Rich Katherine: New Zealand Superannuation Amendment Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee 
Rich Katherine: New Zealand Superannuation Amendment Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee 
[Volume:625;Page:20077] 
KATHERINE RICH (National) 
: 
 As I rise on behalf of the National Party to speak to this bill I can report that the National Party will be supporting it. This bill repeals the Retirement Income Act and transfers the provisions covering the functions and the powers of the Retirement Commissioner to the New Zealand Superannuation Act. The bill is generally a non-controversial bill. In my view it was handled well by the Social Services Committee. We did not have very many submissions on the bill but the ones we did have were very detailed and provided very important advice for our committee as we considered the bill. 
Superannuation is a very important issue to discuss. Every member of this House knows that the ageing population is a growing issue for New Zealand. We need to prepare our country and to make sure that we provide for those elderly New Zealanders who are living for longer and longer periods. 
This bill is in fact part of the framework for preparing for the retirement of each and every member of this House. That is why superannuation is a very important issue for all of us. 
This bill in terms of what it is trying to achieve has some pretty straightforward goals such as moving the functions and the powers of the Retirement Commissioner to another Act. If there is a controversial part to the bill it would be that it gets rid of the accord on retirement income policies which was part of the Retirement Income Act. Getting rid of that accord represents a sad day for Parliament because it was an attempt to bring cross-party support to the superannuation issue and it was a starting point for all parties to have some agreement on superannuation. 
If we have seen a change in the way in which the superannuation debate has run over the last few years I would say the reason is that the present Minister of Finance has decided that cross-party support is not important to superannuation. He is just going to bowl on and put in place his particular agenda and take no account of what the rest of New Zealand thinks. One of the most important things in this bill is that the reviews of retirement income policy shift from being a 6-year time frame to being a 3-year time frame and I think that is quite important as long as the inquiry and evaluation of superannuation policies remain independent. 
One of the National Party’s further reservations about this bill is that the Minister has greater control to set the terms of reference of that inquiry. If a Minister does not want to have a fully independent inquiry into retirement policy then there is an opportunity to start to meddle with those terms of reference. So I hope Government members can confirm that that is not their intention that that will not be the case and that the Minister in charge will make sure that the independence for that particular inquiry remains unquestionable. It is a shame that we could not keep part of the accord—or at least the intention to work together in a cross-party way—within this bill but it is probably for political reasons that the Government has decided to move the accord or any discussion of an accord off the statute altogether. 
One issue that we did discuss at the Social Services Committee was the status of the Retirement Commissioner and whether he or she should be an Officer of Parliament. There was robust debate about this but the advice we received and the information we collected during our consideration indicated that being an Officer of Parliament was not the correct status for a Retirement Commissioner. In fact we asked the Retirement Commissioner some questions on this point and there was some agreement there as well. We totally understand that not only does a Retirement Commissioner have to be independent the public has to perceive the role as being independent as well. However being an Officer of Parliament is not the only way of doing that or creating that perception. So I think we can work towards greater independence—and the perception of that independence—without having to change the status. We should reserve the role or the status of being an Officer of Parliament for very specific situations only and this is not one of those. 
As I mentioned we are also looking at the number of reviews that will be done. It is good that we are increasing the regularity of reviews of retirement income policy. It is important to have an outsider—or someone who has a mountain top view of the superannuation issue—to be able to have a look at a Government’s retirement policy and to be able to make statements about it. But I hope that the Retirement Commissioner will always give full and frank advice and give full and frank commentary about a particular Government’s superannuation and retirement policy because if he or she does not the role will be pretty pointless. 
If there is no independent view of the way a Government is preparing for the ageing population then all we have is a political puppet who is there just to say what the Government would like him or her to say. 
There was also a bit of debate about changing the name of the bill. I did not think that that was a particular issue. I think the bill is well named. It does concern superannuation and most New Zealanders would understand that any discussion of superannuation is about retirement and about preparing our country to make sure that we provide for New Zealanders as we get older. The bill is quite straightforward. It is not a bill about which there is huge controversy although I have raised some reservations on behalf of the National Party. It will have our support through all stages.