Mr. T.J. Flanagan:

The only experience we have in this sector is that one of our colleagues spends a lot of his time in co-operative development and trying to develop co-operatives in new areas. Over the last few years, particularly post-Covid-19, we devoted quite a bit of time to looking at the gig economy, which has evolved, with a view to trying to bring people stuck in that economy together to achieve the scale we did 100 years ago with dairy farmers, for example, to pool their resources and achieve something better. I do not think it was a flaw in the legislation that caused these things not to succeed, it was just brutal commercial reality. We could say the reason they did not succeed was that there is something lacking in the Industrial and Provident Societies, IPS, Act, at the time or in this new Act. It was just commerce. If the Senator is suggesting that there are other tools, whether taxation or something that could give these entities a leg up, we will defer to that. We did not find any problems in the core legislation.