Hudson BrettBRETT HUDSON (National): Thank you Mr Speaker. I rise to speak on behalf of the National Party in support of the Venture Capital Fund Bill in its second reading. Look you know we've got some reservations but we're going to support this because after all it was pretty much the only pro-growth announcement in the Government's Budget this year. They're not doing much but you know we're going to have to support them doing something at least. Let's say that it's suboptimal at best but the country needs some sort of stimulus because here we are in the heart of the best terms of trade that we've seen in a while and the exporters should be doing well and the country should be doing well but we're going backwards. Growth has halved. Jobs are down by 70 percent. We had 10000 new jobs each month under National. It's a 70 percent discount from this Government. They're giving stuff away—mainly people's prosperity. So at least they did something in the Budget that was targeted at pro-growth and we will support it for that. But the reservations are real and they should be reservations that New Zealanders hold as well. First of all there is no legislative objective for the New Zealand Superannuation Fund who will administer this to provide a return to taxpayers—no objective to provide a financial return. As members on this side of the House in the Finance and Expenditure Committee said name one—name one—investment fund around the world that operates particularly at arm's length or supposedly at arm's length from a Government that isn't modelled on a certain level of return at least as an objective and this one doesn't. So its success will be inordinately difficult to measure because even if it loses most or all of the money that's invested in it there's still not an objective goal that it can be measured against. The second part which is really quite worrying is we don't believe that the Superannuation Fund should be subject to any sort of Government influence in what it invests in. While the Government will have said and those members will try to say Oh this money's new money." the reality we fear as this thing continues to roll on is the Superannuation Fund will be influenced if not strong-armed into using some of its invested funds to put into this fund and that does risk real returns to New Zealanders. We have faith in the fund managers under the New Zealand Superannuation Fund. They do a good job. There's probably a bit of rivalry between them and ACC as to who does the better job. They do a good job including that the investments they make are rationally based ones that are designed to give good returns to New Zealanders. To force them—which we think is where this will end up going—to put that at risk in what are very high-risk and not necessarily high-reward sorts of venture fund investments such as this thing is targeted at actually risks compromising some of those returns to New Zealand taxpayers for a fund which is there to help offset our future superannuation costs. So we will support the bill. As I've said it does at least do something to try to stimulate some growth but it's not without reservation. So I will say the words: I will commend this bill to the House."