Smith StuartSTUART SMITH (National—Kaikōura): Thank you Madam Speaker. It is a pleasure to speak on the Employment Relations (Protection for Kiwisaver Members) Amendment Bill. I want to congratulate the member who has got the bill to this stage. It was a pleasure to actually have it in front of the Finance and Expenditure Committee.I want to address a couple of the issues raised by the Green member Ricardo Menéndez March. He asked what's happened between the first reading and the second reading. Well I don't know if he's aware but it went through a select committee process. Madam Speaker as I'm sure you are aware the select committee process is the major part of our legislative process. All of our members in the House are members on select committees and they put a lot of work into select committees. One major part of that of course is scrutinising legislation calling for submissions reading submissions very carefully then hearing oral evidence from those submitters and then going through a process with very hard-working officials and select committee staff to try and improve the bill to take note of submitters' issues that they had raised ways the bill could be improved or indeed in some cases coming to a different view. That is what has happened for the National Party. I think that shows pragmatism. I think that shows the select committee process actually working as it was supposed to do.I want to thank all of those people who did submit—there weren't that many submissions I have to admit and we only had two that appeared before the select committee as my colleague Jamie Arbuckle mentioned in his good speech on this bill. That as Jamie so eloquently put it really brought it home for the New Zealand First member on the select committee that this was essentially a solution looking for a problem well-meaning as it is and it has a good outcome on the face of it and that's why at first reading we supported the bill. It looked like it was going to really provide something and bring something to the table.Unfortunately once we got into it it actually became quite obvious that there were some issues with it. It was going to add complexity. So really that solution wasn't going to be that great. If as was indicated by the Green member just previously there was such an issue if it was such an issue for workers where were they at the select committee process? Where were they? Why didn't they submit?Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan: They were working.STUART SMITH: Oh they were working! They were working OK. Well people came out in large numbers for a whole lot of things. If it really means anything—and now days we do take submissions particularly on the Finance and Expenditure Committee and I think all the committees do by Zoom. So people could come during their lunch hour and actually usually it's five minutes for an individual maybe it depends on the select committee; it could be more—10 minutes for a submission. So it's not asking them to take a day out of their work life and a significant impost on their pay. I really do recognise those people who the previous member was talking about those people on the lower incomes. Absolutely. No way that we would want to make or expect them to sacrifice a day's work for something like that. But if they really did think there was an issue they would have found a way to appear before the committee. But they didn't submit and they didn't turn up because there were very few submissions. Business NZ's submission was a good one. I remember that one quite well and their appearance before the committee.I know before I took it back to the caucus before we deliberated I did quite a lot of work. I called around a number of other people doing my own research outside of those submissions to the select committee trying to find a way to make this work. Unfortunately it just wasn't possible.That said superannuation is a big issue for New Zealand. We do have an ageing population. We have an economy that's actually only just starting to see some green shoots now that we've got in behind the driver's wheel if you like of the economy and getting things back on track.But some of the things in this bill we did do to change it—actually we changed the name of it. We capitalised the S" in KiwiSaver. We did very important work in that small but important. There were so many things that we went through in looking at how this would work in practice. One of the bigger issues that we have was that this was going to be another avenue for a personal grievance. Now that's fine if the personal grievances are worthy but sometimes they're not and we couldn't really find a way to make that work. That also was a major red flag for me.Clause 5 in the bill would insert new section 110C into the Employment Relations Act and that sets out an adverse effect test that would be used to determine whether a worker is eligible to raise a personal grievance. I'd have to say at the end of that I didn't think that really brought any clarity to the bill and I was a bit concerned—well in fact very concerned—about that. I thought that was going to be quite difficult for us to deal with.The bill did seek to—in the end it's about discrimination between people who have taken a full remuneration approach or have their wage and salary paid to them and then the employer's contribution is paid to their KiwiSaver account versus those who just have that KiwiSaver remuneration 3 percent that goes on top of their salary and they keep the money and choose to do what they want with it. We did find out actually that KiwiSaver is not the only way that people save for superannuation; there are many other schemes. So this was too narrow and so we sought to expand that because ultimately employees should have rights to choose their own path if they wish to. There are plenty of other mechanisms in the law to protect people from not being treated fairly. While this bill was worthy in that sense in its aim it really didn't help make the boat go any faster.As was mentioned by my colleague Jamie Arbuckle I think it was—you mentioned the minimum wage protections and that's absolutely the case. I think that is another safety net that we can feel confident that this bill wouldn't do it. I believe at some point there will be some piece of legislation that will come through which will include something on this in the future. But I don't think the work was able to be done in the back or in the early stages of this bill's life to get all of those little things ironed out with all the policy work that needed to be done. It's unfortunate that we've got to this stage.But I do once again want to thank all of the submitters; although there were few in number at least they did submit. I can assure them that their submissions were taken very carefully. I guess given the small number of them Madam Speaker as a select committee member you do soon find out if people have read their papers or not. On this bill they had. I can assure you that everyone around the table had read those papers even whether they liked the bill or not. That's an important part of our democracy as I said at the beginning of my speech.So I do want to congratulate the member for getting this far. It's not easy as we all know. I also want to thank the other members on the Finance and Expenditure Committee for the work that they did on it. The National Party won't be supporting the bill past this point but we do think that the member did put her best foot forward and we just unfortunately can't support it. So thank you Madam Speaker."