Shaw James: KiwiSaver Budget Measures Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeShaw James: KiwiSaver Budget Measures Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 21 May 2015. Volume:705;Page:3870. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAMES SHAW (Green):I rise on behalf of the Green Party on this third reading of the KiwiSaver Budget Measures Bill. I am an Opposition member of Parliament but I do not like being oppositional for the sake of it. I do not believe in tribalism. But as a member of the Opposition I do believe that my role is to challenge the Government and to hold it to account. So during the course of this debate—I have actually tried to treat this as an actual debate where we actually try to find out what the Government is thinking—I have asked a number of questions in I think a fairly reasonable tone and I think that they are fairly reasonable questions. I do want to acknowledge that some of those questions have been responded to.I would like to start by just responding to some of those questions. One of the questions that I asked was why would you cut the kick-start for KiwiSaver now rather than cut the member tax credit or reduce the member tax credit when that would both save more money and keep in place the incentive that most people actually recognise. Nick Smith did respond to that. He said that we are doing it now because we want to incentivise people not just for opening an account but for actual savings which is a pretty reasonable response. I understand that. But if people are responding to opening an account because of the $1000 kick-start then what you can predict is that fewer people are actually going to be opening an account in the future. What we know is that there are a lot of people—aspirational people—who are not earning a great deal now but who hope to earn more in the future who have opened accounts because of the kick-start programme. The accounts may be dormant at the moment but these are people who want to earn more in the future and can see a pathway so that when they do they will have at least a little bit put away to start with.The second question that I asked was whether the Government considered leaving the kick-start in place for a period of time—say 6 12 or 18 months—to enable people who are not currently enrolled to have the opportunity to enrol or to enable people who are partially through the process of enrolling to have a chance to actually complete their enrolment. Again Minister Smith said we did not want a rush to take advantage of the programme. If we did not want people to take advantage of the programme we would not have set it up in the first place. That is the whole point of the incentive scheme—to get people to take advantage of the programme. So to me that argument holds no weight.Related to that why cut the KiwiSaver now but delay the rest of the Budget hardship package? In other words why take this away now and give people that gap where they are screwed from both ends? Somebody referred to this as middle-class welfare. But can I just say that that question was not answered by any speaker from the Government side at any point during this debate. That leads me to the other five questions that remain unanswered. As I said I think I have tried to ask pretty reasonable questions in the spirit of holding the Government to account and at the very least finding out what it is thinking. During the course of the debate no one—no one—has even attempted to try to respond to these questions so I will ask them again.New Zealand is 22nd out of 24 OECD countries for savings. Cutting the KiwiSaver incentive reduces the savings rate. What is the Government’s plan to increase savings? There is no plan. There does not seem to be a plan. We have not heard one yet. My next question is that the ANZ chief economist says that removing the KiwiSaver incentive will reduce the rate of take-up. What is the plan to maintain or increase the rate of take-up in KiwiSaver? I have not heard an answer to that question. There is no plan. Next question: how does reducing the KiwiSaver take-up rate impact intergenerational equity issues relating to today’s working parents essentially paying for three generations’ worth of costs? How does it deal with the change in the dependency ratio from 7:1 today to 2:1 in 30 years’ time? No one has responded to that question. Next question: the Government is reducing the short-term deficit by raiding New Zealand’s retirement scheme again. What is the plan for long-term—long-term—financial sustainability? Nobody has responded to that question.I know that it is a Saturday and we are under urgency and not all that many people watch Parliament TV. There have been a few people in the gallery—thank you for coming and watching. But it seems extraordinary to me that we could pass a piece of legislation of this much importance to this many New Zealanders about the long-term financial viability of the country and its residents and receive no answers to any of those questions. The Government is being completely unaccountable in passing this legislation. It is lazy to not be responding to these questions. It is arrogant to be relying on your numbers rather than attempting to respond to these questions. Like I said before I think that these are reasonable questions I have tried to ask them in a reasonable way and I think I have asked most of them about four or five times just in case anybody wanted to actually respond to them.There are only a couple of pieces of evidence—of actual evidence—that we have seen in the House today in relation to the bill. One is the regulatory impact statement. But in the regulatory impact statement it says in three or four different places that they did not consider any of the impacts of this legislation beyond the financial impact on the Government’s books. In other words we have no idea what this is going to do to New Zealand’s savings to the New Zealand population or anything other than the impact on the Government’s books. We have no idea what the impact is. The other piece of information that we have got is a 2011 report from Inland Revenue which said that to remove the incentive would gut the programme. So we have seen no positive arguments other than to get the Government’s books back into black—an admirable objective and I am fine with that notion but other than that we have seen no evidence relating to anything else in terms of the impact of this scheme. The only evidence we have seen is that it will have a negative impact. For all those reasons the Green Party cannot support this legislation. Thank you.