Cunliffe David: Financial Service Providers (Pre-Implementation Adjustments) Bill — Second Reading In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Cunliffe David: Financial Service Providers (Pre-Implementation Adjustments) Bill — Second Reading In Committee 
[Sitting date: 22 June 2010. Volume:664;Page:11974. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE (Labour—New Lynn) 
: 
 I rise to take a brief call in this Committee stage of the debate. I do so for several reasons. The first reason I do it is because many of my constituents in New Lynn are among the thousands of New Zealanders whose life savings have been stolen from them by shonky finance companies. For too many senior citizens for people who have worked all their lives on modest incomes who have scrimped and saved to put aside the pennies and build up a nest egg for their retirement who may not have a high degree of financial literacy or specialist education and who are reliant on the good faith of those who have held themselves out as the intermediaries of the finance sector their life savings have gone. They have been stolen. 
John Hayes 
: Under whose administration? 
Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE 
: If the member opposite disagrees with this analysis then he should say so; otherwise he should listen. It is absolutely reprehensible that the companies that are now filling the front pages of our newspapers like ING (NZ) owned by a major New Zealand bank have now left many thousands of senior citizens bereft of most of their savings—in that case even after the Commerce Commission has had to weigh in. While Mark Hotchin the poster boy of irresponsible greed is building a palace on Paritai Drive—well I say “building”; he has not paid his contractors so building has stopped—tens of thousands of investors have seen their savings disappear. 
John Hayes 
: Crocodile tears. 
Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE 
: These are not crocodile tears. I grew up in a family that did not have money to spare and that could not have saved the way the way these people save. I know what it is like to go without. A lot of my constituents are going without because of the greed the profligacy and the venality of these people. 
It is fair cop though to recognise two things. Firstly there is now a bipartisan effort under way in this Parliament which this bill represents to clean this mess up once and for all. I commend the Government for carrying forward the work that the Hon Lianne Dalziel and the previous Cabinet commenced. Now in the best of all worlds I believe it is fair to say that in hindsight we could have moved somewhat quicker on some of these matters but some of the issues were masked by the property bubble that existed in New Zealand as it did worldwide and hindsight is always 20/20. But I tell you what this Labour Opposition believes this is a hugely important issue and we will not stop until this mess is cleaned up. 
I will give a personal view now. I look forward to the day when it is impossible for financial advisers to receive a fee from a company for a financial product they are advising on. They should be paid a fee for service in the same way as doctor or an accountant is paid. They should not be disguised salespeople for wholesale finance companies or the purveyors of financial products. If in practice they are then they must be held to the highest standards of transparency so that their obligations are transparent. 
I also want to mention in my role as finance spokesperson a macroeconomic implication of this mess and that is that New Zealand has a huge savings deficit. It is killing us. It is the primary reason that our current account is bleeding red and it cannot be solved until we get the savings rate up. New Zealanders are asking what they can save in and with. They say they cannot put their money on the stock exchange because some of them do not understand stocks. They are told they should not put it into real estate for good reason so they put it into finance companies and those companies burnt them. They stole their savings. This bill is essential from a macroeconomic point of view as well as from a fairness and ethics point of view. We need to get our rate of savings up. We need to have high standards of integrity and transparency for the good of the investor and the good of the country. Thank you.