Woolerton R Doug: Taxation (KiwiSaver and Company Tax RateAmendments) Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
Woolerton R Doug: Taxation (KiwiSaver and Company Tax RateAmendments) Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:639;Page:9478] 
R DOUG WOOLERTON (NZ First) 
: 
 That contribution from Mr Nathan Guy was another of what I call the National Party financial adviser speeches. The people who will be better off under the KiwiSaver scheme the people who will be advantaged by it are the people who just know they need to save. They have been unable to save hitherto because there were no incentives no help from the Government and no help from employers or anybody else. But those people know they should save. It saddens me that the National Party does not give people apart from the wealthy the credit for wanting to do what they believe to be the right thing for themselves for their families and in fact for the country. People do want to save. They do want to put money away for the future. They do want to have the security that comes from doing that. But hitherto they have been absolutely unable to do so. 
The KiwiSaver scheme—especially the enhanced KiwiSaver which we are talking about now—enables people for just about the first time ever to save. We cannot stand here as New Zealand First and not applaud that. We have made an issue of the need for savings from the time we first came to Parliament and we will continue to do so. We are proud to support this bill and we do not take any heed of the manipulations that the National Party thinks people will have to go through in order to decide whether they will be part of this scheme. 
I want to attend to the issue of 50 percent participation in KiwiSaver which is being made a lot of. It has been said people cannot afford to participate in KiwiSaver and will not participate and in fact only 50 percent of people will participate. The community is just not divided up like that. There will be a time when people who do not participate in the initial stages will participate. They may not get all the benefits that early participation will give to anybody—we all know the rules of compounding interest—but they will be able to participate at some stage. It is not right to talk about only 50 percent of people participating in KiwiSaver then in the next sentence—or in the same sentence many times—to talk about communism compulsion and our socialist regime. If there was compulsion people would all be in KiwiSaver. I do understand that some members of the National Party have taken the time to at least say that the compulsion component they are talking about is on the employer when the employee decides to participate and that is certainly true. But one cannot talk about a 50 percent take-up on this issue and then talk about compulsion in the same breath because that is just not credible. 
We in New Zealand First have talked for years and years about the issue of encouraging saving. I have congratulated Mr Dunne before; I will do so again. I will also congratulate the leader of New Zealand First its deputy leader who is here and— 
Dr the Hon Lockwood Smith 
: What about anybody else? 
R DOUG WOOLERTON 
:—I was just going to do that—and the whole caucus because we have stuck to our guns over this issue. We have not played politics with it. Whenever a bill has come up that has had a savings component to it whether or not we agreed with it in its entirety we voted for it. There are many cases we would like to see. I am sure many other members of this Parliament would like to see the company tax rate come down to 20 percent—not just equal with Australia’s rate but more competitive than it. But that is not to be at this point and we understand that in this Parliament most change is incremental. When it is not it is really really scary so we would look forward to further enhancements not only of KiwiSaver but of a lower tax rate variety to the taxation system.