Smith Stuart: Social Assistance (Portability to Cook Islands Niue and Tokelau) Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSmith Stuart: Social Assistance (Portability to Cook Islands Niue and Tokelau) Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 18 June 2015. Volume:706;Page:4592. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]STUART SMITH (National—Kaikōura): It is nice to finish on a positive note there. It is a pleasure to speak on the Social Assistance (Portability to Cook Islands Niue and Tokelau) Bill. I think there is general agreement across the House that this is a good bill. With the Realm countries electing to have self-governance and free association it is a wonderful thing to be able to align them with the same rights to be able to retire and take your superannuation with you to the Islands.Although there has been a lot of talk about those rules—I think I will touch on that a bit further on—I first want to talk a little bit about the submissions that were given to the Social Services Committee. Generally they were mostly all except for one focused on the 5 years over 50 provision in the bill and two of them in fact suggested that the 5 years over 50 should be 5 years over 40 giving people a bit longer in the Islands. The rationale of course is that those people would be able to contribute more to the economy of those islands and contribute to the communities as well. Although I suggest that that is a very good ideain spirit they will actually get that at age 55 anyway.Although we are aligning this with what every New Zealander has to do to qualify for superannuation I think I would just like to point out that in those countries we have agreements with like Australia and the UK as was pointed out before what is different about that situation is that there is a provision known as totalisation. That provision allows for reciprocal payments of superannuation within those nations. That does not apply in the Islands because they are not able to pay their superannuation at the same rate.So in theory it sounds good to hand out a little bit more money and I know the rationale of some members of the Opposition in the Committee debate was that it is not that much money so why do we not just pay it. Well my running total so far at the moment when adding all of these up in these various bills through the House is half a billion dollars. So these little bits of money add up to quite a lot of money and being legislators we have to make hard decisions. We take taxes off New Zealand citizens and distribute them to provide the services that the Government provides and superannuation is one of those. In this bill we must be responsible with that money as we are with every other bill we debate in this House.On the whole I think we can be very proud of this bill. I think the people of the Cook Islands Niue and Tokelau can all be very very pleased with this. I would also like to take note that my colleague Alfred Ngaro reminds us that the triple star that is referred to in our national anthem refers to these nations. I think that probably should be spoken about at every opportunity because most people do not realise that that is what it refers to. I think it is a great thing. In summary I think this is a great bill and I have a lot of pleasure in commending it to the House. Thank you.