Dalziel Lianne: Trustee (Public Trust) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDalziel Lianne: Trustee (Public Trust) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 08 May 2013. Volume:689;Page:9817. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon LIANNE DALZIEL (Labour—Christchurch East): I have read the regulatory impact statement for this bill the Trustee (Public Trust) Amendment Billand I think that it is important to refer to it. It does traverse the history of the legislation. The legislation is doing something in this particular instance for which it was not originally intended. Originally it was intended to ensure that private trusts would not fail through the lack of a replacement trustee and I guess as we have moved into a modern environment with securities now having trustee appointments the potential for what has actually occurred in this one instance has in fact arisen. I think it is appropriate for the Government to act to cut it off at that point. So we are in agreement on this side of the House in respect of the intent of the legislation and the fact that it would apply from today’s date.But there are two different ways that you can make legislation apply from today’s date. One is to do what the Government is doing and that is to pass it under urgency through all of its stages without the benefit of a select committee hearing without advice from the Law Society and without advice from any trustee company. In fact the trustee companies could not be consulted on this bill when it was being developed because of course of the conflict of interest and the fact that it would alert those companies to the fact that the Government was going to do precisely this. So I actually think that the second option would have been the preferred way to go given those limitations and that was to announce that today would be the operative date for the legislation—that it would come into effect from today even though it would be passed in a fortnight’s time.I like everyone else would rather see the certainty of having the time-scale truncated but I for one would always prefer to hear what the Law Society has to say in a considered submission to a select committee and then have the officials respond to that and provide the committee with advice. Maybe it would have been more than a couple of weeks but with the date in concrete that would have prevented any other application being filed because at the simple transition point—and I can see Kate Wilkinson is shaking her head but the transition clause could simply say that any case filed after today’s date would not have the benefit of the application of that particular provision. So with a good deal of working through these issues I honestly think we could have come to the best of all worlds.The only thing that just concerns me is that we are now going to substitute that select committee process with a Committee stage where we will ask questions about amending the wording of section 46 of the principal Act. I guess that one of the questions that I will be wanting to know the answer to is whether this is the same provision that is due to come into effect with the provisions of the Financial Markets Conduct Bill which I understand the Government hopes to have passed by June and have come into effect later on. If that is the case I mean that would be incredibly useful information but on the face of it it does not seem to me to explain whether this is in fact the wording that has been taken out of there. I do not know. So there is detailed stuff that I would like to know because the last thing that we would want to do when we are addressing the unintended consequence of perfectly good legislation which has just become outdated because of the circumstances that we now find ourselves in is to create the potential for another unintended consequence down the track if we have not got the wording quite right. It is very difficult to amend these things. Obviously it is much easier to amend these things with a select committee process. So I agree with my colleague Andrew Little that this is very much a case where we are on all fours with the Government in terms of policy—the outcome that we want to achieve—but we are not entirely happy with this process because it just brings such risks with it.The last thing that I just wanted to comment on was the finance company failures which actually led us to this position today. I just want to make this point. I have given the odd speech in the past because I was the Minister of Commerce at the time that theoriginal finance companies started their cascading effect into failure. The point was often made that the finance companies were not regulated. That actually is not correct. The finance companies were under-regulated. The supervisory role of the trustee was what was supposed to protect the investors from what actually happened. I want to remind this House that when Neville Harris reported to the select committee that I chaired after the fact he said at the time that at least 25 of the failed companies at that point had used just two trustee companies: Perpetual Trust and Covenant Trustee.I think that we actually have to think long and hard about how we let that area which was supposed to exist as a regulatory protection for investors so utterly fail in this particular instance. I do want to place on record again my absolute concern for those who lost a substantial amount of money in all of those company failures. There were people out there who had roles that were supposed to act towards protecting those investors’ interests and they simply failed to do so.