I am delighted to be able to say that I was not, this year, interrupted over the Christmas holiday by a security of payment claim served on Christmas eve. And so, happily, I was able to enjoy a couple of weeks off.

But before and since then I have been “heads down” on a number of fronts, which means that I have not reported as fully as I might have done on some recent developments.

One of them was the issue of the report late last year in Western Australia of John Fiocco  Security of Payment Reform in the WA Building and Construction Industry. This made a number of detailed recommendations about the way that the security of payment issue should be dealt with in Western Australia. Such State-By-State consideration may well turn out to be pretty much irrelevant in the event that the Federal Government enacts some legislation which applies throughout the country, and pretty much everyone agrees that that would be sensible. The Federal Government is still considering the Murray Report as to such federal legislation.

Diligent readers of these pages might recall that the Murray report includes a suggested treatment of Queen of Hearts clauses, and in particular adopts a suggestion of mine as to how such clauses might be prohibited. The Fiocco Report takes the same line, albeit with a small suggested tweak as to how the prohibition should be worded.

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