. So another possibility, other than Part 1, is to arrive at an accommodation with the disgruntled plumbers, gasfitters, and drainlayers, and say: “All right, we’ll come to some arrangement where some of the levy that you have paid, which we extracted from you illegally, will be refunded.”

That is why we have submitted Supplementary Order Paper 204, which seeks to enact the recommendation of the Office of the Ombudsmen that a proportion—not even the whole lot—of those levies and fees, but the levies in particular, that were extracted unlawfully should be repaid to the members of the Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Federation. Our Supplementary Order Paper provides that the retrospective validation component of the bill, which is this Part 1, will be effective only after a percentage of those levies and fees is repaid, in accordance with terms specified in an Order in Council made under section 172 of the Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Act.

That would address some of the concerns that plumbers, gasfitters, and drainlayers have over this issue. But the effect on the industry, because of the board’s behaviour, is really profound, and we are now seeing perfectly well-qualified tradespeople relegating themselves to the category of cowboy—by virtue of being unregistered—because they do not wish to pay fees to a board that misappropriates them or that extracts those fees unlawfully.

The only remedy the board has ever entertained has been retrospective validating legislation, and that is what is in front of us in Part 1. That is not the only alternative, and I would ask the Minister to consider Labour’s Supplementary Order Paper and consider supporting that, in order for this industry to be mended somewhat. I personally think that there probably needs to be another clean-out entirely of the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board. I would rather that the Minister acted in that way and had a close look at the actions of the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board, instead of simply going with its request to make legal what it did illegally.

I understand the disgruntlement of these men. George Clarkson comes up to me on a regular basis at the Nelson market on Saturdays. He is so wound up about this—and he is not alone—that I find it difficult to say anything to him other than: “I agree, George. It needs to be started over. It needs to be done again.”, but this legislation is not going to be the answer.

The legislation as it stood was, I think, perfectly OK. I do not think there was anything wrong with the legislation. The Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board has, in fact, stepped out of line with the legislation and done something that everybody who has been asked to pass judgment on its action has found to be illegal, from the Ombudsman to the Regulations Review Committee and onwards, and this piece of legislation is not going to appease the plumbers, gasfitters, and drainlayers who feel not only hard-done-by but led inappropriately in their industries.

The numbers the Hon Annette King was quoting a moment ago are seriously scary. In the space of 10 years, where there used to be one drainlayer per 939 people, we have now one drainlayer per 2,471 people, and the population has not increased that much. I use the example of drainlayers in particular in this instance because they were under the administration of the Ministry of Health because of their impact on the health of communities. They lay the sewers. They put down the waste-water pipes. These are the people who connect up all the services that are required for us to not all be dying of E. coli, the plague, and anything else that might be carried by waste water and through sewers. So they were always under health previously. They are important and we will need them—Christchurch will need them. Christchurch needs them now, and yet somehow, overall, we now have 761 fewer certified drainlayers than we did in 2012.

This behaviour of the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board is causing the industry to diminish, for two reasons. One is that it behaved badly towards those in the industry and will not apologise for doing things that are illegal, and, secondly, it whacks up the charges on them, so that it costs far more to register as a qualified and licensed tradesperson in New Zealand than it does in Australia. So is it any wonder that our young tradespeople are being driven offshore, being driven to Australia, where the prospects—

Given what we have listened to in the last half-hour, I think it necessary to refute a number of issues that I think have been raised slightly erroneously. We should remember that this issue arose from legislation put in place in 2006, so it goes back quite some time. That is the first point I want to raise. I want to briefly talk about Supplementary Order Paper 204, introduced by Raymond Huo. In my view it is clearly impractical. It does not achieve anything other than to give some money back to an organisation, or a group of people in an organisation who will then have to pay it back to the organisation, in order for the organisation to continue to function. We heard the Greens earlier thinking that it would be a great idea for the Government to just pay the difference. Well, we could just pay the difference in a whole lot of issues in this country, but we would run out of money. That, clearly, is not going to work. The Plumbers—

💬 Andrew Williams: You could sell more assets.

