Clark David: Financial Reporting Bill Financial Reporting (Amendments to Other Enactments) Bill — Third ReadingsText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeClark David: Financial Reporting Bill Financial Reporting (Amendments to Other Enactments) Bill — Third Readings[Sitting date: 19 November 2013. Volume:695;Page:15003. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr DAVID CLARK (Labour—Dunedin North): Let us see whether I can outlast the chair of the Commerce Committee Jonathan Young who shepherded the Financial Reporting Bill through Parliament with great care and dignity. I guess no one can accuse him of hypocrisy because this legislation which has great principles in it is being passed through. He is supporting it but he is not going any further than that. He is not explaining why. He is not getting into the detail. He is not contrasting it with the Government’s current behaviour in the way that my colleague Clayton Cosgrove has so eloquently done and as he so eloquently does.I want to speak a little bit about the public sector management principles that sit behind this legislation. I can actually hear people turning their TV sets off as I say that. I will try to make it vaguely entertaining or as entertaining as it can be. This legislation is not particularly exciting it has to be said.Hon Anne Tolley: No. Nor is this member.Dr DAVID CLARK: It is not the bright lights kind of thing. Ms Tolley says that no it is not. But it is actually exciting for those entities affected by it. It is exciting thataccountability where it is unnecessary is being done away with. And where it is required where there is a public interest angle where an entity is too big to fail without having ripples through the community proper and clear accountability is being required.As my colleague Clayton Cosgrove has contrasted the Government’s behaviour inside this place and in its deals with the expectations of those who are outside in the business world I want to bring another example to the table. That is the example of the AgResearch restructure that is going on currently. AgResearch has brought a proposal which it has put to the shareholding Ministers Ministers Steven Joyce and Bill English which they have signed off called theFuture Footprint Business Case for AgResearch. It is based around an idea that you cluster things together you get hubs of activity and it is more productive. There is nothing wrong with that as a general principle. Broadly it has been agreed with. It has been agreed with in the reviews inside the organisation that those principles are good ones. But what has not happened has been a transparent process around assessing whether that is what is really achieved in the restructuring proposal. That is not what is achieved argue three separate reports that have come out subsequently.The executive leadership team—very close connections there into the Minister’s office—has defended the current plan which was signed off by the Minister. The Minister may be embarrassed because the original plan seems to lack some good principles behind it in terms of the way the different options have been compared. It was very detailed so we know Minister Joyce had the plan for about 6 months. He received it on 31 October last year and had it on his desk until at least the end of March. He must have worked through all those details of how many jobs were going to be lost in Dunedin and thereabouts and how many jobs were going to go out of Hamilton.The member David Bennett opposite must be furious at the way the AgResearch centre there in Hamilton has been gutted by Steven Joyce without going through a proper process. Maybe he is just rolling over and letting his belly be scratched—I do not know. But if I were him I would be furious because Minister Joyce is steamrolling this ideological vision through without having a transparent process and without having the proper business case requirements that Treasury would demand.Again there we see a level of hypocrisy. When the Government commits itself to a deal it puts transparency to one side. In this legislation we are seeing that everybody is required to comply with transparent processes if it is in the public interest except the behaviour of this Government. That is the record that we are seeing. There is one rule for everyone else and one rule for the National Government. On the Invermay Agricultural Centre debacle we have had many many independent investigations—three now. Well one was an internal review which said: “You’ve got these objectives but you’re not meeting them Invermay AgResearch by breaking up the Invermay cluster in Dunedin.” There is a productive hub there. There is private enterprise. There are productivity gains—a huge history of productivity gains that are extraordinary in New Zealand terms and that contribute to our agricultural sector which is so important as it is. In fact you have got the whole “-omics”—genomics and so forth—cluster there which is working effectively.It could be working more effectively in fact if you transferred more resource into it. That would be good for New Zealand. That would actually achieve your goals. But it seems at this stage that the Government is wedded to it although Minister Joyce does say he is going to look at more detail. He has asked for more detail and I commend him for that.It is a little bit disappointing perhaps that the National Party list member who lives in Dunedin has not been out there putting the pressure publicly on Minister Joyce to look at those things carefully. There has been no statement. There has been silence from the list member who is based in Dunedin and that is disappointing.Hon Michael Woodhouse: Rubbish! Don’t tell fibs.Dr DAVID CLARK: I expect him to take a call. He is saying “Rubbish!” so I look forward to his rebutting that. But I certainly have not heard the echoes of his complaints through the media so I will listen with interest and I will look to the newspapers for criticism as those jobs which benefit New Zealand’s economy are ripped out of Dunedin. The productivity of our country is dependent on good science and on good research. This Government seems determined to run a non-transparent process and in that case to rip out that functional hub in the south. It is doing harm to New Zealand. Let us put aside the regional interests. It is doing harm to New Zealand.But when it is ideologically wedded be it a casino deal be it a Rio Tinto golden handshake be it a Chorus deal sorted out behind the scenes where it is big business and corporate welfare this Government is willing to do the deal with its ideological blinkers on. It does not matter that the electricity sector for example had that history of price gouging that I referred to in the Committee stage where $4.3 billion of price gouging was identified between 2001 and 2007. Simon Bridges says that the current market model works and that it just needs a little more time to bed in. I think that is an exact quote: it just needs a little more time to “bed in.” Fifteen years down the track this Government is not prepared to stand up and say when something is not working.Dr Rajen Prasad: Too early to tell he said.Dr DAVID CLARK: It is too early to tell—too early to tell. We will wait and see. But not the Labour Government. The Labour Government of the future will step in. It will make sure that we regulate the power market so that it is run in the interests of New Zealand citizens so that people do not pay too much for their power and so we do not have blackouts across the country. Those are the kinds of things that this Government will tolerate in the interests of making sure that the money from the asset sell-offs goes offshore and that its mates are looked after. The Government is ideologically wedded to it. It will not even look at the NZ Power model which is so well-championed by the Labour Party and also a variant put forward by the Green Party down the back of the House.Unfortunately this Government is so wedded to this ideological position. It is one thing for the Government and its deals—the way it does its business. It is expecting in this legislation the citizens of New Zealand to do something different. It is a pity the Government cannot take its own advice. It is a pity the Government cannot apply those simple principles that I referred to at the outset the public sector management principles: clear objectives transparent reporting sanctions and rewards and clear lines of accountability. Those kinds of simple principles that we find embodied in this legislation looking out for the public interests seem too far beyond this Government for it to adopt itself. That is a great shame because this Government if it applied these principles to its own practice would be acting in the interests of New Zealanders more broadly.But no it seems to be out of touch. It seems to be increasingly arrogant. We saw the dismissal of the Earthquake Commission—the Auditor-General’s report. We saw the dismissals of the Crown Retail Deposit Guarantee Scheme—the Auditor-General’s report. We saw the dismissal of the Law Society’s advice on the Government Communications Security Bureau legislation saying to slow down have a clear process have some clear oversight of the agency and have a proper review for goodness’ sake! But no this Government does not want scrutiny. It does not want areview. The Government says that this is not for it. The Government says “This is for the people of New Zealand but it is not for us. We are a Government that is not interested in the wider public interest where it applies to us. We will do our own thing.” This is a Government that is out of touch with New Zealanders out of time and New Zealanders will be well advised to get rid of it at the next election. Thank you.