Pettis Jill: Charities Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee Third Reading 
Pettis Jill: Charities Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:625;Page:19979] 
JILL PETTIS (Labour—Whanganui) 
: 
 I commend Dail Jones for his speech. We sometimes see piffle on the front page of our newspapers and in the lead stories on the 6 o’clock news that means absolutely nothing and has nothing to do with improving people’s quality of life yet the cooperative approach that has been taken for most of this evening by all members of Parliament in trying to pass legislation that will be of benefit to the people of New Zealand will not get mentioned even on page 19. I just say to Mr Jones that I enjoyed listening to his speech. 
The tone will drop now because I will refer to those comments made by Judith Collins. I say from the outset that National members and Judith Collins in particular would not recognise people from the charitable or voluntary sector even if they ran over them. Judith Collins in her Jaguar—well I do not care what she drives; I will just say that she would not recognise them if she ran over them. She is the very same member who has made comments that sole parents sit around watching videos and TV all day and smoking dope. That is an indication of how much she knows about people who are perhaps at the lower end of the economic scale and she has no idea about people who are trying to improve the lot of others in a very humble but very effective way. 
I also remind the skeleton crew on the other side of the House tonight that Nick Smith when he was in that ill-fated National Government threatened the voluntary sector with the removal of its funding if it spoke out about and against the National Government of that time. He threatened the sector with the loss of funding. A lot of those people—and a lot of people whom we on this side of the House know well—were genuinely frightened about that. That was the kind of intimidation that was brought to bear during the last National Government. 
Even before then Mr Muldoon withdrew the charitable status of CORSO because it spoke out about the evils of apartheid. Some people will not remember those kinds of things. Some people will not even remember the huge amount of international activity that took place to rid South Africa of apartheid. The mean Prime Minister of New Zealand at the time Mr Muldoon reacted by crawling to Margaret Thatcher and treated CORSO cruelly. That is something many people in New Zealand will always remember. Of course some johnny-come-latelies will have absolutely no recollection of that history at all. 
This bill is a good bill because firstly it is an initiative that will acknowledge the vital contribution that the charitable sector makes to the New Zealand economy and to the well-being of New Zealand and New Zealanders. This Government in support of this Charities Commission has committed $9.8 million of funding to help the commission in its initial stages. 
One very important aspect that has not been mentioned very much tonight is that the charitable sector has approached the Government a number of times over recent years about income tax benefits for charities and for people who make donations and quite rightly so. The Government will be in a position to assist because it will now be able to assess how much an increase in the form of taxable assistance would cost and how much it would assist those various organisations. It is critically important to have robust information about the size and scope of the charitable sector in New Zealand and it has traditionally been quite difficult to collect or assess that information. 
This is a good bill because it will protect the integrity and reputation of the charitable sector. I just want to pay my respects and express appreciation to the hundreds of thousands of people who go out and do voluntary work every day in a humble but hugely important way.