We will use the asset money productively. The Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Amendment Bill is being put in place to allow plumbers, gasfitters, and drainlayers to act in the same manner as any other good industry-good body would act. It is being put in place to protect those members from the activities, I guess, of what we might call cowboys. I think it is logical that any industry-based organisation should be able to operate in that manner and operate with the protection of legislation put in place by this House. That is what this bill does. It cleans up a messy situation created in 2006. Sure, there have been complaints to the Regulations Review Committee. Those complaints have been dealt with, one way or another.

There has surely been a complaint to the Ombudsman. The Ombudsman made a call on this, and in the process of making that call, he suggested there was a fine line between what was right and wrong and what was the best way to deal with this. He thought that the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board was doing the best it could with a slightly, I guess, poor piece of legislation. It is not an opportunity for us to attack an industry body. The course of this bill certainly should not provide that opportunity. I think that the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board is doing the best it can, as the Ombudsman, indeed, said, with a piece of legislation that certainly is not perfect. We have got to understand that this board collects about $600,000 a year, so for it to be putting in place levies of the magnitude that were mentioned earlier in this Chamber—$11,000 to $14,000 a year per member—is quite ridiculous.

The next issue I think we need to refute is the claim that the numbers of these people are dropping as a result of the poor management of this board. That clearly is not the case. We have to look only at the record of our building industry over the past 7 or 8 years and we will see why the numbers are dropping. Quite clearly, the numbers of all sorts of professionals in this area have dropped in that time. They have dropped for a very good reason—they have dropped because there is no work. The other thing that happens in an industry like this, which happens frequently in all sorts of industries, is that a significant amount of efficiency comes in. New methods arise and, obviously, that has played a large part in the changes in this industry.

So the opportunity that this bill puts in place is, firstly, to give the plumbers, gasfitters, and drainlayers legislation that supports their industry-good body, which allows them to contest and, I guess, investigate unlicensed people practising in the industry. As one of the Opposition members mentioned earlier, this organisation used to come under the Ministry of Health, for very good reason. That is why we need to have legislation and strict management of the opportunity for registered people to be operating in this industry. [Interruption] As my compatriot Mr Sabin says, gas is not the safest thing to be operating within our houses, and it certainly needs to be regulated very well there.

I do not want to dwell on this much longer, but I think there is a very good reason for this piece of legislation to be put in place. I do not think there was a suitable alternative to it, and I think that the Minister for Building and Construction has done a good job of bringing this to the fore.

I just want to say one last thing. All organisations are going to have internal disputes. All organisations are going to have disagreements as to how they should be run. This legislation will give this organisation the opportunity to put its house in order and to manage the process that it needs to manage around the licensing and the control of those licences in a proper manner. So I think that aside from not supporting the Supplementary Order Paper, which I think clearly will not work, I am all in favour of this bill proceeding. Thanks.

I take a call on behalf of New Zealand First on the Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Amendment Bill. New Zealand First will not be supporting this bill, as we have said in this Chamber before. We do not favour bringing in retrospective legislation to sort out what was basically something of the past. It should have been picked up a long time ago. The Government should have sorted out the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board back in 2006, 2007, and 2008, at the beginning of the National Government, and it should not have taken 5 years for the Government and for Minister Maurice Williamson to bring it to this House. It is wrong, we believe, to impose, effectively, a retrospective tax, in a sense. It is a tax on small business—this levy, these charges, these fees. It is wrong to go back and attack these small businesses and try to penalise them and charge them for errors of the past.

We have received a lot of correspondence from a lot of concerned plumbers, gasfitters, and drainlayers around the country, who simply say that in this current environment and in the way they have been conducting business in recent years, they cannot afford to start paying these retrospective moneys for a number of years going back. These small businesses are not able to suddenly start coughing up retrospective fees, so it is not fair for them to be attacked in this manner—for the board to go after some of these organisations in this manner.

It is also driving a wedge right into the middle of this industry. You are now seeing one side versus the other. It is not healthy in a small economy like ours to have such an important area as the provision of plumbing, gasfitting, and drainlaying ending up with the two sides at loggerheads. In this instance the Minister has very much been on the side of the board, which has ended up alienating such a large percentage of people in this particular industry. As a result we are seeing more and more disappearing off to Australia and further afield, and, as we have heard already in this Chamber today, there have been 761 fewer certified drainlayers since 2012. That is an alarming sort of figure.

