Mr. John Shine:

Our intention and motivation are to provide a legislative framework for the variety of entities that want to espouse the co-operative model, whether they be, as I mentioned in my opening statement, the very large or very successful, those with a commercial focus, those with thousands of employees and possibly billions of turnover, or the very small, run by volunteers, which are very minimal and may only have a handful of people at a local farmers' market or whatever. The motivation is a broad church to cater for all of those groups. What we have done enables that without getting into specifics in any particular area. To answer the Deputy's question, we are not explicitly providing for workers' co-operatives or explicitly providing, for instance, for social enterprises; it is for co-ops in general. I am mindful of the motivation of many people who have particular needs and aspirations for what they do. They can do that in their rules. The way we see it, there are certain things that we say must be in the rules, but how co-ops actually address them is a matter for themselves. It is to empower to co-ops to go as far as they want to. For those who want to identify as workers' co-ops and reflect that in their operation, they can do that in their rules. It is a question of providing the enabling legislation and then allowing those who want to, whether it be a social enterprise or whatever, to go further. They can do so in their rules.