Copeland Gordon: Securities (Local Authority Exemption) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Copeland Gordon: Securities (Local Authority Exemption) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:646;Page:15219] 
GORDON COPELAND (Independent) 
: 
 I will take just a brief call on the Securities (Local Authority Exemption) Amendment Bill and I begin by congratulating Dr Richard Worth. He set out a very eloquent and very complete analysis of the bill and its importance. It is actually a very important bill. As Dr Worth said it is a very short bill but its ramifications are quite dramatic. 
Before I go on to speak on the bill I think I should respond to the contribution of the Hon Paul Swain who correctly pointed out that the problem we are fixing probably has its roots in the time of the National Government of 1996 to 1999. I say to the Minister that it is now 2008 and if Government members protest too loudly about their great vision of getting things fixed in their country then I say to them that it has taken a great deal of time. It has taken far too long to fix this problem. I just want to bring a bit of balance to that political issue. 
I want to make a slightly different link as well. At the time this bill was being considered by the Commerce Committee we were also talking about housing affordability. I wonder whether the very very large development levies would have been levied on new homeowners by local councils in this country if this bill had been enacted much earlier. As Dr Richard Worth has said we have actually unintentionally I believe shut off the ability of mum and dad ratepayers to invest in stock issued by their own local council. 
I remember the days when for example the Nelson City Council or the Lower Hutt City Council could go to its own ratepayers tell them there was a bond issue coming up and ask whether they would like to buy some stock. Many households of every portfolio large and small always had a fair proportion of their investment in local body stock. Bringing that to an end was a tremendous mistake with ramifications not just for the funding of local authorities. 
I will refer back to the development levies just to make this point. The development levy is actually a levy on the new homebuyer and it therefore makes housing affordability worse. It makes housing less affordable. The right way in my view to fund new infrastructure such as sewerage works and roading works is—as Dr Richard Worth has pointed out and Mark Blumsky has also mentioned it in this connection—through long-term intergenerational debt so that it is repaid over a 30 or 40-year period. That is the traditional way it has been done in New Zealand and removing that opportunity really was a great mistake. I agree with the comments that have been made that removing that opportunity has also forced a lot of mum and dad shareholding ratepaying investors to get into junk bonds with finance companies like Blue Chip with very very sad consequences. 
I look forward to the passage of this bill. I wholeheartedly endorse it and I hope we will see a return to the good old days when ratepayers—mum and dad investors—had the opportunity to put some of their money into their own local council bonds. That really is intergenerational finance in another sense is it not? Those people who are older and better off and who have some spare cash are actually funding—physically and necessarily funding—the infrastructure that is coming on board for the next generation of homeowners and the next generation of citizens. That is the way things should be.