Bishop Chris: New Zealand Superannuation and Retirement Income Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeBishop Chris: New Zealand Superannuation and Retirement Income Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 30 June 2015. Volume:706;Page:4913. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CHRIS BISHOP (National): I just want to take a short call to respond to Mr Robertson’s remarks. This deals with Part 2 of the bill which of course is clauses 10 to 14 dealing primarily with the Income Tax Act 2007. I just want to rebut the idea—the proposition that Mr Robertson made—that basically if someone can borrow at 3 percent or 4 percent the Crown’s cost of capital and invest and make a 20 percent return then it is lunacy not to do so OK? On the face of it that is true. But let us take off the rose-tinted rear-vision mirror glasses and just think the other way which is that we had done that—that somebody had gone out and borrowed at 3 percent or 4 percent or maybe even higher than that and had lost 20 percent; not gained 20 percent not improved the asset value by 20 percent but actually lost. That is a conceivable scenario at the time of the global financial crisis when global equities were tanking. It is highly conceivable that the Crown would have lost money. So it is all very well 8 years on to look back and say “Well we would have made 10 percent. We would have made this. If only the dastardly National Government had not done that.”—that is all very well. I can understand why the Labour Party wants to run that line as a political attack except for the fact that it is equally plausible that the Crown and the Government would have lost 20 percent or even moreperhaps.You will remember that this was at a time when the global economy was in total turmoil. Global equities were tanking and to say that the New Zealand Government should have borrowed money at a time of great global uncertainty in order to invest in risky assets that were extremely volatile is naive. Why do we know that what we did as a Government was the right thing? Well Michael Cullen the Svengali of the left the social democratic paramount chief when he set up the New Zealand Superannuation Fund in 2002 said that it was only going to be invested in by the Crown at times of surpluses. It was his attempt to squirrel away the money so that the National Party at the time would not spend it on tax cuts. That is what he said. Right? We can argue about whether or not that was right or wrong but what he said was that it was to be usedonly at a time when we had surpluses not when the Crown was borrowing to invest in the share market. So the very man whom the Labour Party has spent the last 2 hours lauding and to whom it continues to bend the knee all the time—go down to the Auckland Fabian association to hear from him about how Labour needs to reclaim the political momentum and all of the advice that he gives—that guy the guy who set up the fund that the Labour Party has benevolently named after him at least in the vernacular he himself does not support what the Labour Party is advocating now.Actually the Labour Party has form on this because at some point the Labour Party members had a road to Princes Street conversion and they decided that what National had done with the Superannuation Fund was a good idea. It was David Shearer in 2012 who turned up at the Wellington Employers’ Chamber of Commerce—and I think Grant Robertson was deputy then; he may not have been; at least he was a senior strategist inside the leadership team—and he said: “We’ve decided that until we are back in surplus any new spending will have to be paid for out of existing Budget provisions new revenue or by reprioritising.” That was David Shearer in 2012 when he was leader of the Labour Party. I know that they have changed their position now and that they have gone back to the typical left-wing orthodoxy that was the case under Phil Goff that was the case under David Cunliffe and that presumably is the case under Andrew Little—and quite possibly will be the case under the new leader of the Labour Party Carmel Sepuloni. I know her time is coming. She is making a run from the second benches from the whip position and the sterling work that she is doing in social development railing against vouchers social development and the National Government’s investment approach of trying to get people back into work. I know that she is making a run but anyway—the Chair is asking me to shorten it up—I just want to make the point that the Labour Party members are all over the place on this issue.Actually when it comes to superannuation policy more generally they are in the middle of a review. Grant Robertson is rampaging around the country with the amusingly titled Future of Work Commission and we have got Andrew Little musing about raising the superannuation age or maybe even means-testing it. David Clark just about 1½ hours previously in the debate on a previous part of this bill—