Genter Julie Anne: Keep Kiwibank Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGenter Julie Anne: Keep Kiwibank Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 14 October 2015. Volume:709;Page:7266. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green): The Green Party will be supporting this bill to the select committee. Obviously we are very much in support of keeping Kiwibank in public ownership. The campaign against the National Government’s planned asset sales last term was a huge focus for the Green Party because we understand the value of keeping assets that have been built up over generations by New Zealanders in the hands of New Zealanders so that they can all benefit in the future. In the case of our Government-owned bank Kiwibank it is incredibly important not only because it is a State-owned asset. I mean we have other State-owned enterprises that do not necessarily return the same strategic benefits to New Zealand like for example we have a State-owned commercial television station which does not really make sense. It would make sense to have a television station that actually provided public broadcasting but owning a television station for the purposes of commercial return does not necessarily make as much sense. I mean I personally would support public broadcasting on television which this Government has completely killed and which we probably will not get back as long as it is in power.But Kiwibank is incredibly important because we have had a long problem in New Zealand with a lack of competitiveness in the banking sector because of the big four Australian banks which had a very cosy relationship did not compete on price and of course that all contributed to—it was great for them there were huge profits that were sucked out of New Zealand back to Australia—our current account deficit the largest share of which is our investment income deficit. So having the State-owned bank has been incredibly important for New Zealand to ensure that we are not losing all of that profit overseas. Some of it is staying here in New Zealand.I must comment as well that Kiwibank is a great bank. It is kind of like Air New Zealand. I am a client of Kiwibank and I have actually never had better service from a commercial bank. So I think it is doing a great job for its customers it is doing a great job introducing competition to the banking sector here in New Zealand and that is important to our economy.It is critically important that we retain public ownership because we are too small. When the National Government put up the State-owned energy companies for partial privatisation of course we saw it was impossible to be sure that the private owners would be here in New Zealand. So if Kiwibank is not kept in public ownership there is an incredible risk a huge risk and a very likely risk that we would see Kiwibank slowly becoming yet another foreign-owned bank which is not what we need.I have said we will support this bill to select committee because although we support the aim of the bill I think it would be interesting in the select committee to tease out whether or not this bill is the best way to achieve that aim and I can see some potential issues with the way in which the bill has been drafted. In particular it does seem to tie Kiwibank’s future to New Zealand Post which may not be the best way for Kiwibank to arrange its business and for us to keep it in public ownership here in New Zealand. But I am open to this bill. I think it is a worthy endeavour and I do think that it will be interesting if it makes it to the select committee to see exactly how it could be improved potentially to ensure that we do achieve the aim which is so incredibly important of keeping Kiwibank in public ownership.I think that politically at least National has realised that it cannot sell Kiwibank. That would be incredibly unpopular. It went ahead with the partial privatisation of the energy companies even though that was incredibly unpopular and did not make fiscal sense did not make economic sense and did not make strategic sense in the long term. But it went ahead and did it because it was an election promise that it campaigned on. But I do think that the victory for all those who stood up and supported the Keep Our Assets campaign and who voted in the referendum is that we will not see further privatisation of incredibly important assets like Kiwibank. So there is a partial political victory there for all those people who stood up in the Keep Our Assets campaign.