Shearer David: Securities Trustees and Statutory Supervisors Bill — In Committee 
Shearer David: Securities Trustees and Statutory Supervisors Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:671;Page:17714] 
DAVID SHEARER (Labour—Mt Albert) 
: 
 I am pleased to take a call on the Securities Trustees and Statutory Supervisors Bill. I appreciate the Minister in the chair the Minister of Commerce taking part in the discussion as he did earlier and his explanation of the link between this bill and the Financial Markets Authority legislation. They are pretty inextricably linked. That is pretty hefty legislation that we will be getting to hopefully later on this evening. Certainly I appreciated the explanation of the cognate legislation and the navigation through the intricacies of parliamentary process. 
I reiterate that Labour is supporting this legislation. As my colleague Stuart Nash just said this legislation is designed to restore confidence in our financial markets and to make sure they operate in a way that enables people who are investing to have real confidence that the thing that happened unfortunately to tens of thousands of New Zealanders in the crash of a lot of our financial institutions is not repeated. Many of our citizens particularly older citizens lost their life-savings and were put in a position where they were unable to re-earn those savings. As younger people we might have a second or third chance but as an older person we do not have that chance. 
I am particularly pleased that the Labour Party is able to support the legislation. I thank the Minister the Commerce Committee and the officials for working so diligently to bring it together. It is complex legislation. 
We are supporting the legislation because it forms part of the ongoing reform of financial products and providers that we started under the Labour Government. It is now being continued seamlessly under National and I am pleased that has happened. I think both parties as do all people in this Chamber agree on the need to make the financial markets much more secure for ordinary New Zealanders. 
To reiterate the purpose of the bill is to protect the interests of investors and enhance investor confidence in financial markets by requiring people who wish to be appointed as trustees or statutory supervisors to be capable of performing the functions of trustees or statutory supervisors. The crux of the issue is that that has not happened in the past. People have not performed that function adequately and as a result the situation over the last couple of years was able to arise. The bill enables trustees and statutory supervisors to be held accountable for any failure to perform their functions effectively. In effect it puts the onus on those people to ensure that the institutions that they represent or the trusts they are involved with perform effectively. 
As I said before some of the preparatory work was started under the Labour Government. This bill was introduced in December 2009. It is now 16 months since then and I am really pleased that the bill will I hope go through its remaining stages fairly smoothly tonight and in its subsequent reading. 
The bill will provide a regime that supervises in effect the supervisors. It looks after those people who are entrusted with supervising the various trusts and trustees of institutions. Although the role of trustees was included in the review of financial products and providers undertaken by the Labour Government there are still further concerns about the model of supervision they provided. Those concerns were raised as I said by the string of finance company collapses.