At a time when our country needs to be developing our capacity and increasing our capacity, it is most alarming to be seeing so many trained people disappearing out of the system. They are not just disappearing overseas; we are hearing that they are just disappearing—giving up and getting out of the business because they have had it up to their back neck with it.

So in this respect we feel this is wrong. We feel that the Minister should have worked through a far more conciliatory process to find a way to get buy-in from the whole industry, instead of just taking one side of the argument. He has not worked through all the other alternatives that were available to him in order to find a better solution to this. He has tried to ram this through in very quick succession, despite it being a 5 or 6-year-old problem, instead of sitting down and working with the industry to come up with a solution that, although it might not meet every single need, would at least have some compromises in there to appease those who are aggrieved by this. Instead of doing that, as is the usual Maurice Williamson way he has just rammed it through with a sledgehammer, the same as in the days when he rammed through changes to legislation that ended up with us having the leaky building situation in this country.

It is the same way that he has been ramming through changes to the building code, through the building amendment legislation, to reduce the requirements on building in this country. Again, this legislation is being pushed through with little regard for the final effects in terms of the situation in our building industry. This is what we would call a litany of continuous errors on the part of the Minister, Maurice Williamson, who just seems to think that you can sort it all out in retrospective situations like this with legislation, you can turn a blind eye to leaky buildings, and you can turn a blind eye to errors within the building code. Quite frankly, we do not think this is the right way to go, so New Zealand First will not be supporting this. We really do feel that it is wrong.

Once again, when this Government keeps talking about supporting small business in this country, supporting and developing the economy, growing the jobs, helping small to medium enterprises get ahead, reducing compliance costs, and making this a more competitive economy, it sends all the wrong signals to then go after just the plumbers, gasfitters, and drainlayers in this manner. Basically, it is not warranted.

I would like to put forward an amendment to clause 4(2) in the Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Amendment Bill, a clause that amends section 143 of the Act, to replace the words “of any amount it thinks fit for the purpose of funding the costs arising out of—” with “of a reasonable and justified amount for the purpose of funding costs directly attributable to the functions of”. I believe that any amendment should define what “a cost arising out of” is. It is far too broad as it stands, and it is being applied to items that the Regulations Review Committee has already stated do not appear to be costs arising from investigations.

So the bill, as it is, is validating expenditure by the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board on items that may not be costs arising out of investigations. The validation at this stage simply gives the board a clean slate, another start point to cover its total incompetence and that of the Minister for Building and Construction and the Building and Housing Group. We ask where the accountability is. For instance, was the legal firm that gave wrong advice to the board held accountable, and did that legal firm repay the money, the fee that it was paid? I would suggest certainly not.

I would ask too where the accountability is in the bill as it stands. Is anybody on the board going to lose their job because of the debacle that occurred? Saying that they are going to be held accountable through the Minister’s accountability agreement is certainly a long bow to stretch.

The industry started as a victim. The industry had followed the correct procedures to get accountability, which the Government has taken away with this bill. The industry is once again the victim. This bill will create more problems than it will resolve. Bully-boy tactics will no longer be accepted, and those in the industry who disagree with the board have clearly indicated that they will stand their ground. What happens from here on is the responsibility of the Government and the board. If the industry declines and fails, it is this Government’s failure and the board’s failure. So to that end, I would like to put forward this amendment.

Members, we come to the votes on Part 1. We have an amendment in the name of Brendan Horan to clause 4(2). The question is that the amendment be agreed to. Those of that opinion will say Aye, to the contrary, No. The Noes have it? [Interruption] The Noes have it? Can I just remind members that if you want a party vote, you must challenge my vote at the time, not many seconds later, because I was ready to move on. But this is probably the first amendment the member has put, and with the goodwill of the Committee, I am allowing a party vote.

The question was put that the following amendment in the name of Brendan Horan to clause 4 be agreed to:

in subclause (2), replace the words “of any amount it thinks fit for the purpose of funding the costs arising out of—” with the words “of a reasonable and justified amount for the purpose of funding costs directly attributable to the functions of—”