O'Connor GregGREG O'CONNOR (Labour—Ōhāriu): Thank you Madam Assistant Speaker. How timely a piece of legislation is this? We've got a generation who are growing older who are ones who have trusted. I know from personal experience that some of a generation ahead of me—unfortunately there is only one generation between—Hon David Bennett: There is no generation ahead of you. GREG O'CONNOR: —myself and the graveyard. There still remains one unlike for some of those people screaming from across the other side. But they were a generation that trusted the professionals. They trusted their accountant. They trusted those who basically looked after their financial matters and unfortunately there were some investments that just didn't really turn out to be what they thought. That's a generation that are the first ones that lost a lot of money through finance companies and then there was the crash. In Wellington there was David Ross of Ross Asset Management which unfortunately again left a trail of financial victims around Wellington in particular—building companies Blue Chip investments. So it's a world where people previously really had a lot of trust in their banks. We've seen what's happened in Australia with a banking inquiry but who can you trust? It really now behoves us as lawmakers in this House to ensure that we can get some sort of confidence back in there so that people who have nest eggs—people are living longer. Those nest eggs that they had hoped would see them out and that would maybe leave a little bit for the grandchildren—they hope that they can actually do that. They need the confidence to do that and that's why legislation like this is so important. Just looking at one aspect of this around the international companies who've been setting up here using the New Zealand name I had a personal experience of that. I was in New York at a fund-raiser where I was a guest and someone mentioned that I was from New Zealand. Someone from South Carolina who was doing a big property investment came up to me and mentioned the name of a New Zealand company that was financing this particular development that he was doing and it was a very large development. So I had some inquiries made about this company and they were one Canadian and two Americans who had never been to New Zealand but who had this company doing exactly what one of the previous speakers on the other side has talked about. They were just having the New Zealand name to give it the credibility. The money was channelled through New Zealand which was at one stage why the New Zealand dollar I believe was the 10th most traded currency in the world—through those sorts of transactions. I might say that on that particular occasion everything as far as I understand did work well but it did show the ease of using the New Zealand name for very little. In fact I looked into that. There was very little for New Zealand in that. I think there were about 200 other companies renting the same office space and so there was very little accrued to New Zealand from that. That was a type of financial system where bills like this become absolutely necessary. So I commend whoever has been involved and it's one of these cases where success has a thousand fathers and failure is an orphan—everyone is taking credit for it—but I'll give that credit to Minister Kris Faafoi on this occasion. This is something that I just hope for those of us who reach our dotage—that's a long way away for some of us—we can actually have faith that those hard-earned dollars we have will be secure and that the State is doing what it can to be sure to protect us from some very scurrilous individuals that exist out there. I commend this bill to the House.