Moroney Sue: Callaghan Innovation Bill — Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Moroney Sue: Callaghan Innovation Bill — Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 04 December 2012. Volume:686;Page:7025. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
SUE MORONEY (Labour) 
: 
 It is indeed a pleasure to rise and speak to—well since I spoke to it last it has changed its name. It is the Callaghan Innovation Bill. I do just want to point out though before I speak on the detail of the bill that I think that last speech from a Government MP said it all which is really that this bill is so devoid of vision and so devoid of something that is desperately needed by this country that all the last member Simon O’Connor could do was rehearse in fact what is already happening in this country. It is already happening. All he could do in his speech was rehearse research that has already been undertaken. So I have to ask that member what he thinks this bill actually lends the situation to improve it unless that Government so lacks ambition for this country that it thinks that everything that is going on now is just fine and dandy. 
On this side of the House certainly within the Labour camp we do not want to see the continuation of a flat-lining economy that is being led by that Government. We think that we actually need to boost the economy. The Prime Minister once said he was going to supercharge the economy. That is what he once said—he was going to supercharge it. I am sorry Labour is supporting this bill but this by no stretch of the imagination supercharges the economy in the way that the Prime Minister once used to say he wanted to do. 
But then the Prime Minister once used to say and once used to promise a brighter future for this country. I notice that he has stopped using that particular phrase and so he should. He promised the brighter future not in just the most recent election but also in the one before that again; 5 years later the New Zealand public now sees that the brighter future was something of a sham because they did not expect that it meant selling the State assets down the tubes they did not expect that it meant increasing class sizes and they did not expect that it meant cutting funding for early childhood education. 
I do want to talk about Sir Paul Callaghan because he was a remarkable New Zealander. I think it is actually a little bit of a shame that something this lightweight has been used in his name because what I knew of Sir Paul Callaghan was that he was a man who was well thought through in his thinking. When he talked on an issue and saw what a future really should look like for New Zealand he took a comprehensive approach to it not a piecemeal approach to it like this bill does. It really just tries to make a symbolic attempt at making it look like the Government is doing something serious to improve science and innovation in this country when in fact all it is actually doing is establishing a new statutory Crown entity. 
In supporting this bill I guess Labour asks whether it will do any harm. The answer is that it probably will not do any harm but will it do any good? Well we do not believe that it will do much good in terms of the serious issues that confront this country at the moment. I come from a really important part of our country when it comes to science and innovation: the Waikato. In the mighty Waikato we are really proud of the science capacity and the research capacity that we have particularly with regards to the production of food because we do actually consider ourselves to be the food bowl of New Zealand and we have the smarts to go with it. 
When Labour was in Government there was a proposal that was being worked on going by the name of the smart food network which actually would have joined up a whole series of innovations across the country. It was not a new Crown entity without scientists even being involved in it which is what this bill proposes but it was actually an on-the-ground innovation that would have worked directly with small companies to join together so that they could have the capacity to actually test out their ideas their new innovations in a manufacturing sense. This bill appears to me to be an afterthought of a different attempt at doing exactly that but that attempt was stopped—stopped in its tracks—by this current Government. That was an approach that I think would have made a much quicker and more comprehensive difference to the innovation and research going on in this country. 
I am standing to support this bill. I think it is woefully inadequate and it is not the path to the brighter future.