Twyford Phil: Eden Park Trust Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Twyford Phil: Eden Park Trust Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:653;Page:2569] 
PHIL TWYFORD (Labour) 
: 
 I am eminently qualified to speak on the Eden Park Trust Amendment Bill which Labour supports—I live only 10 minutes away from the stadium. But I was just wondering who that last speaker was. Does anyone know? He looked very familiar. Is he a councillor? [ 
Interruption 
] So he is an Auckland city councillor. It is the Richard Worth approach to dealing with political issues. 
Chris Hipkins 
: Conflicts of interest! 
PHIL TWYFORD 
: I do not know whether a trustee of the Eden Park Trust Board deals with conflicts of interest. 
The purpose of the bill is non-controversial. The bill is designed to clean up the trust deed to give the trustees flexibility to deal with the run-up to the Rugby World Cup in 2011 to change and amend as necessary the governance arrangements of the trust deed and to obviate the need for the trust to come back to Parliament whenever it needs to make a change to the deed. It is very important. It gives the trust board the flexibility it needs. In future the trustees will be able to agree amongst themselves on the changes they need and those amendments can be confirmed by regulations made by the Governor-General by Order in Council. The bill gives the board an important level of flexibility as it prepares for the world cup and any potential legal bottlenecks will effectively be removed in advance. 
One of the interesting provisions of the bill is that the trustees are not personally liable under the bill; it extends protection to all the trustees past and present. Interestingly it does not include any event or circumstance that could have been avoided by the trustees exercising a reasonable standard of care. Presumably that means that if the trust board gets David Beckham to come and play a game of football and the board loses a pile of money over it it will be liable for that debt. 
The real reason this bill is important is that the New Zealand economy is very very dependent on big international events coming to New Zealand and we have got a lot riding on the Rugby World Cup in 2011 in terms of our tourism and also our national self-esteem. Given some of the dire predictions about how long it will take for our economy to climb out of this global recession and given the lack of any decent stimulus policies from this National Government we really have to make sure that we are as well positioned— 
Paul Quinn 
: Come on! That was a low blow. 
PHIL TWYFORD 
: —as well positioned I say to Mr Quinn as we possibly can be in the international tourism market. We get only one shot at the world cup. It is absolutely important that we get it right. 
 So let us just pause for a moment and think about what it is worth to us for this event to go ahead and to do so successfully. The economic analysts project that it will be worth $476 million in direct additional expenditure in New Zealand outside of Auckland an additional $262 million in expenditure within Auckland additional GDP in the New Zealand economy of $507 million and additional GDP in the Auckland economy of $240 million. There is a huge amount at stake—something like $1.5 billion. We have to see this measure from a wider perspective. It is about the future of our economy the future of our tourism market and the crucial role that the Rugby World Cup plays in that. It is like the Olympics; it is essential that we make a favourable impression on the many thousands of visitors who come to New Zealand. 
When I think about tourism and how well we are placed I have to say it reminds me of how little progress we have made—in fact how far back we have gone—in the last few months since the election. There has been a complete failure to reposition New Zealand’s tourism industry as a sustainable industry. I am reminded of the complete failure by the Minister of Tourism to rebut the claims that were made as part of the air miles debate in Great Britain—one of our most important markets for tourism. It was a terrible shame to see the Minister of Tourism completely fall into a trap and argue how badly poor little New Zealand had been dealt to by the people involved in the air miles debate. Strongly positioning New Zealand’s tourism industry as sustainable would have been a much more intelligent approach. 
I want to discuss another aspect of Eden Park for a moment. 
 According to a clipping from the  
Australian 
 newspaper—and some members in the House may have heard this story—when workmen were demolishing the main stand in preparation for the current upgrade they found a secret escape route that had been built for the Springbok rugby team in 1981. For the sake of members on the other side of the House I probably should explain what the 1981 Springbok Tour was. Most of the members on the other side do not even know what happened in 1981 let alone how they felt about it. 
Paul Quinn 
: Some of us had a choice. 
PHIL TWYFORD 
: For the information of Mr Quinn it was all about a rugby team from apartheid South Africa coming to play rugby in defiance of an international boycott. Apparently a local builder was called in only days before the famous flour bomb test at Eden Park to build a series of escape hatches. He built a hatch up through the roof of the changing rooms. He cut holes and built a series of interconnecting doors between the offices. The escape route was built to spirit the Springbok team out of the stadium if things got too hot and heavy for them with the protesters and so on. 
Today we can see in a wonderful little echo down through history that it would be great for the National Government to have a similar kind of escape hatch so that its members could scuttle away from the public outrage at all the election promises that have been broken in the last few months. One that springs to mind today—it is at the very very top of our minds—is the complete abdication of any moral commitment to their election campaign promises to consult the people of Auckland about the findings of the Royal Commission on Auckland Governance. 
Hon Ruth Dyson 
: What happened to that? 
PHIL TWYFORD 
: Nothing. They had no answer this afternoon in the House. They had nothing to say on this issue even though it is there in black and white in their election manifesto. There are many many more broken promises and I want to touch on just half a dozen of them. 
The National Party said it would clean up the streets. Its members made a huge fuss about their 100-day plan and they rushed all sorts of legislation through under urgency. What was the ultimate result? I can tell members that the Bail Amendment Bill the Sentencing Amendment Bill and the Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill amounted to nothing more than window dressing. I have to be honest and say that it was extremely disappointing to see that kind of performance during National’s first 100 days. National promised a very dramatic 100 days. It used urgency. It broke every democratic and constitutional convention in the book by not submitting any of that legislation to select committee scrutiny and not allowing the public to make submissions. 
Chris Hipkins 
: No regulatory impact statements? 
PHIL TWYFORD 
: No none at all. It is extraordinary. If National members really had wanted to do something of substance on law and order they would have brought into effect the Order in Council of Labour’s 2007 legislation requiring that a minimum of two-thirds of a sentence be served before parole was granted. But no. What did we see instead? We saw window dressing and small ideological gestures. Instead of making the ridiculous claim that murder and other crime are out of control—and we now know that is a complete lie; anyone who saw the information in the  
New Zealand Herald  
on Tuesday knows that the murder rate has been cut in half in the last two decades—they might have done something constructive like putting in place Labour’s early intervention initiatives to stop child abuse. 
That is rather a long way of saying that Labour supports the first reading of the Eden Park Trust Amendment Bill. 
Hon Ruth Dyson 
: What does it do? 
PHIL TWYFORD 
: It is a very important amendment that allows the trustees of the Eden Park Trust Board to make the amendments to their trust deed that they need to make without having to come back to Parliament and endure any more speeches like this. Labour supports this bill. It is non-controversial. 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Rick Barker) 
: I remind members that the next speeches are to be 5 minutes in length.