White HelenHELEN WHITE (Labour): It's a pleasure to take a call and the last call on this bill. I'd like to congratulate my friends Dr Duncan Webb and Camilla Belich for continuing to bring this bill because for me this bill is going to bust the myth that you have to maximise the profit of a company. That's a myth that has been around my entire life. In 1970 there was a paper published in The Times and that was the paper which was called A Friedman Doctrine: The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits. What it said was it said that there was no social responsibility that a company had other than to maximise its profits. That must be done; that's what its sole purpose must be. That myth shaped the economy. That myth shaped the way that businesses worked.I looked up the fallacy of maximising a profit and when I did I saw that Thomson Reuters had a very good statement of why this fallacy continues and yes it does continue today. It continues to shape our businesses and the responses of our directors. What it said was that there are several reasons for this. The first is that there is pressure from heavyweight shareholders for short-term bonuses and profit. That's what this does. This myth encourages those shareholders to push directors into producing profit at all cost—that's what it does.It said that another reason was bonuses and rewards. That is one of the reasons why this fallacy persists. It says that it is an easy metric and it is a simple metric and it says that a fear of competitors actually making more profit in the short term keeps this alive. It does us damage because it erodes our environment and it erodes our social responsibility and it puts directors in a really hard position quite often because they've got to justify to their shareholders why they are not going for the shortest and maximised profit. This is the environment that we have lived in.Now I read a book that maybe some of you have read. It's a book by Yuval Noah Harari called Sapiens and it was an interesting read. It talked about the development of limited liability companies. What it said was that these were actually part of the evolution of our economy and they did good for quite some time because they separated us from our responsibilities from our moral and social responsibilities—we were separate from them. And they separated the risk in those businesses because the risk was separated by the limited liability nature. But what he says in the end of that book is that the time has come for us to re-examine that because it got out of hand. We actually got to the point where we no longer had it in balance any more.My example for that and it is a dramatic one was Pike River because I remember when Pike River happened and I was an employment lawyer and I had several friends and relations in fact who actually put up—they put up—the argument that it was OK what happened at Pike River because what actually those company people were doing was they were looking after the shareholders' interests. That was actually put up as an argument. That was the fallacy in action. That's where it can lead us people. That is not where we want to be in modern New Zealand.The reason why we had the ACT Party slur Dr Duncan Webb the reason why we had Mr Woodhouse talk about profit and how important that was in terms of its social contribution was because that fallacy is still around and alive and well and we have to fight it by nudging. We have to actually make sure that people feel secure when they are directors of companies and they can actually stand up and say These are clearly things that matter. These are things that matter. The environment matters. Social responsibility the way we treat our staff matters." These are all things that are legitimate to care about in a company structure and that's a very very good thing. That is something that is happening in our society and we should be there as a legislature. And we're not there with an iron fist; we're there with a nudge. We are there to support businesses to do that. This particular little change does that. So why is Mr Seymour so frightened of it that he has to slur that he has to suggest terrible things about people who have happened to be brave enough and creative enough to come and actually reinforce the capacity of our companies to do something that they desperately need to do as we face an environmental crisis as we face a need for social growth because we actually do need those things? It shows to me that I am in the right party because I am not in a party that is stuck in the 1970s where several other parties in this House do seem to be stuck. I urge those people to read a little more to get a little less religious about these beliefs think through a little more what in fact they are saying because it is very very important. We stand by our companies when they are innovative and they are brave and they want to do something real and good that isn't just about maximising short-term profit because maximising short-term profit is going to actually rip our children off. It's going to hurt us it's going to hurt our environment and it's going to make this place a darker place to live and that is not what we are about.Now I wanted just to finish by talking for a minute about other nudges that we've had which have worked because this is a "nudge" piece of legislation. I come from the background of an employment lawyer and in the employment space this is what happened with good faith. I'm pretty sure that when good faith was introduced as a principle there would have been people from the other side of the House saying "But employers always act with good faith." Yes lots of employers do. But isn't it nice that we introduced a concept like that into legislation and it became the foundation of good employment relations in New Zealand? So I hope that this law by introducing this concept in this very simple way gives people a foundation in company law to actually do the right thing and to grow and evolve. So I don't agree with the idea that this does nothing. I think that this does a lot. It is simple. It is elegant. It is supportive of our businesses. That is a very very important thing at this time.I hope that we have a law here that will actually stand the test of time and that in a few years there will be no more fallacy of maximising profit. There will be no more religious adherence to that even from the right because the status quo will be of course all businesses—all businesses—are perfectly entitled to care about the environment or feeding their children or looking after their workers. That's the New Zealand I want to live in. And the only way we're going to live in that New Zealand is if we move on from the 1970s. Thank you. I commend this bill to the House."