Copeland Gordon: Third Readings 
Copeland Gordon: Third Readings 
[Volume:616;Page:12428] 
GORDON COPELAND (United Future) 
: 
 I want to take a brief call on the third reading of what was the Business Law Reform Bill and is now split into 13 different bills that amend various pieces of legislation. I would like to pick up a little bit on the big-picture issue that Stephen Franks has alluded to. I think it is a good thing that in this bill we are attempting to roll back and limit some of the more excessive compliance costs that we have put on the business community with the very best of intentions. 
Our intention has been to protect what we see as vulnerable people from being sucked into fraudulent or less than honest business schemes. In some ways we have gone too far in places and it is good to see as Stephen Franks alluded to—and I mentioned this in my second reading speech—that we are loosening the rules a bit for employer superannuation schemes. I think we need to do that because there is a maxim in public policy and that is that if the Government wants more of something it should encourage it. On the other hand if the Government wants less of something it should discourage it. In some ways we have been discouraging savings through employer-based superannuation schemes rather than encouraging them. 
There is a lot more work to be done in that area because New Zealand and its economy—coming off a dis-savings base of about minus 11 percent per annum according to the Reserve Bank’s projections—desperately need the saving rates of New Zealanders to increase and to increase significantly. But at some point we need to take a step back and wonder why it is that every time there are scandals in the business community—and I am referring here to some of the recent United States examples; Enron and the securities companies in New York and so forth—we always have to react by putting in place more and more legislation and more and more information in prospectuses and other issue documents. 
 In that context I draw the House’s attention to the fact that in my opinion a better way for us to address those issues would be to give a lot more emphasis in our society to high ethical values. A lot of what we do is in terms of writing endless law. Stephen Franks has just mentioned and I agree with him entirely that we have huge documents that cost megabucks to provide—and no one reads them and no one has much regard for them when making investment decisions. We are trying to shut the door after the horse has already bolted because somebody down the line somewhere did something dishonest. It would be much much better if we approached this issue on two levels and that is firstly to encourage—insist really—the business community to give much more emphasis to ethical values and standards and secondly to put people in jail for a long long time when they do something crooked and fraudulent. I think we would then get back to the good old days when economies prospered on a handshake because people trusted one another and trusted the standards of honesty and integrity in the business community. We have lost that to our detriment and I hope that at some stage we as a Parliament can think about that and ask whether that is the right way to go—whether we could start at the right end of the whole problem and insist on better standards in our communities. With those few remarks I signal United Future’s support for the third readings of these bills. 
Bills read a third time.