SpeechHon DAVID BENNETT (National): Thank you Madam Speaker. Well I must admit I'm going to take a different sort of tack even though we are supporting the bill. You know many times councils and local communities give up assets that they shouldn't give up. And I want to just use the Waikato as a little bit of an example and then translate it back to this. The Waikato Regional Council once owned a significant share of Tauranga port and for their great wisdom they managed to sell it for bugger all and invested that in a fund for bugger all when the actual port is now worth a lot of money.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Poto Williams): Is that a new parliamentary word is it bugger all"? Hon DAVID BENNETT: Well it was bugger all they got compared with what it is worth now. And so that was the reality of what they did there and then. When we were in Government 20 years later we set up the fibre network through New Zealand and Auckland had its own one Christchurch had its and there had to be another company to give some competition and so we created one in Hamilton. Hamilton was the first city to get fibre in New Zealand. It was ultra-fast fibre. We made sure that Hamilton could have Taranaki and Tauranga in the contract and they could create a new TrustPower-type model that would be a company that would add value to the community. And we gave them that opportunity. We gave them that and then they sold it. They sold it for a couple of hundred—$800 million or something a few years later. Madness absolute madness that was done by that community group because that business isn't about just the money. It's not the capital that's there; it's actually what it can do for a community. If it's a corporate that's of decent size like that it can actually sponsor things it can actually be a corporate player it can be a Gallagher like in Hamilton where it actually gives some money back. Now all we've got is a fund that's run by somebody in America and the money comes back to a group of people that want to spend it on things I hear like cultural social environmental and economic. Maybe take out three of them and just leave economic—would have been great. But you know the reality is that these funds are a loss. They are an actual loss on capital. If that money is utilised not only do you get the profit but you actually get the capital that could have been there in the business. And so I know it's great to say these things are cool and we support them and all that but the reality is these hurt communities in many ways when if the community had held the asset they could have done much better. Like look at Taranaki Powerco whether you make that into an environmentally friendly green power company in the future or whatever you want to do with it it's still got a huge future ahead of it. It's better than having it in a capital fund where you spend it on social cultural environmental and maybe some economic things. And so personally I think these types of enterprises are a great failure and a missed opportunity for many of our communities that don't want to take the risk of running an asset. And that's fine but there's other ways you can manage that without the community having to run that asset. But don't give up those assets. We did it in the Waikato around the Tauranga port shares. It was the worst thing the region's ever done. We managed to get the region back growing because we built the expressway but if we hadn't have done that we'd be back where we were. Second thing was Waikato gave up the ability to have ultra-fast fibre that it could have created a business through the central North Island. That would have been a really significant business that they could have made into something even bigger and better. And they sold that at the wrong time and they missed out on that opportunity of having a business plus the dividend. So I say to the communities: be careful in these kind of situations. The dividends are great; it's fine. OK you've got to be careful where you spend them. But you actually miss an opportunity if you give up the capital of the business as well because that's where you can actually do something really constructive if you're looking at a green economy going forward or something like that. And a lot of the time people get scared. They fear that they can't manage these things. They give them up on the basis that it's going to be too much liability for them. Devolve it to someone else that is a professional in that area to do that for you and you will actually be able to have the best of both worlds. You'll be able to have that business that can be part of your community and you can have the dividend that you actually use rather than just a fund which gets lapped up in other places."